The Chemistry of CookeryWilliams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Science
The Chemistry of Cookery
Williams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Cooking
The proportion of bicarbonate, which I theoretically estimate as
demanded for supplying the deficiency of potash, is at the rate of
about a quarter of an ounce to the pound of cheese; and I find that
it will bear this quantity without the flavour of the potash being
detected. The proportion of potash in cows’ milk is more than double
the quantity thus supplied, but I assume that the cheese loses about
half of its original supply, and base this assumption on the fact that
ordinary cheese contains an average of about 4 per cent. of saline
matter, while the proportion of saline matter to the casein and fat of
the milk amounts to 5 per cent. This is a rough practical estimate,
kept rather below the actual quantity demanded; therefore more than the
quarter ounce may be used with impunity. I have doubled it in some of
my experiments, and thus have just detected the bitter flavour of the
salt.
As regards the solubility of the cheese, I should add that there are
great differences in different samples. Generally speaking, the newer
and milder the cheese the more soluble. Some that I have tried leave a
stubbornly insoluble residuum, which is detestably tough. I found the
same cheese to be unusually indigestible when eaten with bread in the
ordinary raw state, and have reason to believe that it is what I have
called ‘bosch cheese,’ to be described presently.
The successful solution, in either alkalised milk or alkalised water,
cools into a custard-like mass, the thickness or viscosity varying, of
course, with the quantity of solvent. It may be kept for use a short
time (from two or three days to two or three weeks, according to the
weather), after which it becomes putrescent.
As now well known to all concerned, a great deal of ‘butterine,’ or
‘oleomargarine,’ or ‘margarine,’ or ‘bosch,’ is made by extracting from
the waste fat of oxen and sheep some of its harder constituents, the
palmitic and stearic acids, then working up the softer remainder with
a little milk, or even without the milk, into a resemblance to butter.
When properly prepared and honestly sold for what it is, no fair
grounds for objection exist; but it is too commonly sold for what it is
not—_i.e._ as butter. For cookery purposes a fair sample of ‘bosch’ is
quite as good as ‘inferior dosset.’ I have tasted some that is scarcely
distinguishable from best Devonshire fresh.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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