Household Papers and StoriesStowe, Harriet Beecher
General
Household Papers and Stories
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Didactic fiction; Home economics -- Fiction; Short stories
I am aware that, if this is urged on the score of aesthetics, the ready
reply will be, "Oh, we can't give time here in America to go into
niceties and French whim-whams!" But the French mode of doing almost
all practical things is based on that true philosophy and utilitarian
good sense which characterize that seemingly thoughtless people.
Nowhere is economy a more careful study, and their market is
artistically arranged to this end. The rule is so to cut their meats
that no portion designed to be cooked in a certain manner shall have
wasteful appendages which that mode of cooking will spoil. The French
soup kettle stands ever ready to receive the bones, the thin fibrous
flaps, the sinewy and gristly portions, which are so often included in
our roasts or broilings, which fill our plates with unsightly debris,
and finally make an amount of blank waste for which we pay our butcher
the same price that we pay for what we have eaten.
The dead waste of our clumsy, coarse way of cutting meats is immense.
For example, at the beginning of the present season, the part of a
lamb denominated leg and loin, or hind-quarter, sold for thirty cents
a pound. Now this includes, besides the thick, fleshy portions, a
quantity of bone, sinew, and thin fibrous substance, constituting
full one third of the whole weight. If we put it into the oven entire,
in the usual manner, we have the thin parts overdone, and the skinny
and fibrous parts utterly dried up, by the application of the amount
of heat necessary to cook the thick portion. Supposing the joint to
weigh six pounds, at thirty cents, and that one third of the weight is
so treated as to become perfectly useless, we throw away sixty cents.
Of a piece of beef at twenty-five cents a pound, fifty cents' worth is
often lost in bone, fat, and burnt skin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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