Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/13

Rh inventions on which I have experimented personally in such scraps of time as I could spare from my regular occupation, and on nearly two years' use of my apparatus in my own family.

I will challenge attention and discussion by first submitting some very positive and dogmatic statements, subsequently sustaining them by such proofs as I have to offer:

1. Special apparatus for boiling and frying has been adequately and suitably developed for the use of those who can afford these somewhat wasteful methods of preparing food, yet excellent when skillfully practiced.

2. The ordinary methods of frying are utterly bad and wasteful.

3. Bread may be baked suitably in a brick oven, and also economically, when the work is done upon a large scale.

4. It is very difficult to bake bread in a suitable way in the common iron stove or range; for this, among other reasons, most of the bread consumed in this country is very bad, although we have the greatest abundance of the best material.

5. Meats may be well roasted in a costly manner before an open fire.

6. Aside from the exceptional apparatus or methods named, substantially all the modern cooking stoves and ranges are wasteful and more or less unsuitable for use. All the ordinary methods of quick baking, roasting, and boiling are bad; and, finally, almost the whole of the coal or oil used in cooking is wasted.

7. The smell of cooking in the ordinary way gives evidence of waste of flavor as well as a waste of nutritious properties; and in most cases the unpleasant smell also gives evidence that the food is being converted into an unwholesome condition, conducive to indigestion and dyspepsia.

8. Nine tenths of the time devoted to watching the process of cooking is wasted; and the heat and discomfort of the room in which the cooking is done are evidence of worse than waste.

9. The warming of the room or house with the apparatus used for cooking is inconsistent with the best method of cooking, and might be compassed at much less cost if the process of cooking were separated from the process of warming the room or dwelling.

10. No fuel which can not be wholly consumed is fit to use in the process of cooking, and any chimney which creates a draught upon the fuel when in the process of combustion, like the ordinary chimney of a house, is worse than useless, since it wastes the greater part of the heat generated from the fuel.

The true science of cooking consists in the regulated and controlled application of heat by which flavors are developed and the work of conversion is accomplished. For this purpose a quantity of fuel is required which is almost absurdly small compared to the quantity commonly used.