Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/18

8 lighting, may be stored or accumulated so as to do the work of cooking in a very perfect manner. In the cooker the heat is imparted to water in an attachment to a metal-lined wooden box corresponding to the water-back of the common range or stove, and the work is done by the contact of the hot water with the outside of the porcelain vessels in which the food is placed, or by the steam generated when the water is heated to the boiling-point.

In the oven a column of heated air is carried from the chimney of the lamp to the inside of an outer oven made chiefly of prepared wood-pulp, but outside of the inner sheet-iron or metallic oven in which the food is placed, which inner oven is separately ventilated.

I do not claim any originality in these simple principles or in the idea of jacketing an oven with non-conductors of heat. All these matters are well understood by every intelligent stove-manufacturer, but it is practically impossible for any one to apply them in making stoves such as will meet the demand of the market, for two reasons:

1. The greatest demand for stoves is that of people of very moderate means, who are too much controlled by the price in making a choice, making the common error in confounding cheapness with low price, an error which leads to great waste not only in the matter of stoves but in many other ways.

2. The absolute and imperative preference of the public for a stove in or upon which the work can be done very quickly.

The custom of cooking quickly is in part a matter of choice, and in part due to the necessity to which a great many working people are subject to cook their meals quickly or else to go without hot breakfasts and dinners.

Another great obstruction to improvement in the art of cooking is the almost universal misconception that the finer cuts of meat are more nutritious than the coarser portions, coupled with an almost universal prejudice among working people against stewed food. This prejudice is doubtless due to the tasteless quality of boiled meat; boiling toughens each of the fine fibers, and deprives the meat almost wholly of its distinctive flavor.

All these blunders and misconceptions must evidently be removed before any true art of cooking can become common practice.

The more necessary, however, does it become to invent apparatus in which meat can only be simmered and can not boil, as in the Aladdin cooker, and also to invent a stove or oven in which neither meat nor bread can be overcooked, dried up, or rendered indigestible by too much heat, as in the Aladdin oven.

Next, people must be persuaded that a better and more nutritious breakfast can be made ready to eat, as soon as the family