The Chemistry of Cookery

by W. Mattieu Williams

I have received two other letters making, quite independently, the same suggestion concerning the bread-crumbs. I have tried the addition, and agree with Mr. Girdlestone that it is a great improvement as food for such as ourselves, who are brain-workers, and for all others whose occupations are at all sedentary. The undiluted fondu is too nutritious for us, though suitable for the mountaineer.

The chief difficulty in preparing this dish conveniently is that of obtaining suitable vessels for the final frying or baking, as each portion should be poured into, and fried or baked in, a separate dish, so that each may, as in Switzerland, have his own fondu complete, and eat it from the dish as it comes from the fire. As demand creates supply, our ironmongers, &c., will soon learn to meet this demand if it arises. I have written to Messrs. Griffiths & Browett, of Birmingham, large manufacturers of what is technically called ‘hollow ware’—i.e. vessels of all kinds knocked up from a single piece of metal without any soldering—and they have made suitable fondu dishes according to my specification, and supply them to the shopkeepers.

The bicarbonate of potash is an original novelty that will possibly alarm some of my non-chemical readers. I advocate its use for two reasons: first, it effects a better solution of the casein by neutralising the free lactic acid that inevitably exists in milk supplied to towns, and any free acid that may remain in the cheese. At a farmhouse, where the milk is just drawn from the cow, it is unnecessary for this purpose, as such new milk is itself slightly alkaline.

My second reason is physiological, and of greater weight. Salts of potash are necessary constituents of human food. They exist in all kinds of wholesome vegetables and fruits, and in the juices of fresh meat, but they are wanting in cheese, having, on account of their great solubility, been left behind in the whey.

This absence of potash appears to me to be the one serious objection to the free use of cheese diet. The Swiss peasant escapes the mischief by his abundant salads, which eaten raw contain all their potash salts, instead of leaving the greater part in the saucepan, as do cabbages, &c., when cooked in boiling water. In Norway, where salads are scarce, the bonder and his housemen have at times suffered greatly from scurvy, especially in the far north, and would be severely victimised but for special remedies that they use (the mottebeer, cranberry, &c., grown and preserved especially for the purpose). The Laplanders make a broth of scurvy-grass and similar herbs; I have watched them gathering these, and observed that the wild celery was a leading ingredient.

Scurvy on board ship results from eating salt meat, the potash of which has escaped by exosmosis into the brine or pickle. The sailor now escapes it by drinking citrate of potash in the form of lime-juice, and by alternating salt junk with rations of tinned meats.

I once lived for six days on bread and cheese only, tasting no other food. I had, in company with C. M. Clayton (son of the Senator of Delaware, who negotiated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), taken a passage from Malta to Athens in a little schooner, and expecting a three days’ journey we took no other rations than a lump of Cheshire cheese and a supply of bread. Bad weather doubled the expected length of our journey.

We were both young, and proud of our hardihood in bearing privations, were staunch disciples of Diogenes; but on the last day we succumbed, and bartered the remainder of our bread and cheese for some of the boiled horse-beans and cabbage-broth of the forecastle. The cheese, highly relished at first, had become positively nauseous, and our craving for the forecastle vegetable broth was absurd, considering the full view we had of its constituents and of the dirtiness of its cooks.

I attribute this to the lack of potash salts in the cheese and bread. It was similar to the craving for common salt by cattle that lack necessary chlorides in their food. I am satisfied that cheese can never take the place in an economic dietary, otherwise justified by its nutritious composition, unless this deficiency of potash is somehow supplied. My device of using it with milk as a solvent supplies it in a simple and natural manner.