Rensselaer Union, Volume 2, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 July 1870 — Frying Meats. [ARTICLE]

Frying Meats.

No one of the rapid processes of cooking, however, is so generally abused as frying. The frying-pan has awful sins to answer for. What untold horrors of dyspepsia have arisen from its smoky depths, like the ghosts from witches’ caldrons! The fizzle of frying meat is a warning knell on many an ear, saying, “ Touch not, taste not, if you would not burn and WTithe 1" Yet those who have traveled abroad remember that some of the lightest, most palatable, and most digestible preparations of meat have come from this dangerous source. But we fancy quite other rites and ceremonies inaugurated the process, and quite other hands performed its offices, than those known to our kitchens. Probably the delicate eoUUtUs of France are sot flopped down into half-melted grease, there gradually to warm and soak and fizale, while Biddy goes in and out on her other ministrations, till finally, they are thoroughly saturated, and as dinner hour impends, she bethinks herself, and crowds tha fire below to a roaring heat, and finishes the process by a smart burn, involving the kitchen and surrounding precincts in Stygian gloom. From such preparations has arisen the very current medical opinion that fried meats are indigestible. They are indigestible, it they are greasy; but French cooks have taught us that a thing has no more need to be greasy because emerging from grease than Venus had to be salt because she rose from the sea. There are two ways of frying employed by the French cook. One is, to immerse the article to be cooked in boiling fat, with an emphasis on the present participle—and the philosophical principle is so immediately to crisp every pore, at the first moment or two of Immersion, as effectually to seal the interior against the intrusion of greasy particles; it can then remain as long as may be necessary thoroughly to cook it, without imbibing any more of the boiling fluid than if it were inclosed in an egg shell The other method is to rub a perfectly smooth iron surface with just enough of some oily substance to prevent the meat from adhering, and cook it with a quick heat, as cakes are baked on a griddle. In both these cases there must be the most rapid application of heat that can be made Without burning, and by the adroitness shown in workfng out this problem the •kill of tha cook is tested. Any one whose cook attains this important secret will find fried things quite as digestible, and often more paUiiAble, than others.— PrindfU* ts Domtttic Seknct.