CHAPTER VI.

THE BEEF WE COOK.

The fibrin and water of beef.-Composition of beef compared with that of wheaten bread and wheaten flour.-Striking differences.-Dried flesh compared with dried oat-cake. More fat in domesticated animals and such as are fed for the butcher.Composition of fish.-Richness of the salmon and the eel.-Less fat in fowls.Eating butter with fish.-Composition of the egg.-Albumen or white; its properties and relations to gluten and fibrin.-Oil in the yolk, and in the dried egg.— Composition of milk.-Milk allied both to animal and vegetable forms of food.— Milk a model food.-Importance of a mixed food, containing much liquid.—Adjustment of the several ingredients of food in cooking.-Qualities of different kinds of cheese.-Composition of new and skimmed milk cheeses.-Comparison with milk.-Cheese as a digester.-Solvent power of decayed cheese.-Customary practices in cooking.-Qualities of different kinds of animal food.-Loss of beef and mutton in cooking.-Effects of heat upon meat.-Constituents of the juice of meat. -Kreatine.-Effects of salt upon meat.-Loss of nutritive value in salting.-How to boil meat and make meat soup.-Animal fats; their analogy to vegetable fats.The solid fat of beef, mutton, and palm-oil.-Composition of human fat, goose fat, butter, and the oil of the egg.-The liquid part of animal fat.-Identity of animal and vegetable food as regards the mineral matters they respectively contain.

BEEF and bread are the staples of English life; and as the study of wheaten bread in the preceding chapter gave us the key to the composition and nutritive qualities of all other vegetable substances, so an examination of beef will help us to a clear knowledge of all other kinds of animal food.

THE FIBRE OF LEAN BEEF.

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10. FLESH. If a piece of fresh beef be dried in the hot sunshine, or in a basin, over boiling water, it will shrink, dry up, diminish in bulk, and lose so much water, that four pounds of fresh, newly-cut beef will leave only one pound of dried flesh.

Again, if we take a piece of lean beef and wash it in separate portions of clean water, its colour will gradually disappear. The blood it contains will be washed out, and a white mass of fibrous tissue will remain. If this be put into a bottle with alcohol or ether, a variable proportion of fat will be dissolved out of it, and the whole fibrous mass will now be dryer and more compact than before. Through this fibrous mass many minute vessels are scattered, but it chiefly consists of a substance to which chemists, from its fibrous appearance, give the name of fibrin.

The annexed woodcut (fig. 27) shows the structure of

cles of all animals The fibres of lean muscle, showing how they aro chiefly consists; it is composed, and how they shrink or contract. disposed or arranged,-the particles of which they are

therefore the principal

constituent of animal flesh. It resembles the gluten of plants very closely in composition and properties-insomuch that, in a general comparison of animal with vegetable food, we may consider them for the present as absolutely identical.

Thus we have separated our beef-besides the small

quantity of blood and other matters washed out of it by the water-into three substances, water, fibrin, and fat. Its composition, as compared with that of wheaten bread and wheaten flour, it represented as follows:

Lean beef, therefore, agrees with wheaten flour and bread, in containing water and fat-only in beef the water is as great as it is in the potato or the plantain. It agrees with them also in containing a substance (fibrin) which represents in the animal the gluten of the plant. The main difference between beef and bread are first, that the flesh does not contain a particle of starch, which is so large an ingredient in plants; and, second, that the proportion of fibrin in ordinary flesh is about three times as great as in ordinary wheaten bread. Or a pound of beef-steak is as nutritive as three pounds of wheaten bread, in so far as the nutritive value of food depends upon this one ingredient. In the dry matter of flesh, also, the proportion of fibrin is greater than that of gluten in any known vegetable food, and very much greater than in dried bread made from any of our cultivated grains.

This latter fact will become more apparent if we compare perfectly dry flesh with perfectly dry oat-cake-oatmeal being the richest of our common kinds of meal, both in gluten and in fat.

PROPORTIONS OF FAT IN DOMESEIC ANIMALS.

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Here we have the two differences between the lean flesh of animals and the most nutritive of our grains presented in a very striking light. The animal food contains four times as much of what for the moment we may call gluten; but it is wholly deficient in the other main ingredient of vegetablesthe starch-which in the dried oatmeal forms seven-tenths of the whole weight.

The flesh of wild animals is represented very nearly by the lean beef of which the composition is given above. Wild animals generally contain little fat. But it is not so with our domesticated animals, and especially such as are reared for food. They all contain much fat, either collected by itself in various parts of the body (the suet or tallow), or intermingled with the muscular fibre, as in the highly-prized marbled beef in which the English epicure delights. In the boiling-houses at Port Philip, a small merino sheep of 55 lb. weight gives 20 lb. of tallow, which is nearly two-fifths of the whole. In heavier sheep the proportion of fat increases, four-fifths of all the weight above 55 lb. being tallow. In beef and mutton, such as is met with in our markets, from a third to a fourth of the whole dead weight generally consists of fat.

Supposing that, as it comes to the table, one-fourth of the weight of the butcher-meat we consume consists of fat, then the nutriment contained in 100 lb. of it, made quite dry, will be represented by—

This fat to a certain extent represents and replaces the starch of vegetable food.

Fowls contain less fat than butcher-meat; though, when crammed and fed upon food rich in fat, the capon and the

ortolan, and the diseased livers of the goose, become as rich as the fattest beef or mutton.

The composition of other kinds of flesh which we eat as food is much the same as that of beef. Veal and venison contain less fat, while pork contains more. Each variety also possesses a peculiar flavour and a faint odour, which is characteristic of the species, and sometimes of the variety of the animal. In some cases, as with our mountain mutton, this peculiar flavour is a high recommendation; in others, as with the sheep of the Low Countries, and with the goat, it renders them to many altogether unpalatable.

2o. FISH in general is less rich in fat than the flesh meat in our markets, and consequently contains more fibrin. Some of our common varieties of fish, when perfectly dried, consist of

These numbers, of course, are liable to variation-the herring especially being very much fatter at some seasons and on some coasts than on others. We see, however, that salmon is justly considered a rich fish, since it contains three times as much fat as the haddock. The epicure has also a substantial reason for his attachment to the eel, since it contains a considerably greater weight of fat than it does of muscular fibre.

It appears, therefore—

First, That the dried flesh of all the animals that we most usually consume for food, consists essentially of fibrin.

Second, That the proportion of fat is variable, and that