Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/17

Rh stove in summer nor of the range in winter are now used for cooking; therefore, the kitchen is never overheated and the food is never spoiled. We have occasionally failed to cook a large joint of meat for a sufficient time, but we have never spoiled a dish in the process of cooking since the pulp or jacketed oven was adopted.

What, then, are the simple principles of the science of cooking? I think they may be stated in a few very plain terms:

1. The heat should be derived from fuel which can be wholly consumed or wholly converted into the products of complete combustion without any chimney except that of the lamp or burner. The fault with coal, especially anthracite, is, that it is not evenly or fully consumed; hence the need of a chimney to take away the gases developed and not wholly consumed; but the chimney also carries off the greater part of the heat. It is very evident that the crude combustion of coal and the direct application of the heat generated will ere long give way to more scientific methods of consuming the gaseous products and of deriving the heat from the final combustion of the gaseous products in all arts. In the matter of cooking, kerosene-oil burned in any one of the types of lamp which have a central duct to convey oxygen from below to the inner side of a circular wick, when properly trimmed and served with well-distilled oil, gives substantially perfect combustion.

The same may be said of illuminating gas when used in one of the burners of the Bunsen type which supply an excess of oxygen and yield the blue flame.

The combustion of oil and of gas can be brought under absolute control by gauging the size of wick or burner to the work to be done.

2. The oven in which the food is to be subjected to this measurable and controllable source of heat must be so constructed that the heat imparted to it may be entrapped and accumulated up to a certain measure or degree and then maintained at that temperature without substantial variation until the work is done. This can be done by jacketing the oven in a suitable way with material which is incombustible and also a non-conductor of heat.

3. There should be no direct communication between the true oven or receptacle in which the food is placed and the source of heat, lest the products of incomplete combustion should sometimes taint the food, and lest the food should be exposed to being in places burned or scorched.

These three conditions are all accomplished in the two somewhat crude and probably incomplete inventions which I have named the "Aladdin Cooker" and the "Aladdin Oven," in both of which the heat derived from common lamps, such as are used for