Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/14

4 Compare the ordinary method of using fuel for cooking with the scientific use of fuel for the development of power in the steam-engine.

The sheet of lightly sized linen paper abstracted from the unused part of an old ledger, on which I am now writing the first draught of this essay, measures 13" X 9" = 117 square inches, and weighs half an ounce. In solid form it measures half a cubic inch. If consumed under the boiler of the modern marine steam-engine such as is used in the freight-steamers that carry our wheat to England, two sheets of this paper in a solid form would be equal to seventy-one per cent of the calorific value of a cube of bituminous coal of the same size, and would drive a ton of wheat and its proportion of the steamship 1 miles on the way from the producer to the consumer at the present standard of power developed from coal. Yet not over twelve per cent of the actual power of the heat which this scrap of paper will yield would even then be actually converted into work. A cube of pure wood-pulp of the same size will do the same work. On the other hand, wood-pulp until ignited is the best available non-conductor of heat; I therefore build my ovens in greater part of wood-pulp prepared so as not to ignite at any degree of heat which is necessary for cooking; but even in my oven it requires one quart of oil, measuring a fraction under fifty-eight cubic inches, to cook fifty to sixty pounds of bread, meat, and vegetables in four successive charges occupying two hours each. Compared with the application of heat to the development of power, even my oven must be utterly condemned as wasteful of fuel; but compare my quart of oil with the hodfuls of coal that would be required to cook sixty pounds of food in the common range or stove, and then what is the verdict?

I now venture to submit the data of a dinner prepared by myself, but little out of the usual course, as an example of the common practice in my own family, and of what may be done substantially with one lamp. The dinner was provided for my own family of seven persons, with five guests, and it also sufficed for four servants—sixteen in all—with something left over. My summer kitchen is fitted with a cooking-stove, as it is more convenient to use the top of the stove, heated with hard-wood chips, for boiling water, heating the soup, and boiling potatoes, than it is to use a kerosene-oil stove of the common kind; on this stove the soup made the day before in the Aladdin cooker was reheated, the potatoes were boiled, and the hot water was provided.

The dinner cooked in the Aladdin oven consisted of three to four pounds of fresh blue-fish, just caught, cooked in imitation of broiling, one hour; six to seven pounds leg and loin of lamb, roasted one and three fourths hours; three tame ducks, weighing about seven pounds, roasted one hour; squash cooked in its own