Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/235

Rh is one of the most decided and best understood changes effected by cookery, and therefore demands especial study.

Place some fresh, raw white of egg in a test-tube, or other suitable glass vessel, and in the midst of it immerse the bulb of a thermometer. (Cylindrical thermometers, with the degrees marked on the glass stem, are made for such laboratory purposes.) Place the tube containing the albumen in a vessel of water, and gradually heat this. When the albumen attains a temperature of about 134° Fahr., white fibers will begin to appear within it; these will increase until about 160° is attained, when the whole mass will become white and nearly opaque. It is now coagulated, and may be called solid. Now examine some of the result, and you will find that the albumen thus only just coagulated is a tender, delicate, jelly-like substance, having every appearance to sight, touch, and taste of being easily digestible. This is the case.

Having settled these points, proceed with the experiment by heating the remainder of the albumen (or a new sample) up to 212°, and keeping it for a while at this temperature. It will dry, shrink, and become horny. If the heat is carried a little further, it becomes converted into a substance which is so hard and tough that a valuable cement is obtained by simply smearing the edges of the article to be cemented with white of egg, and then heating it to a little above 212°.

This simple experiment teaches a great deal of what is but little known concerning the philosophy of cookery. It shows in the first place that, so far as the coagulation of the albumen is concerned, the cooking temperature is not 212°, or that of boiling water, but 160°, i. e., 52° below it. Everybody knows the difference between a tender, juicy steak, rounded or plumped-out in the middle, and a tough, leathery abomination, that has been so cooked as to shrivel and curl up. The contraction, drying up, and hornifying of the albumen in the test tube represent the albumen of the latter, while the tender, delicate, trembling, semi-solid, that was coagulated at 160°, represents the albumen in the first.

But this is a digression, or rather anticipation, seeing that the grilling of a beefsteak is a problem of profound complexity that we can not solve until we have mastered the rudiments. We have not yet determined how to practically apply the laws of albumen coagulation as discovered by our test-tube experiment to the cooking of a breakfast-egg.—Knowledge.