being very rich in both fats and proteids. Considering this, its price is very low and it ought to be a treasure to the poor man and do good service in replacing sometimes the more expensive meat.

Use of cheese

Its food value is fully recognized abroad.

For the abroad. Swiss peasant it is a staple second only to bread, while the use of it in Italy and Germany is extensive. The writer once spent several weeks in the house of a large farmer on the slope of Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland, and observed daily the food given to the harvester; the luncheon sent twice a day to the fields consisted of a quarter section of the grayish skim cheese, accompanied with bread. I was told that the poor people in the region ate scarcely any meat, using cheese in its stead.

The writer has also observed the use of cheese in Germany. Every locality has its special variety of the soft kind made of sour milk, and great amounts of the Swiss, both skim and full milk, cheese are consumed. It is generally eaten uncooked, but also as an addition to cooked food in a great variety of dishes. There is no doubt of the food value of cheese, Digestibility of cheese. but there does seem to be some question as to its digestibility. When we come to inquire into this point, we find that thorough experiments have been made by German scientists. Dr. Rübner, a pupil of Voit, gives the result of experiments on himself. He found that he could not consume much of it alone, but that with milk he took easily 200 grams or nearly 1⁄2 pound, and only when he took as high as 517 grams, or over a pound daily, was it less completely digested than meat. Professor König says that in the amounts in which it is generally eaten, 125 to 250 grams daily (1⁄4 to 1⁄2 pound), it is as well digested as meat or eggs. The extensive use of it abroad would seem to be some guaranty for the digestibility of the foreign varieties at least.

American cheeses have in general a sharper flavor than the foreign, still it is probable that, well mixed with other food, enough could be taken many a time to give a man his needed daily quantity of animal proteid, - between 6 and 7 ounces,— and this is a matter of great importance from an economical point of view.

Why cook?

METHODS OF COOKING MEAT.

And first, why do we cook it at all? In the animal as well as in the vegetable world some foods are all ready for our digestion, as milk. Raw eggs, too, are perfectly digestible and are often given to invalids. We hear of "raw meat cures," and it has been found that tender and juicy raw meat, if chopped fine to break the connective tissue, is well digested.

But raw meat does not taste good to most of us, while the delicious flavor and odor of a broiled steak make it very acceptable to the palate, and we must believe to the stomach also. We "bring out the flavor," as we say, by cooking; what else do we do? Let us examine for a moment a piece of meat with reference to the effect heat has upon it.

Structure of

these

The red part is made up of, first, very tiny sausagemeat. like bags, or muscle fibres as they are called, and in these is contained the precious proteid matter, flavors, and salts all mixed together with water into a sort of jelly; second, muscle fibres are bound together by strands of connective tissue, as that white stringy mass is called, in which the fat and bloodvessels are lodged; this is also of food value, but inferior to the fibres; third, dissolved in the juices floating between the fibres and strands, there is also a proteid called soluble albumen. The little bags of proteid, when we can get at them, are as digestible in our stomachs as is the white of egg, though, like the egg again, their flavor is improved by slight cooking. But, as we have seen, they are imprisoned in the connective tissue, somewhat, we may say, as are the starch grains of the potato in

the cellulose.

Softening con

This connective tissue we can soften by heat, nective tissue. thereby turning it into a sort of gelatine, but, unfortunately, unless the meat is very tender, this requires a longer application of heat than is needed to cook the delicate albumen, all full of flavors too easily lost. To soften the connective tissue without overcooking the albumen, is one of the problems of meat cookery.

The next question is, how do our methods of cooking meet these requirements?

Ist method.

COOKING MEAT IN WATER.

Put a piece of lean meat into cold water, heat it very slowly, and watch the effect. The water becomes slightly red, then cloudy, and as the heat increases, yellowish in color, and finally it clears, sending a scum to the surface. If we examine this scum, we find that the water has soaked out much soluble albumen, and a large proportion of the salts of the meat, as well as other substances called extractives; and now the odor of the boiling meat begins to fill the kitchen. The longer and slower the warming process, the more of all these things we shall extract, and the meat when taken out will be in just that proportion poor.

This is the process known as soup making, - very Soup making. simple, if we care nothing for the piece of meat but to soak out of it all the food and flavors possible. After some hours of cooking we find it shrunken, gray, and tasteless. A dog, if fed on that alone, could not live many days. However, as we have before said, we are not to conclude that it contains no more nutriment, but the stomach rejects it now that it is separated from all the flavoring matters.

2d method.

Now put a piece of meat into boiling water, and continue the boiling. The surface of the meat suddenly whitens, and a little scum rises on the water, though very little compared with what we saw in the former method. We have coagulated the albumen contained in all the little cells in the surface of the meat, and the soluble albumen, flavoring matters, and salts cannot get out; the sealing up is not quite perfect, enough escaping into the water to make it a weak soup, but it is a good method of cooking a large piece if properly completed from this point. But if we go on boiling our meat, that is, keeping the temperature at 212°, we shall overcook the albumen in the outer layers before that in the center is coagulated. By overcooking, we mean making it horny and flavorless, as we do the white of an egg if we cook it in the old-fashioned way, by dropping into boiling water and keeping it at that heat. Having seared the outside of the meat to keep the juices in, we must lower the temperature. The albumen coagulates at between 160° and 170°, but the water in the kettle may be a little above this,

as it must constantly transfer heat to the interior of the meat. The general rule is that it should "bubble" or "simmer" only, and if the cook can do no better she must follow these indications. That the true temperature for cooking meat is below the boiling point, many an intelligent housekeeper knows; but how is she to know when the water is at 170°? Here we come upon the weakest point in household cookery; various degrees of heat have different effects on the foods we cook, but of only one temperature is the housekeeper certain that of boiling water.

For the use of the thermometer and the heat saver, see pages 225 and 226.

But to return; is there no way of cooking that will keep in the meat all these flavors and salts and albumens, just as nature mixed them? Yes, there are three ways: frying in fat, baking in an oven, and broiling over coals.

Frying in fat.

We will examine the first. If we plunge a thin piece of meat, as a cutlet coated with egg and breadcrumbs, into boiling fat, the albumen in the surface, or rather, in that of the egg surrounding it, is coagulated as in boiling, but this time the outer rind preserves the juices still better, because the fat will not mix with them as will water. Everyone knows how an oyster cooked in this way retains its juices.

If we

When we bake a piece of meat in the oven, we Baking meat. start in the same way; we sear the outside in fat, turning the roast about in a small quantity of fat made hot in a kettle; we then transfer it, still in the kettle or pan, to a hot oven, where the process of cooking is completed, but at short intervals we moisten the surface with the fat in the pan. did not baste the roast, we would find a thick layer of gray, tasteless meat inside the outer brown crust, and indeed the whole piece would dry long before the center of our roast had reached the coagulating point; we baste, in order to keep in the juices which, as we know, will not mix with the fat, and also that only a mild degree of heat, not exceeding the coagulating point of proteids, may be transmitted to the interior. In the intervals of our basting, some water is driven out of the meat and evaporated into steam, and the high heat of the oven expends itself in evaporating this, in heating the basting fat, and perhaps (if it reach so high a temperature) in decomposing part of it, and in chang

ing the chemical character of small quantities of extractives, thus making the meat "tasty," and so it happens that only a mild degree of heat is passed into the center of the piece. We would hardly believe that the inside of a roast, with its light pink color, registers only 160° by the thermometer, yet this can be proved by anyone with a long chemist's thermometer. Although some of the water of our meat has evaporated, the extractives and salts are retained to a larger extent than in boiling, as we shall see by the table given later.

Broiling.

In broiling, the principle applied is exactly the same as in baking, the cooking being done by the medium of heated air. The dry heat of the coals affects the outer layer of the meat, as does the hot air of the oven. In both these methods, just as in boiling, we try to hold the temperature of our cooking medium just high enough to keep the heat traveling toward the interior of the meat.

We have now learned to cook the albumen enough and not too much, and to keep the flavors of our meat; what about the connective tissue, and how has that fared with our different modes of cooking?

If our meat is cut from the tenderer part of an aniTender meat. mal of the right age, well fed and fattened, and if it has been kept long enough after killing, the connective tissue will soften into eatable condition in the length of time required to cook the albumen by the methods described. Such meat, so cooked, will always be tender and full of flavor.

Tough meat.

But if the meat is cut from the tougher parts, or from an old or ill-fattened animal, or cooked too soon after killing, the connective tissue will not soften in that time; we must continue the application of heat till this tissue softens.

Methods com

meat.

Therefore, what method of cooking we shall use, depared: 1st, as pends on the quality of the meat we have. Trimmings to quality of and tough portions we will make into soup, expecting to chop the tasteless meat next day, and add other flavors to make it palatable. Somewhat better pieces, but still requiring long cooking to soften the connective tissue, may be made into a stew or ragout; or, if the piece is large and compact, boiled in water; but meat that is tender and juicy (and for improving