Copper must be lined with tin, for unlined copper, whether clean-scoured or not, is extremely unwholesome. Upon this point much indecision prevails in the public mind, and it is well to speak positively, as many cases of poisoning from copper saucepans are on record. Turning to frying-pans, there is for the impecunious householder no refuge from iron and tin. A copper frying or sauté pan is not found in many houses. Nevertheless, there is no occasion to burn the outside of cutlets; and if the inside is raw, the cook is to blame, not the metal. “Once burnt will burn again.” A new pan does not burn; therefore, why should an old one? No frying-pan should be washed or scoured; it should be wiped while hot with a cloth. But this rule presupposes no scraps left on the edges, no burning on the bottom; it assumes, in fact, that the frying be well done. If the pan be burnt, you must scrub and scour it until it is bright, for nothing so effectually spoils both the flavour and the appearance of cooking as the black bits that detach themselves from the sides of dirty pans. For omelets, copper, enamel, tin, are all used effectually by a careful cook; while no one of the three will serve the purpose with unskilful fingers. But every housewife who wishes first-class omelets served on her table will do well to invest in a copper pan, since there are few dishes to which the utensils at command of the cook make so great a difference. Then, again, porcelain and earthenware might be used with great advantage. The great art in making omelets is that they shall not be cooked so slowly as to be tough, nor yet so quickly as to be over-coloured; and the happy medium is difficult to attain when cooking with metal that, like iron, is a very rapid conductor of heat. English middle-class kitchens are often furnished with a strange mixture of niggardliness and extravagance. Any one accustomed to foreign customs will have been struck with the modest but well-chosen batterie de cuisine commonly seen abroad in houses of the lower middle classes. There the mistress selects her own stock by the light of her own experience; here an order is given to some ironmonger, who furnishes the kitchen according to precedent, and in sublime indifference as to the first principles of cookery. The general absence of so trifling a luxury as wooden spoons may account for the quality of the unpleasant mixture commonly known as melted butter. And the extreme reluctance of mistresses to invest in such an article as a frying-basket, while they waste double its cost every week by bad frying without it, may be cited as another example of ignorant saving (E. A. B. in the Queen.)
An extensive catalogue might here be given of the various appliances used in the kitchen, such as mincing, cutting, slicing, whisking, mixing, knife-cleaning, bread-making, and other domestic machines, but it could serve no useful purpose. All ordinary requisites can be purchased at any ironmonger’s, in all degrees of size and quality. Sundry new and ingenious implements are introduced to public notice every year, and a great many may be found in the price lists of the large firms, such as Mappin and Webb, 18 to 22 Poultry; Farrow and Jackson, 8 Haymarket; Spong, 226 High Holborn; Kent, 199 High Holborn; J. Baker and Sons, 58 City Road; Wilson and Son, King William Street, Strand; and several others. In the Ironmonger for May and June, 1885, appeared an account of an ingenious machine for washing crockery, adapted to the needs of large establishments. See also p. [1006].
THE PROCESSES OF COOKERY.
Much useful information is to be derived from Prof. Mattieu Williams’s Cantor Lectures on the Scientific Basis of Cookery, from which some of the following paragraphs are borrowed.
Roasting.—Williams shows that “in roasting a joint before the fire without any screen, the radiant heat from the coal is only used; the meat is heated only on one side, that next to the fire, and, as it turns round, is radiating its heat away from the other side to the wall, &c., of the kitchen. If a meat screen of polished metal is placed behind the meat, the rays of heat not intercepted by the meat itself are received upon the screen, and reflected back towards the meat, and thus both sides are heated.”
There is an old rule well known all over the world of cookery, and that is, “white meats well done, black meats underdone;” this applies to all meats of the four as well as of the two-legged sort, but then it means properly well done, and properly underdone. To attain this end the first thing which demands attention is the making up of the fire. It should be regulated according to the size and the nature of the article which is to be roasted, and should be so managed as to last all-aglow the whole length of time which the roasting will take. In the case of joints of meat the following are the main points to be attended to. The joint should be trimmed neatly; cut off the end or flaps of a sirloin of beef (this makes a very good stew for the kitchen dinner, or maybe used to make stock with greater advantage than roasting it with the joint in the point of view both of economy and of taste), a piece of buttered paper should be tied on with string over the fat, and not removed until just before the joint is done. If it can possibly be avoided do not use skewers to fix up the joints, but use string instead; and when practicable perpendicular roasting is preferable to horizontal, as not requiring the use of the spit. Place the meat at first 18 in. from the fire, or even farther off if it be a large joint and the fire greater in proportion. When the meat is well warmed, gradually bring it nearer, and from that time never cease basting the joint at regular intervals, but this you must not overdo. The time that meat takes to roast is usually set down at 15-20 minutes for every lb. the joint weighs, but this is a very broad rule, so many circumstances tending to modify it. The quality of the meat, the age of it, whether it be fresh killed or not, the season of the year, the nature of the fire, and the position of it as regards currents of air in the kitchen, must all be taken into consideration. One thing only is certain, and that is, that when the joint begins to smoke it is nearly if not quite done, and at this stage 2-3 minutes more or less at the fire will make or mar the success of the joint as a piece of artistic roasting. (The G. C.)
In Ovens.—“The oven is an apparatus for cooking by radiation. In this case the meat or other object of cookery receives radiant heat from the heated walls of the oven. If this chamber, with radiant walls, be so arranged that the heat shall be radiated equally on all sides, and is capable of regulation, it becomes a roaster, which theoretically does its work more perfectly than an open fire, even when aided by a screen.” (Williams.)
Williams has “not the slightest hesitation in affirming that moderate-sized joints properly roasted in a closed chamber, are far better than similar joints cooked with the utmost skill in front of a fire. The smaller the joint, the greater the advantage of the closed chamber.”
Roasting-ovens are now attached to all the best forms of kitcheners.
On one point in the philosophy of roasting, Williams differs from Rumford. He thinks “it desirable—and has tested this theory experimentally—to begin at a temperature above that which is to be maintained throughout the roasting. The object of this is to produce a crust on the surface of the meat that shall partially seal it, and keep in the juices as much as possible. Then the temperature may fall to the average, which should be well kept up, and rather raised towards the last. This comes about automatically in the ordinary course of cooking with a roasting-oven.”