Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/233

Rh Reflecting on this subject, I have been struck with a curious fact that has hitherto escaped notice, viz., that, in the country which over all others combines a very large population with a very small allowance of cleanliness, the ordinary drink of the people is boiled water flavored by an infusion of leaves. These people, the Chinese, seem, in fact, to have been the inventors of boiled-water beverages. Judging from travelers' accounts of the state of the rivers, rivulets, and general drainage and irrigation arrangements of China, its population could scarcely have reached its present density if Chinamen were drinkers of raw instead of cooked water.

Next to the boiling of water for its own sake, as treated in my last, comes the boiling of water as a medium for the cooking of other things. Here, at the outset, I have to correct an error of language which, as too often happens, leads by continual suggestion to false ideas. When we speak of "boiled beef," "boiled mutton," "boiled eggs," "boiled potatoes," we talk nonsense; we are not merely using an elliptical expression, as when we say "the kettle boils," which we all understand to mean the contents of the kettle, but we are expounding a false theory of what has happened to the beef, etc.—as false as though we should describe the material of the kettle that has held boiling water as boiled copper or boiled iron. No boiling of the food takes place in any such cases as the above-named—it is merely heated by immersion in boiling water; the changes that actually take place in the food are essentially different from those of ebullition. Even the water contained in the meat is not boiled in ordinary cases, as its boiling-point is higher than that of the surrounding water, owing to the salts it holds in solution.

Thus, as a matter of chemical fact, a "boiled leg of mutton" is one that has been cooked, but not boiled; while a roasted leg of mutton is one that has been partially boiled. Much of the constituent water of flesh is boiled out, fairly driven away as vapor during roasting or baking, and the fat on its surface is also boiled, and, more or less, dissociated into its chemical elements, carbon and water, as shown by the browning, due to the separated carbon.

As I shall presently show, this verbal explanation is no mere verbal quibble, but it involves important practical applications. An enormous waste of precious fuel is perpetrated every day, throughout the whole length and breadth of Britain and other countries where English cookery prevails, on account of the almost universal ignorance of the philosophy of the so-called boiling of food.

When it is once fairly understood that the meat is not to be boiled, but is merely to be warmed by immersion in water raised to a maximum temperature of 212°, and when it is further understood that water can not (under ordinary atmospheric pressure) be raised to a higher