Paper-bag Cookery

by Countess Vera Serkoff

If the bag containing a joint be thickly greased inside and out, the interior of the oven will be greasy and will smell, thus doing away with two of the benefits of paper-bag cookery—cleanliness and freedom from smell.

THE COOKING OF DIFFERENT DISHES TOGETHER.

If a joint of meat is being roasted in an oven in the ordinary way, nothing else may be cooked at the same time, unless it be a Yorkshire pudding or baked potatoes, which are placed below the meat expressly to catch the dripping and the gravy.

If the rash cook ventured to put in several articles of food at once, disaster would be the result. The tart would savour of roast pork, the meat taste of onions, or the baked fish would give its own special flavour to everything else in the oven. Apart from this, the heat required to cook the joint would curdle the milk pudding, and the gentle warmth required for the custard would leave the steak in an almost raw condition. Then, too, the necessity of hanging the joint from the bar at the top of the gas-cooker leaves very little room for anything else.

In paper-bag cookery, the most varied assortment of dishes will lie amicably side by side on the grid supplied with the gas-cookers, and no mingling of flavours or spoiling of one or the other will result. Cooking them thus altogether, an immense saving in time and in expense for heating is effected. Even the savoury onion will cook placidly by the side of a bag of gooseberries, without imparting its flavour to the fruit.

While cooking is going on, the oven door can be freely opened without risk of spoiling anything by the admission of cold air, which, of course, would be fatal to the contents of the oven in ordinary cooking.

THE CLEANLINESS OF PAPER-BAG COOKERY.

When dinner has been successfully cooked, dished up, and eaten, the labours of the cook are by no means ended, for then comes the distasteful business of clearing up. The oven must be cleaned while it is still hot, the interior well scrubbed out with hot water and soda to free it from the grease which will cause such an unpleasant smell next time the oven is used. The baking tin must next be attended to, and then comes the array of saucepans, stewpans, and frying-pans which have been used, and which are often so difficult to scour that one can understand and almost forgive the hard-driven “general” who puts them away in a dirty condition, trusting to be able to clean them some time before they are again required. In this particular, the contrast between paper-bag and ordinary cooking is most striking.

The meat having been cooked in a bag, there is no grease to be scrubbed from the oven, and none on the bars of the grid where it has lain; the interior of the cooker is perfectly clean; there is no baking or dripping-pan to be cleansed with hot water and plenty of soda; there are no saucepans to scour.

When the paper bags have been disposed of, there remain only the plates, knives, forks, and spoons to wash up, and that over, cook may sit down to rest. This, in itself, is such an immense saving of labour and time, that the mistress who adopts “Papakukery” may be said to have gone far towards solving the servant problem.