[CHAPTER V.]
ROASTING AND GRILLING.
I may now venture to state my own view of a somewhat obscure subject—viz. the difference between the roasting or grilling of meat and the stewing of meat. It appears to me that, as regards the nature of the operation, it consists simply in the difference between the cooking media; that a grilled steak or chop, or a roasted joint is meat that has been stewed in its own juices instead of stewed in water; that in both cases the changes taking place in the solid parts of the meat are the same in kind, provided always that the roasting or grilling is properly performed. The albumen is coagulated in all cases, and the gelatinous and fibrous tissues are softened by being heated in a liquid solvent. I shall presently apply this definition in distinguishing between good and bad cookery.
In the roasted or grilled meat the juices are retained in the meat (with the exception of those which escape as gravy on the dish), while in stewing the juices go more or less completely into the water, and the loosening of the fibres and solution of the gelatin and fibrin may be carried further, inasmuch as a larger quantity of solvent is used.
Roasting and grilling may be regarded as our national methods of flesh cookery, and stewing in water that of our continental neighbours. The difference between the flavour of English roast beef and French bouilli or Italian manzo is due to the retention or the removal of the saline and highly-flavoured soluble materials. (Concentrated kreatine and kreatinine are pungently sapid.) The Frenchman takes them out of his bouilli, or boiled meat, and transfers them to his bouillon, or soup, which, with him, is an essential element of a meal. If he ate his meat without soup, he would be like the dogs fed on gelatin by the bone-soup commissioners. To the Englishman, with his roast or grilled meat, soup is merely a luxury, not an absolutely necessary element of a complete dietary.
What we call boiled meat, as a boiled leg of mutton or round of beef, is an intermediate preparation. The heat is here communicated by water, and the juices partially retained.
Not only do we, in roasting and grilling our meat, keep the juices within it, but we concentrate them considerably by evaporating away some of the water by which they are naturally diluted. This is my explanation of the rationale of the chief difference between boiled meat and roasted or grilled meat. A further difference—that due to browning—is discussed in the [chapter on Frying]. Those accustomed to such concentration of flavour regard the milder results of boiling as insipid, for, by this process and by stewing, where much water is used, the juices are further diluted instead of being concentrated.
It is a fairly debatable question whether the simplicity of taste which finds satisfaction in the milder diet is better and more desirable than the appetite for strong meat. The difference has some analogy to that between the thirst for light wine and that for stiff grog.
The application of the principles above expounded to the processes of grilling and roasting is simple enough. As the meat is to be stewed in its own juices, it is evident that these juices must be retained as completely as possible, and that in order to succeed in this, we have to struggle with the evaporating energy of the ‘dry heat’ which effects the cookery, and may not only concentrate the juices by driving off some of their solvent water, but may volatilise or decompose the flavouring principles themselves. We must always remember that these organic compounds are very unstable, most of them being decomposed when raised to a temperature above the boiling-point of water. The repulsive energy of heat drives apart or ‘dissociates’ their loosely-combined elements, and when thus wholly or partially dissociated, all the characteristic properties of the original compound vanish, and others take their place.
It should be clearly understood that the so-called ‘dry heat’ may be communicated by convection or by radiation, or both. When water is the heating medium, there is convection only—i.e. heating by actual contact with the heated body. In roasting and grilling there is also some convection-heating due to the hot air which actually touches the meat; but this is a very small element of efficiency, the work being chiefly done, when well done, by the heat which is radiated from the fire directly to the surface of the meat, and which, in the case of roasting in front of a fire, passes through the intervening air with very little heating effect thereon.
I am not perpetrating any far-fetched pedantry in pointing out this difference, as will be understood at once by supposing a beefsteak to be cooked by suspending it in a chamber filled with hot dry air. Such air is actively thirsting for the vapour of water, and will take into itself, from every humid substance it touches, a quantity proportionate to its temperature. The steak receiving its heat by convection—i.e. the heat conveyed by such hot air, and communicated by contact—would be desiccated, but not cooked.