A calendar of dinners, with 615 recipes

it by submitting it to the action of heat, and usually of moisture also, which will make it more fitted for food; and it is on the nature of this action on different materials that the rationale of the cook’s art chiefly depends. Good cooking can make any meat tender, and bad cooking can make any meat tough. The substance in meat called albumen becomes tougher and more indigestible, the higher the temperature to which it is subjected reaches beyond a certain point. It is this effect of heat on albumen, therefore, which has to be considered whenever the cooking of meat is in question, and which mainly determines the right and the wrong, whether in the making of a soup or a custard, the roasting or boiling of a chicken or a joint, or the frying of a cutlet or an omelet. We now will see to begin with, what are the special ways in which it bears on meat cookery. Take a little bit of raw meat and put it in cold water. The juice gradually soaks out of it, coloring the water pink and leaving the meat nearly white. Now take another bit, and pour boiling water upon it; and though no juice can be seen escaping, the whole surface of the meat turns a whitish color directly. Lean meat is made up of bundles of hollow fibres within which the albuminous juices are stored. Wherever these fibres are cut through, the juice oozes out and spreads itself over the surface of the meat. If, as in our first little experiment, the meat is put in cold water, or even in warm water, or exposed to a heat insufficient to set the albumen, either in an oven or before the fire, the albuminous juices are in the first case drawn out and dissolved, and in the second evaporated. In either case the meat is deprived of them. But if the Meats meat is put into boiling water or into a quick oven or before a hot fire, the surface albumen is quickly set, forms a tough white coating which effectually plugs the ends of the cut fibres, and prevents any further escape of their contents. Here, then, we have the first principles on which meat cookery must be conducted; viz: that if we wish to get the juices out of the meat, as for soups and stews, the liquid in which we put it must be cold to begin with; while if we wish, as for boiled or roast meat, to keep them in, the meat must be subjected first of all to the action of boiling water, a hot fire or a quick oven. The meats of soups and stews must not be raw, and that of joints must not be tough; and the cooking of both one and the other, however it is begun, should be completed at just such a moderate temperature as will set, but not harden, the albumen. That is to say, the soup or stew must be raised to this temperature, after the meat juices have been drawn out by a lower one, while a joint or fowl must be lowered to it after the surface albumen has been hardened by a higher one. All poultry or game for roasting should be dredged with flour before and after trussing, to dry it perfectly, as otherwise it does not crisp and brown so well. Unless poultry is to be boiled or stewed it never should be washed or wet in any way as this renders the flesh sodden and the skin soft. Good wiping with clean cloths should be quite sufficient. With the exception of ducks and geese, all poultry and game require rather a large addition of fat during roasting, as the flesh is dry. Chickens will cook in from twenty to thirty minutes; fowls take from thirty to sixty minutes when young and tender, the only condition in which they are fit to roast; turkeys take from one to two hours and even more if exceptionally large. Game takes longer in proportion to its size than poultry, and all birds require better and more cooking than beef or mutton. Beef Collops 1 lb. hamburg steak Salt and pepper to taste 1 chopped onion 1 teaspoonful mushroom catsup 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco or Worcestershire sauce