Another and somewhat original method of roasting is that which is carried out in ‘Captain Warren’s Cooking Pot,’ concerning the practical result of which I hear conflicting opinions. It is a large pot containing water, inside which is suspended—like the glue chamber of a glue-pot—an inner vessel. The meat to be cooked is placed without water in this inner closed vessel, which dips into the water of the outer vessel, the steam from which is led away by a side opening or pipe. This outer water being kept boiling, the meat is surrounded only by its own vapour, in the midst of which it is cooked at a low temperature. The result is similar to boiled meat, with the advantage of retaining those juices that pass away into the water in ordinary boiling. This advantage is unquestionable, and so far the apparatus may be safely recommended. But some of the claims made in the prospectuses that are freely distributed are questionable. The method of roasting with Warren’s pot is to cook the meat as above described in its own vapour, then dredge with flour, and hang before the fire twenty minutes. The result is a tender imitation of roast meat, but more like boiled than roasted meat in flavour. This is much approved by many, but I am told that meat thus cooked and eaten daily palls upon the appetite. I know one, a youth (not one of our fastidious fops of the period), who, fed upon this at school during a few years, has thereby acquired a fixed aversion to boiled meat of all kinds. Regarding the subject theoretically, it appears to me that the method recommended by Captain Warren, and followed by those who use his cooker, should be reversed for roasting; that the meat should have the twenty minutes before the fire—or in a hot oven—before, instead of after, its stewing in its own vapour. Some experiments I have made confirm this view so far as they go, but are not sufficiently numerous to settle the question. For stewing of all kinds, and for such concoctions as Rumford’s soup (_see_ Chapter XIV.), it is an admirable apparatus, and the contrivances for carrying the steam from the outer vessel to a vegetable steamer above the cooking chamber, before described, is very ingenious and effective. The statement in the prospectus, that the ‘nourishing juices’ otherwise wasted ‘are by that mode condensed, and form at the bottom of the vessel a rich gelatinous body,’ is misleading. Gelatin is not volatile; the gelatinous body at the bottom of the vessel is not composed of condensed vapours, though condensed vapour of water is concerned in its formation. It is simply some of the gelatin of the joint dissolved by the water which condenses upon it, and finally drips down from the joint, carrying with it the dissolved gelatin. CHAPTER VII. FRYING.