Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/381

Rh destruction of the nutritive value of its solid portion by rendering it all indigestible, with the exception of the gelatine which is dissolved in the gravy. This exception should be duly noted, inasmuch as it is the one redeeming feature of such proceeding that renders it fairly well adapted for the cookery of such meat as cow-heels, sheep's trotters, calves'-heads, shins of beef, knuckles of veal, and other viands which consist mainly of membranous, tendinous, or integumentary matter composed of gelatine. To treat the prime parts of good beef or mutton in this manner is to perpetrate a domestic atrocity.

I am not yet able to record the result of stewing a sirloin of beef in accordance with the scientific principles expounded in my last. Have no hopes of being able to do so until I can spare time to stand by the kitchen fire with thermometer in hand from beginning to end of the process, or have constructed a stewing-pot, big enough for the purpose, so arranged that its contents can not possibly by any effort of ingenious perversity be raised above 180°. The domestic superstition concerning simmering is so wide-spread and inveterate that every normally-constituted cook stubbornly believes that simmering water is of much lower temperature than boiling water, and therefore any amount of instruction or injunctions for the maintenance of a heat below boiling will be stubbornly translated into an order for "gentle simmering," a quarter of an hour of which would spoil the sirloin.

I may, however, mention an experiment that I have made lately. I killed a superannuated hen—more than six years old, but otherwise in very good condition. Cooked in the ordinary way she would have been uneatably tough. Instead of being thus cooked, she was gently stewed about four hours. I can not guarantee to the maintenance of the theoretical temperature, having suspicion of some simmering. After this she was left in the water until it cooled, and on the following day was roasted in the usual manner, i. e., in a roasting-oven. The result was excellent; as tender as a full-grown chicken roasted in the ordinary way, and of quite equal flavor, in spite of the very good broth obtained by the preliminary stewing. This surprised me. I anticipated the softening of the tendons and ligaments, but supposed that the extraction of the juices would have spoiled the flavor. It must have diluted it, and that so much remained was probably due to the fact that an old fowl is more fully flavored than a young chicken. The usual farmhouse method of cooking old hens is to stew them simply; the rule in the midlands being one hour in the pot for every year of age. The feature of the above experiment was the supplementary roasting. As the laying season is now coming to an end, old hens will soon be a drug in the market, and those among my readers who have not a hen-roost of their own will oblige their poulterers by ordering a hen that is warranted to be four years old or upward. If he deals fairly he will supply a specimen upon which they may repeat