Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/16

6 oven; and, lastly, all kinds of meat and poultry develop their respective flavors in the most appetizing manner when roasted in my pulp oven at such low degrees of heat as not to give off any smell or to dissociate any of the volatile elements of the juices or fats, while for game nothing can equal it. Quail and partridge come out rich, juicy, and of almost too full a flavor.

I have frequently served dinners or lunches of four or five courses—soup made the day before, reheated; fish, meat, game, potatoes, cauliflower, asparagus, onions, tomatoes, and custard pudding—all cooked in the same oven at the same time in the dining-room, and served from the oven to the table in the china or earthen dishes in which each had been cooked; the only difference between one dish and another being in respect to the time in which it had been subjected to the heat of the lamp or lamps, yet without the least flavor or taint being carried from one kind of food to the other.

It will be apparent that, if cooking can be done in this way, the whole art will consist in preparing the food according to written or printed receipts, and in determining the degree of heat and the time to which these dishes should be subjected. No watching is needed, and indeed none is possible without danger of cooling off the oven by opening it too often. Of course, it is better to use two ovens than one, devoting one to meat and fish, served by a lamp of moderate power for the right period of time, and the other served by a lamp of higher power for cooking vegetables, puddings, and pastry.

My Aladdin ovens, so called, are adapted to methods of cooking corresponding to broiling, roasting, baking, and braising; but they can also be used for boiling and simmering.

My Aladdin cooker, so called, in which the heat is conveyed through water, is devoted wholly to boiling, stewing, and simmering, especially the latter. I neither attempt nor desire to fry anything in either kind of apparatus. About nine tenths of all the cooking of my somewhat large family has been done with this apparatus for nearly two years, and I also have an office lunchroom for the use of about twenty employeés, in which no other apparatus is or can be used. My summer kitchen at my sea-side house is fitted with a grill which is very seldom used; it proves to be most convenient to use the cooking-stove, heated with hardwood chips, for boiling the water for tea and for occasional frying.

My winter kitchen is a large one, and it depends upon the range for warming it. The range, therefore, continues to be used to some extent for cooking, mainly for preparing breakfast, but I contemplate substituting a special stove without any oven, which will heat the room with much less coal, the top of the stove being fitted for cooking in the ordinary way. Neither the oven of the