FLAVOR AS THE GUIDING PRINCIPLE.
"Cookery is an art which almost more than any other has civilized mankind," as President E. B. Tylor[120] of the British Anthropological Association has truly said.
Before breakfast in the garden
Some links in this article are affiliate links, from which we may receive a tiny commission, at no cost to you, should you visit a merchant via our link and subsequently make a purchase.
Nor is it only an art; it is also a science—or rather, it is becoming a science. From time immemorial cooks have, by instinct or accident, often done the right thing; but in the absence of a guiding principle, scientifically formulated, they have much more frequently made a mess of it.
There are four reasons for cooking food: to sterilize it; to make it more nutritious; to make it more easily digestible; and to improve or vary its Flavor.
Cooking destroys the germs of typhoid and other diseases which may lurk in food products, and it also retards the general decomposition which may result in ptomaine poisoning.
It has long been believed that raw or semi-raw meat is more nutritious than meat which has been moderately cooked; but this is not true. It is true, on the other hand, that in the ordinary methods of cooking there is often a considerable loss of nutriment. The United States Department of Agriculture has had a number of experiments made to place this question on a scientific basis.[5] Much remains to be done, but in the end it will doubtless be found that there is no appreciable loss if French methods are followed.
That cooking makes most foods more digestible it is needless to prove. Even fruits which taste better raw, digest more readily when cooked. A great many persons who cannot, for instance, eat apples, find them not only agreeable but easily assimilated and most beneficial to health when stewed or baked. Cereals (particularly oatmeal) and many vegetables and meats need cooking—sometimes hours of it to make them easy to masticate and digest.
The main object of cooking, however, is to preserve and develop the countless savors latent in good raw material, to combine them or to add others where the material is deficient in natural Flavor.
This is the guiding principle to the science of cookery. Strange to say, there are cook books in which the word Flavor is not to be found! The recipes given in such books may be correct, but to follow them mechanically is like playing the notes of a piano piece without knowing anything about expression marks. Flavor is the soul of food as expression is the soul of music.
Born cooks know this instinctively and act on it. But cooks can also be made. Tremendous improvement could be effected in our kitchens in a short time by attending to the elements of the Science of Savory Cooking, long since discovered, but usually ignored.
Much has been written about the wastefulness in our households. A French family, we have been told a[122] thousand times, could live on what is thrown away in an American kitchen. True; but as long as we enjoy our present national prosperity this waste is a far less deplorable matter than the criminal way in which ignorant or careless persons habitually denature our best food materials by allowing the healthful Flavors to escape during the process of cooking.
