The Chemistry of Cookery

by W. Mattieu Williams

His faith in cookery is well expressed in the following, where he is speaking of his experiments in feeding the Bavarian army and the poor of Munich. He says:

‘I constantly found that the richness or quality of a soup depended more upon the proper choice of the ingredients, and a proper management of the fire in the combination of these ingredients, than upon the quantity of solid nutritious matter employed; much more upon the art and skill of the cook than upon the sums laid out in the market.’

A great many fallacies are continually perpetrated, not only by ignorant people, but even by eminent chemists and physiologists, by inattention to what is indicated in this passage. In many chemical and physiological works may be found elaborately minute tables of the chemical composition of certain articles of food, and with these the assumption (either directly stated or implied as a matter of course) that such tables represent the practical nutritive value of the food. The illusory character of such assumption is easily understood. In the first place the analysis is usually that of the article of food in its raw state, and thus all the chemical changes involved in the process of cookery are ignored.

Secondly, the difficulty or facility of assimilation is too often unheeded. This depends both upon the original condition of the food and the changes which the cookery has produced—changes which may double its nutritive value without effecting more than a small percentage of alteration in its chemical composition as revealed by laboratory analysis.

In the recent discussion on whole-meal bread, for example, chemical analyses of the bran, &c., are quoted, and it is commonly assumed that if these can be shown to contain more of the theoretical bone-making or brain-making elements, that they are, therefore, in reference to these requirements, more nutritious than the fine flour. But before we are justified in asserting this, it must be made clear that these outer and usually rejected portions of the grain are as easily digested and assimilated as the finer inner flour.

I think I shall be able to show that the practical failure of this whole-meal bread movement (which is not a novelty, but only a revival) is mainly due to the disregard of the cookery question; that whole-meal prepared as bread by simple baking is less nutritious than fine flour similarly prepared; but that whole-meal otherwise prepared may be, and has been, made more nutritious than fine white bread.

Another preliminary example. A pound of biscuit contains more solid nutritive matter than a pound of beefsteak, but may not, when eaten by ordinary mortals, do so much nutritive work. Why is this?

It is a matter of preparation—not exactly what is called cooking, but equivalent to what cooking should be. It is the preparation which has converted the grass food of the ox into another kind of food which we can assimilate very easily.

The fact that we use the digestive and nutrient apparatus of sheep, oxen, &c., for the preparation of our food, is merely a transitory barbarism, to be ultimately superseded when my present subject is sufficiently understood and applied to enable us to prepare the constituents of the vegetable kingdom in such a manner that they shall be as easily assimilated as the prepared grass which we call beef and mutton, and which we now use only on account of our ignorance of the subject treated in the following chapters. I do not presume to assert or suggest that my efforts towards the removal of this ignorance will transport us at once into a vegetarian millennium, but if they only open the gate and show us that there is a road on which we may travel towards great improvements in the preparation of our food as regards flavour, economy, and wholesomeness, my reasonable readers will not be disappointed.