water, batter mixtures left to stand will thicken.
Thirdly, water is used as a cooking medium. As well as being cheap, it won’t heat beyond 212ºF. What’s more, when it gets near that temperature it will bubble and steam, so the cook has a constant visual check on the temperature.
AIR
Air expands when it’s heated. Cooks use this fact in many cooking processes in order to get a texture of holes through the food. Pastry would be a concrete slab and steamed puddings solid rubber if it wasn’t for the tiny particles of air that expand to raise the texture. Remember this when handling various types of mixture. Everything must be cold when handling pastry – some cooks chill the dough – so that the cold air will expand more. Pastry must not be carelessly handled, or the air particles will be lost. When stiffly beaten egg-whites are folded into a mixture the word ‘fold’ is used to emphasize the gentle way the bubbles must be handled. Wet mixtures for cakes are beaten like mad to get air into them. Batter mixtures are best if beaten just before cooking.
Self-raising flour has bicarbonate of soda – a raising agent – added to it to produce bubbles. Beating such mixtures can reduce the effectiveness of the raising agent. Yeast does exactly the same (although, because oven heat halts the action of the yeast, the raising takes place in a warm kitchen before the actual cooking).
METHODS OF COOKING
Having dealt with the types of foodstuffs available, let’s turn on the heat.
DRY RADIANT HEAT
Dry radiant heat of open fire, barbecue fire, domestic grill, or broiler. This is the most basic sort of cooking heat there is. It uses open radiant heat (as against the enclosed moister heat of an oven). Although this is a favourite way of cooking meat it is something of an abuse. Only first quality cuts, that will be tender under any circumstances, can be cooked this way. The object is to keep as much moisture and flavour in the meat as possible and to avoid drying the meat right through. For that reason the best things to grill are the things that you like to eat with an undercooked centre, e.g. steak, beef hamburgers, and toasted bread. Things that must be cooked right through, e.g. pork chops, fish, and veal, have to be moved a little farther away from the heat source or they’ll be burned outside before they are completely cooked.
There is an old French saying that a chef is made but a grillardin is born. Grilling requires constant attention because half a minute too long means disaster when the heat is so great. The meat or fish is usually painted with a trace of oil; grilling is especially suited to foods that already contain a lot of fat, e.g. streaky bacon or any oily type of fish.
Since fat shrinks at a faster rate than lean meat it is usual to slash the fat around a piece of steak (see page) to prevent the meat curling up. A professional cook taps the meat to test it; meat hardens as it cooks. It’s impossible to give times of cooking because I don’t know how much heat your grill produces nor how far away from it the food is. Always have the grill very hot; light it ten minutes before use if electric or gas. Make sure the grill pan is also very hot. On my grill a half-inch thick steak takes four minutes per side while a steak one-and-a-half inches thick takes more like eight minutes per side. A half poussin takes about thirty-five minutes but is farther away. A one-inch thick fish steak takes five minutes per side and a herring split open takes about five minutes, after which I serve it without turning it over.
SEMI-DRY HEAT
Semi-dry heat of oven. When a piece of meat is two inches thick it’s too big to put under a normal-size grill. In olden days they roasted a whole ox in the open but only by having a vast heat source. Nowadays we use an oven because that encloses the heat around the food and so costs less in fuel and takes up less space. But the enclosed space means that the hot air will become moist, because the water inside the meat is turning to steam. The old open-fire method of cooking – roasting – was so dry that it needed an attendant who would watch the spit turning and constantly moisten the outside of the meat with fat. We still do this when we brush fat over a steak before grilling, because that’s radiant heat, but when a joint (or what Americans call a roast) is put in an oven there is no need to baste it. In fact basting the meat is THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO TO IT. Since there is no need to baste it there is no need to have the meat standing in a tray of highly indigestible burning fat. I will explain why.
All meat shrinks when subjected to heat. Because the meat contains juice, that juice will be forced to the surface by the shrinkage. The juice is vital and everything must be done to preserve it. The hot air of the oven will dry those juices as they emerge and the outside of the meat will become dark and shiny. That first outside slice will be delicious. If you baste the meat you are rinsing those juices away as fast as the heat dries them; stop it. In fact, do the reverse, sprinkle a trace of flour over the raw joint to encourage the juices to dry as they emerge. While the joint is cooking don’t prod the meat, and especially don’t stick a fork into it or a stream of juice will escape.
Fat is an important part of cooking; it should occur naturally in the tissue of the meat but you can put it there by sewing threads – lardons – through it or putting thin sheets of fat around it (pages ref1 and ref2 illustrate this). Having done that, put the meat on a wire rack so that the heat can get all around it. Put it in the oven. When it is ready, eat it.
When is it ready?
Cooking means bringing the centremost part to a certain temperature. If you have a meat thermometer the sensitive point of it will register this temperature. Leave the thermometer in the joint until the meat is done. If you have a glass-fronted oven you can watch the temperature rise. These are the temperatures I recommend, although the beef and mutton might be a little too underdone for some tastes. Remember though that it’s the underdone meat that contains the most flavourful juices. The temperatures I have given for pork and veal are generally agreed to be the best ones; these meats are never eaten very underdone(i.e. never below 131°F.).
| ºF. | |
| Lamb | 165 |
| Mutton | 145 |
| Pork | 180 |
| ºF. | |
| Beef underdone | 140 |
| Beef medium | 160 |
| Veal | 175 |
If you don’t have a thermometer then it’s usual to guess the time the meat will take to cook by weighing the joint while considering its general shape, e.g. a thin flat-shaped piece will cook more quickly than a cube shape. As for grilling, only the better quality cuts of beef are suitable for roasting although, because a pig doesn’t get so muscular, any part of a pig can be roasted and very nearly any cut of veal or lamb, if you are careful (i.e. don’t have the oven heat too high). The general temperature for cooking meat is 350–400ºF. because that’s hot enough to ensure the meat doesn’t generate too much steam, but if you have a meat thermometer and like your beef crusty outside and juicy inside you can step up the heat. Cooking inside an oven is called baking. The roast beef of old
