I believe that this inferiority is due, in the first place, to the want of understanding of the difference between coal-flame and fat-flame; and in the second, to the advantage afforded to the ‘grill-room’ cook by his specially-constructed fire, with a large surface of glowing coke surmounted by a sloping grill, whereon he can expose his chops and steaks to a maximum of radiant heat with a minimum of convection heat; the hot air which passes in a current over the coke surface having such small depth that it barely touches the bars of the grill. (This may be seen by watching the course of flame produced by the droppings of the fat.) The same obliquity of draught prevents the serious blacking of the meat, which, although harmless, is unsightly and calculated to awaken prejudice. The high temperature rapidly imparted by radiation to the surface of the meat forms a thin superficial crust of hardened and semi-carbonised albumen and fibre, that resists the outrush of vapour, and produces within a certain degree of high pressure, which probably acts in loosening the fibres. A well-grilled chop or steak is ‘puffed’ out—made thicker in the middle; an ill-cooked, desiccated specimen is shrivelled, collapsed, and thinned by the slow departure or dissociation of its juices. Happy little couples, living in little houses with only one little servant—or, happier still, with no servant at all—complain of their little joints of meat, which, when roasted, are so dry, as compared with the big succulent joints of larger households. A little reflection on the principles above applied to the grilling of steaks and chops will explain the source of this little difficulty, and show how it may be overcome. I will here venture upon a little of the mathematics of cookery, as well as its chemistry. While the weight or quantity of material in a joint increases with the cube of its through-measured dimensions, its surface only increases with their square—or, otherwise stated, we do not nearly double or treble the surface of a joint of given form when we double or treble its weight; and _vice versâ_, the less the weight, the greater the surface in proportion to the weight. This is obvious enough when we consider that we cannot cut a single lump of anything into halves without exposing or creating two fresh surfaces where no surfaces were exposed before. As the evaporation of the juices is, under given conditions, proportionate to the surface exposed, it is evident that this process of converting the inside middle into two outside surfaces must increase the amount of evaporation that occurs in roasting.