The Chemistry of Cookery

by W. Mattieu Williams

Fig. 6.

Is there, then, any difference at all between roasting and baking? There is. In roasting, the temperature, after the first start, is maintained about uniformly throughout; while in baking bread by the old-fashioned method, the temperature continually declines from the beginning to the end of the process; but in order that a dweller in cities, or the cook of an ordinary town household, may understand this difference, some explanation is necessary. The old-fashioned oven, such as was generally used in Rumford’s time, and is still used in country houses and by old-fashioned bakers, is an arched cavity of brick with a flat brick floor. This cavity is closed by a suitable door, which in its primitive, and perhaps its best form, was a flat tile pressed against the opening and luted round with clay. Such ovens were, and still are, heated by simply spreading on the brick floor a sufficient quantity of wood—preferably well-dried twigs; these, being lighted, raise the temperature of the arched roof to a glowing heat, and that of the floor in a somewhat lower degree. When this heating is completed (the judgement of which constitutes the chief element of skill in thus baking) the embers are carefully brushed out from the floor, the loaves, &c., inserted by means of a flat battledore with a long handle, called a ‘peel,’ and the door closed and firmly luted round, not to be opened until the operation is complete. Baked clay is an excellent radiator, and therefore the surface of bricks forming the arched roof of the oven radiates vigorously upon its contents below, which are thus heated at top by radiation from the roof, and at bottom by direct contact with the floor of the oven. The difference between the compact bottom crust, and the darker bubble-bearing top crust of an ordinary loaf is thus explained.

As the baking of a large joint of meat is a longer operation than the baking of bread, there is another reason besides that already given for the inferiority of meat when baked in a baker’s oven constructed on this principle. The slow cooling-down must tend to produce a flabbiness and insipidity similar to that of the roast meat which is served at restaurants where a joint remains ‘in cut’ for two or three hours. Of this I speak theoretically, not having had an opportunity of tasting a joint that has been cooked in a brick oven of the construction above described; but I have observed the advantage of maintaining a steady heat throughout the process of roasting (after the first higher heating above described), in the iron oven of a kitchener, or American stove, or gas oven.

Another and somewhat original method of roasting is that which is carried out in ‘Captain Warren’s Cooking Pot,’ concerning the practical result of which I hear conflicting opinions. It is a large pot containing water, inside which is suspended—like the glue chamber of a glue-pot—an inner vessel. The meat to be cooked is placed without water in this inner closed vessel, which dips into the water of the outer vessel, the steam from which is led away by a side opening or pipe. This outer water being kept boiling, the meat is surrounded only by its own vapour, in the midst of which it is cooked at a low temperature.

The result is similar to boiled meat, with the advantage of retaining those juices that pass away into the water in ordinary boiling. This advantage is unquestionable, and so far the apparatus may be safely recommended. But some of the claims made in the prospectuses that are freely distributed are questionable.

The method of roasting with Warren’s pot is to cook the meat as above described in its own vapour, then dredge with flour, and hang before the fire twenty minutes. The result is a tender imitation of roast meat, but more like boiled than roasted meat in flavour. This is much approved by many, but I am told that meat thus cooked and eaten daily palls upon the appetite. I know one, a youth (not one of our fastidious fops of the period), who, fed upon this at school during a few years, has thereby acquired a fixed aversion to boiled meat of all kinds.

Regarding the subject theoretically, it appears to me that the method recommended by Captain Warren, and followed by those who use his cooker, should be reversed for roasting; that the meat should have the twenty minutes before the fire—or in a hot oven—before, instead of after, its stewing in its own vapour. Some experiments I have made confirm this view so far as they go, but are not sufficiently numerous to settle the question.

For stewing of all kinds, and for such concoctions as Rumford’s soup (see [Chapter XIV].), it is an admirable apparatus, and the contrivances for carrying the steam from the outer vessel to a vegetable steamer above the cooking chamber, before described, is very ingenious and effective.

The statement in the prospectus, that the ‘nourishing juices’ otherwise wasted ‘are by that mode condensed, and form at the bottom of the vessel a rich gelatinous body,’ is misleading.

Gelatin is not volatile; the gelatinous body at the bottom of the vessel is not composed of condensed vapours, though condensed vapour of water is concerned in its formation. It is simply some of the gelatin of the joint dissolved by the water which condenses upon it, and finally drips down from the joint, carrying with it the dissolved gelatin.