Perhaps it will be thought that it is a very simple business to make gravy, and that it is unnecessary to attend to all these details in connection with it. But it is not so. Very often gravy is a delusion. I have known cooks who professed to understand their business take a little boiling water and pour it over the browner portions of the joint, thus watering the joint to all intents and purposes, and then consider that they have done all that is required for gravy. They were mistaken, and they were only pror-ing their ignorance. There is nothing that shows the. ability of a cook more than gravies and sauces. It is very safe to conclude that where meat is served regularly with good brown bright gravy, perfectly free from fat, some one in the house knows something of cookery. 19 III. BOILING. (o f.fokf; boiling meat of any kind whatever, we should (^3 always ask ourselves one question, and that is, “ Do I want to keep the goodness in this meat, or do I want to get the goodness out of it ? ” It is on the answer we give, that our course must depend. If the meat is to be eaten, we want to keep the goodness in it. We shall not be able to manage this entirely, for, with all our care, some of it will escape into the water, but we may preserve a great deal of it. And the best means we can adopt for this purpose is to surround the meat as quickly as possible with a kind of shield, through which the juices cannot escape. We all know that an egg when broken in a cup is liquid. If this same egg be turned into a saucepan containing boiling water it will in three minutes be quite different, for the white part will be solid. Now, there is in meat a great deal of the same substance that white of egg is composed of — that is, albumen, the peculiar property of which is that heat makes it solid. When, therefore, we plunge meat into boiling water, the albumen in it becomes solid, just as the white of an egg does. Of course the part that is nearest to the hot water, that is, the outside, gets hard first, and this makes our shield. After the meat has boiled for five minutes, or a little less, it is quite surrounded with a covering that will keep in the goodness that we so much want to preserve. If any one doubts the truth of this, let her take a little piece of raw beef, divide it into halves, and put one half into cold water and the other into boiling water. In one minute the cold water will be tinged with red — the goodness will have begun to escape from the meat. The boiling water will be very nearly the colour it was before. If the beef is allowed to lie in the cold water for about half an hour, the water will be quite red and the meat will be white ; its juice will have passed into the water, 20 The Girl’s Own Cookery Book. and it will be valueless for nourishing purposes. It is on this account that, when we want to make beef-tea, we put the beef to soak for a while in cold water to draw out the goodness, before we put it into a jar to be placed in a saucepan of water to simmer till it is done.

AI-modernized reading of the original text

Perhaps it will be thought that it is a very simple business to make gravy, and that it is unnecessary to attend to all these details in connection with it. But it is not so. Very often gravy is a delusion. I have known cooks who professed to understand their business take a little boiling water and pour it over the browner portions of the joint, thus watering the joint to all intents and purposes, and then consider that they have done all that is required for gravy. They were mistaken, and they were only proving their ignorance. There is nothing that shows the. ability of a cook more than gravies and sauces. It is very safe to conclude that where meat is served regularly with good brown bright gravy, perfectly free from fat, some one in the house knows something of cookery. BOILING. (o f.fokf; boiling meat of any kind whatever, we should (^3 always ask ourselves one question, and that is, “ Do I want to keep the goodness in this meat, or do I want to get the goodness out of it ? ” It is on the answer we give, that our course must depend. If the meat is to be eaten, we want to keep the goodness in it. We shall not be able to manage this entirely, for, with all our care, some of it will escape into the water, but we may preserve a great deal of it. And the best means we can adopt for this purpose is to surround the meat as quickly as possible with a kind of shield, through which the juices cannot escape. We all know that an egg when broken in a cup is liquid. If this same egg be turned into a saucepan containing boiling water it will in three minutes be quite different, for the white part will be solid. Now, there is in meat a great deal of the same substance that white of egg is composed of — that is, albumen, the peculiar property of which is that heat makes it solid. When, therefore, we plunge meat into boiling water, the albumen in it becomes solid, just as the white of an egg does. Of course the part that is nearest to the hot water, that is, the outside, gets hard first, and this makes our shield. After the meat has boiled for five minutes, or a little less, it is quite surrounded with a covering that will keep in the goodness that we so much want to preserve. If any one doubts the truth of this, let her take a little piece of raw beef, divide it into halves, and put one half into cold water and the other into boiling water. In one minute the cold water will be tinged with red — the goodness will have begun to escape from the meat. The boiling water will be very nearly the colour it was before. If the beef is allowed to lie in the cold water for about half an hour, the water will be quite red and the meat will be white ; its juice will have passed into the water, The Girl’s Own Cookery Book. and it will be valueless for nourishing purposes. It is on this account that, when we want to make beef-tea, we put the beef to soak for a while in cold water to draw out the goodness, before we put it into a jar to be placed in a saucepan of water to simmer till it is done.

The girl's own cookery book