Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Thorough Good Cook: A Series of Chats on the Culinary Art, and Nine Hundred Recipes
It is because I wish others to live well, and to satisfy a cultured appetite without injuring their digestion, that I have written this book. In composing it I have kept three objects in view. First, to avoid padding my pages with quasi-scientific disquisitions on the chemistry of cookery. Nothing would be easier than to tell the public that which they have been told over and over again - that in making the pot-da-feu, or fundamental beef broth, the heat of the fire swells the muscular fibres of the meat, dissolving the gelatinous substances therein contained, and that by these means the osmazome, which is the most savoury part of the meat, gently adds its unction to the broth, while the albumen, which is the muscular part producing the scum, rises to the surface. To harp on such a string would be not only to waste the time but to exhaust the patience of my readers. Nor do I intend in these pages to teach the fundamental prin ciples of cookery. I assume that the cook in whose hands I earnestly hope that very many ladies will place this book has learned the rudiments, and is able to use the minor arts, of her trade - that she knows how to roast, boil, fry, stew, and bake. I have not hesitated, therefore, to leave to her knowledge and judgment things which I should have had to set out in detail if I had been writing a treatisebn the elements of the culinary art. It is true that now and again I have given some simple hints with regard to braising, since that is a process only imperfectly understood by the majority of English cooks, and not half so much used by them as it should be.
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