The Chemistry of Cookery

by W. Mattieu Williams

I cannot proceed any further without a protest against a very general (so far as this country is concerned) misuse of a now very popular term, a misuse that is rather surprising, seeing that it is accepted by scholars who have devoted the best of their intellectual efforts to the study of words. I refer to the word technical as applied in the designation ‘technical education.’

So long as our workshops are separated from our science schools and colleges, it is most desirable, in order to avoid continual circumlocution, to have terms that shall properly distinguish between the work of the two, and admit of definite and consistent use. The two words are ready at hand, and, although of Greek origin, have become, by analogous usage, plain simple English. I mean the words technical and technological.

The Greek noun techne signifies an art, trade, or profession, and our established usage of this root is in accordance with its signification. Therefore, ‘technical education’ is a suitable and proper designation of the training which is given to apprentices, &c., in the strictly technical details of their trades, arts, or professions—i.e. in the skilful moving of things. When we require a name for the science or the philosophy of anything, we obtain it by using the Greek root logos, and appending it in English form to the Greek name of the general subject, as geology, the science of the earth; anthropology, the science of man; biology, the science of life, &c.

Why not then follow this general usage, and adopt ‘technology’ as the science of trades, arts, or professions, and thereby obtain consistent and convenient terms to designate the two divisions of education—technical education, that given in the workshop, &c., and technological education, that which should be given as supplementary to all such technical education?

In accordance with this, the present work will be a contribution to the technology of cookery, or to the technological education of cooks, whose technical education is quite beyond my reach.

The kitchen is a chemical laboratory in which are conducted a number of chemical processes by which our food is converted from its crude state to a condition more suitable for digestion and nutrition, and made more agreeable to the palate.

It is the rationale or ology of these processes that I shall endeavour to explain; but at the outset it is only fair to say that in many instances I shall not succeed in doing this satisfactorily, as there still remain some kitchen mysteries that have not yet come within the firm grasp of science. The whole story of the chemical differences between a roast, a boiled, and a raw leg of mutton has not yet been told. You and I, gentle reader, aided by no other apparatus than a knife and fork, can easily detect the difference between a cut out of the saddle of a three-year-old Southdown and one from a ten-months-old meadow-fed Leicester, but the chemist in his laboratory, with all his reagents, test-tubes, beakers, combustion-tubes, potash-bulbs, &c. &c., and his balance turning to one-thousandth of a grain, cannot physically demonstrate the sources of these differences of flavour.

Still I hope to show that modern chemistry can throw into the kitchen a great deal of light that shall not merely help the cook in doing his or her work more efficiently, but shall also elevate both the work and the worker, and render the kitchen far more interesting to all intelligent people who have an appetite for knowledge, as well as for food; more so than it can be while the cook is groping in rule-of-thumb darkness—is merely a technical operator unenlightened by technological intelligence.

In the course of these papers I shall draw largely on the practical and philosophical work of that remarkable man, Benjamin Thompson, the Massachusetts ’prentice-boy and schoolmaster; afterwards the British soldier and diplomatist, Colonel Sir Benjamin Thompson; then Colonel of Horse and General Aide-de-Camp of the Elector Charles Theodore of Bavaria; then Major-General of Cavalry, Privy Councillor of State and head of War Department of Bavaria; then Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire and Order of the White Eagle; then Military Dictator of Bavaria, with full governing powers during the absence of the Elector; then a private resident in Brompton Road, and founder of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street; then a Parisian citoyen, the husband of the ‘Goddess of Reason,’ the widow of Lavoisier; but, above all, a practical and scientific cook, whose exploits in economic cookery are still but very imperfectly appreciated, though he himself evidently regarded them as the most important of all his varied achievements.