The Chemistry of Cookery — Cheese Part 2

This absence of potash appears to me to be the one serious objection to the free use of cheese diet.

The Swiss peasant escapes the mischief by his abundant salads, which eaten raw contain all their potash salts, instead of leaving the greater part in the saucepan, as do cabbages, &c. , when cooked in boiling water.

In Norway, where salads are scarce, the bonder and his housemen have at times suffered greatly from scurvy, especially in the far north, and would be severely victimised but for special remedies that they use (the mottebeer, cranberry, &c. , grown and preserved especially for the purpose).

The Laplanders make a broth of scurvy-grass and similar herbs; I have watched them gathering these, and observed that the wild celery was a leading ingredient.

Scurvy on board ship results from eating salt meat, the potash of which has escaped by exosmosis into the brine or pickle.

The sailor now escapes it by drinking citrate of potash in the form of lime-juice, and by alternating salt junk with rations of tinned meats.

I once lived for six days on bread and cheese only, tasting no other food.

I had, in company with C. M.

Clayton (son of the Senator of Delaware, who negotiated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), taken a passage from Malta to Athens in a little schooner, and expecting a three days’ journey we took no other rations than a lump of Cheshire cheese and a supply of bread.

Bad weather doubled the expected length of our journey.

We were both young, and proud of our hardihood in bearing privations, were staunch disciples of Diogenes; but on the last day we succumbed, and bartered the remainder of our bread and cheese for some of the boiled horse-beans and cabbage-broth of the forecastle.

The cheese, highly relished at first, had become positively nauseous, and our craving for the forecastle vegetable broth was absurd, considering the full view we had of its constituents and of the dirtiness of its cooks.

I attribute this to the lack of potash salts in the cheese and bread.

It was similar to the craving for common salt by cattle that lack necessary chlorides in their food.

I am satisfied that cheese can never take the place in an economic dietary, otherwise justified by its nutritious composition, unless this deficiency of potash is somehow supplied.

My device of using it with milk as a solvent supplies it in a simple and natural manner.

The milk is not necessary, though preferable.

I find that a solution of cheese may be made in water by simply grating or thinly slicing the cheese, and adding it to about its own bulk of water in which the bicarbonate of potash is dissolved.

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.

More recently this enterprise has been further developed.

Genuine butter is made from cream skimmed from the milk.

The skimmed milk is then curdled, and to the whey thus precipitated a sufficient quantity of bosch is added to replace the butter that has been sent to market.

A still more objectionable compound is made by using hogs’ lard as a substitute for the natural cream.

These extraneous fats render the cheese more indigestible.

The curd precipitated from skim-milk is harder and tougher than that thrown down from whole milk, and these added fats merely envelop the broken fragments of this.

Hence my suspicion that the cheese leaving the above-described insoluble residuum was a sample of ‘bosch’ cheese.

* * * * * Since the above was written I have met with the following in the _Times_, bringing the subject up to latest date, and I take the liberty of reprinting the larger part of this interesting and clearly-written communication: ‘IMITATED DAIRY PRODUCTS.

‘The profitable utilisation of refuse products has always been one of the most difficult problems which have confronted manufacturers.

Until recently the disposal of skim-milk was one of the difficulties of the managers of butter factories, or “creameries” as they are termed in the United States.

Similarly, the sale of the internal fat of animals slaughtered for food, with the exception of lard, was practically restricted to the manufacturers of soap and candles.

It was reserved to a Frenchman, M. Mège-Mauries, to discover the first step towards a more profitable use of these substances.

He showed that by a judicious combination of milk and the clarified fat of animals a substance could be produced which closely resembled butter.

So close, indeed, is the resemblance of imitation butter to the real article that the skill of the chemist must be invoked to render detection positive, if the artificial butter is good of its kind.

So recondite, indeed, is the test of the chemist that it depends upon the percentage of volatile oils in butter-fat and in caul-fat respectively.

‘Artificial butter is the result of several processes.

The internal fat of cattle is first chopped into small pieces, and then passed through a huge and somewhat modified sausage-machine.

The finely-divided suet is afterwards placed in suitable vessels, and heated up to 122° Fahr.

, but a higher temperature must be avoided, otherwise a portion of the stearine, or true tallow of the suet, becomes inextricably mixed with the oleomargarine.

It need scarcely be added that the tallow taste would be fatal to the manufacture of a first-class article.

The melted fat is transferred to casks and left to cool; afterwards it is put in small quantities into coarse bags, several of which are made into a pile with iron plates between them, and placed in a hydraulic press.

The result is the expression of the pure oleomargarine as a clear yellow oil, the solid stearine remaining in the bags.

‘The next step is the manufacture of this oleomargarine into the substance which has been designated “butterine,” and which is quoted on the London market as “bosch.

” The “oleo” is remelted at the lowest possible temperature, mixed with a certain proportion of milk and of butter, and then churned.

The result is the production of a material closely resembling butter, in fact practically identical so far as appearance is concerned.

It is washed, worked, and otherwise treated like real butter, and packed to simulate the kinds of butter which are most in demand on the market to which it is sent.

In London all kinds of butter are sold, and we believe that they are all more or less imitated.

‘Unfortunately for the consumer of butterine, not all that is sold, even as butter, is made with so much regard to care and cleanliness, or with such comparatively unobjectionable materials.

The demand for oleomargarine, which constitutes about 60 per cent.

of the mass that is churned, has naturally raised its price, and various substitutes have been tried with more or less success.

Lard has been extensively used, and is said to answer fairly well.

Oils of various kinds have also had their trial, but used alone their melting point is too low.

Earth-nut oil is used in small quantities by some makers in order to impart an agreeable flavour, especially in cases where the artificial butter has been “weighted” by the addition of water to the milk, or meal to an inferior oil.

‘The adaptation of M. Mège’s process to the imitation of other dairy products is a natural sequence to the success, in a commercial sense, which has attended the manufacture of artificial butter.

The skim-milk difficulty in the American butter factories has set their managers to work at the problem of its conversion into something saleable for some time past.

This difficulty has been increased of late years by the invention of the cream separator, which deprives the milk of practically all its cream; but on the large dairy farms of Denmark, where from 100 to 300 cows are kept and these separators are used, the skim-milk is made into skim-cheese, and the working classes in that country do not object to eat a nutritious article of diet which they can buy at about fourpence per pound.

But neither the American nor the English labourer, as a general rule, likes a cheese that is at the same time exceedingly poor in fat and excessively hard to bite.

‘Obviously the first step was to add fat to the skim-milk so as to replace the cream which had been taken off.

This, however, was no easy matter, for neither oleomargarine nor lard would mix with the skim-milk when directly applied.

The imitation cheese attempted to be made in this way was wretchedly bad;

and, when cut, the added fatty matter was found in streaks, and to a great extent oozed out in its original condition.

“Lard-cheese,” in fact, soon became a by-word and a reproach, and it is stated that last year a large quantity of poor, unsophisticated cheese was sold under that name, and thus increased its evil reputation.

‘But the utilisation of the skim-milk still remained a necessity to the managers of the “creameries,” if they were to be commercially successful.

The question was, therefore, considered whether it would not be possible to make an artificial cream which should replace the natural cream which had been taken off the milk.

This idea was soon put to a practical test, and with most remarkable results.

‘The process now adopted begins with the manufacture of artificial cream as follows: A certain quantity of skim-milk is heated to about 85° Fahr.

, and one-half the quantity of either lard, oleomargarine, or olive oil, as the case may be.

These substances are conveyed through separate pipes into an “emulsion” machine, which subdivides both materials to a surprising degree, while it mixes them thoroughly together—the arrangement insuring that the machine is regularly fed with the due proportions of the substances which are being used.

It is stated that the artificial cream made with olive oil in this way is not objected to in the United States for use in tea and coffee.

‘For the manufacture of imitation cheese, about 4½ per cent.

of this imitation cream is added to the skim-milk.

The latter being raised to 85° Fahr.

, and the former to 135° Fahr.

or upwards, the mixture attains a temperature of about 90° Fahr.

The remainder of the process is identical with that used in the manufacture of American Cheddar cheese, except that a special mechanical agitator is used to insure that the curd shall be evenly stirred and cooked, so as to avoid any loss of fat in the whey.

Success or failure in the manufacture of imitation cheese seems to depend chiefly upon the perfect emulsion of the skim-milk with the fat in the preliminary process of making artificial cream.

That having been accomplished, the remaining processes are said to be perfectly easy and satisfactory.

It has been asserted by competent judges that the best descriptions of oleomargarine cheese can with difficulty, if at all, be detected from the ordinary American Cheddar of commerce; but the imitation product has nevertheless a tendency to become rapidly mouldy after having been cut.

‘The trade in imitation butter is now something enormous and increases every year; in the Netherlands alone there are sixty or seventy factories.

Imitation cheese is only just beginning to appear on the London market, but there can be little doubt that before long it will compete successfully with all but the best and most delicate descriptions of the real article, unless it is branded so as to show its true character.

One firm alone, in New York State, made 200,000 lbs.

of imitation cheese last year, and their factories are in full work again this year.

’ My first acquaintance with the rational cookery of cheese was in the autumn of 1842, when I dined with the monks of St. Bernard.

Being the only guest, I was the first to be supplied with soup, and then came a dish of grated cheese.

Being young and bashful, I was ashamed to display my ignorance by asking what I was to do with the cheese, but made a bold dash, nevertheless, and sprinkled some of it into my soup.

I then learned that my guess was quite correct; the prior and the monks did the same.

On walking on to Italy I learned that there such use of cheese is universal.

Minestra without Parmesan would in Italy be regarded as we in England should regard muffins and crumpets without butter.

During the forty years that have elapsed since my first sojourn in Italy, my sympathies are continually lacerated when I contemplate the melancholy spectacle of human beings eating thin soup without any grated cheese.

Not only in soups, but in many other dishes, it is similarly used.

As an example, I may name ‘_Risotto à la Milanese_,’ a delicious, wholesome, and economical dish—a sort of stew composed of rice and the giblets of fowls, usually charged about twopence to threepence per portion at Italian restaurants.

This, I suppose, is the reason why I find no recipe for it in the ‘high-class’ cookery-books.

It is always served with grated Parmesan.

The same with the many varieties of paste, of which macaroni and vermicelli are the best known in this country.

In all these the cheese is sprinkled over, and then stirred into the soup, &c. , while it is hot.

The cheese being finely divided is fused at once, and thus delicately cooked.

This is quite different from the ‘macaroni cheese’ commonly prepared in England by depositing macaroni in a pie-dish, then covering it with a stratum of grated cheese, and placing this in an oven or before a fire until the cheese is desiccated, browned, and converted into a horny, caseous form of carbon that would induce chronic dyspepsia in the stomach of a wild boar if he fed upon it for a week.

In all preparations of Italian pastes, risottos, purées, &c. , the cheese is intimately mixed throughout, and softened and diffused thereby in the manner above described.

The Italians themselves imagine that only their own Parmesan cheese is fit for this purpose, and have infected many Englishmen with the same idea.

Thus it happens that fancy prices are paid in this country for that particular cheese, which nearly resembles the cheese known in our midland counties as ‘skim dick’—sold there at about fourpence per pound, or given by the farmers to their labourers.

It is cheese ‘that has sent its butter to market,’ being made from the skim-milk which remains in the dairy after the pigs have been fully supplied.

I have used this kind of cheese as a substitute for Parmesan, and I find it answers the purpose, though it has not the fine flavour of the best qualities of Parmesan.

The only fault of our ordinary whole-milk English and American cheeses is that they are too rich, and cannot be so finely grated on account of their more unctuous structure, due to the cream they contain.

I note that in the recipes of high-class cookery-books, where Parmesan is prescribed, cream is commonly added.

Sensible English cooks, who use Cheshire, Cheddar, or good American cheese, are practically including the Parmesan and the cream in natural combination.

By allowing these cheeses to dry, or by setting aside the outer part of the cheese for the purpose, the difficulty of grating is overcome.

I have now to communicate another result of my cheese-cooking researches, viz.

a new dish—_cheese-porridge_—or, I may say, a new class of dishes—cheese-porridges.

They are not intended for epicures, who only live to eat, but for men and women who eat in order to live and work.

These combinations of cheese are more especially fitted for those whose work is muscular, and who work in the open air.

Sedentary brain-workers should use them carefully, lest they suffer from over-nutrition, which is but a few degrees worse than partial starvation.

My typical cheese-porridge is ordinary oatmeal-porridge made in the usual manner, but to which grated cheese, or some of the cheese solution above described, is added, either while in the cookery-pot or after it is taken out, and yet as hot as possible.

It should be sprinkled gradually and well stirred in.

Another kind of cheese-porridge or cheese-pudding is made by adding cheese to _baked_ potatoes—the potatoes to be taken out of their skins and well mashed while the grated cheese is sprinkled and intermingled.

A little milk may or may not be added, according to taste and convenience.

This is better suited for those whose occupations are sedentary, potatoes being less nutritious and more easily digested than oatmeal.

They are chiefly composed of starch, which is a heat-giver or fattener, while the cheese is highly nitrogenous, and supplies the elements in which the potato is deficient, the two together forming a fair approach to the theoretically demanded balance of constituents.

I say _baked_ potatoes rather than boiled, and perhaps should explain my reasons, though in doing so I anticipate what I shall explain more fully when on the subject of vegetable food.

Raw potatoes contain potash salts which are easily soluble in water.

I find that when the potato is boiled some of the potash comes out into the water, and thus the vegetable is robbed of a very valuable constituent.

The baked potato contains all its original saline constituents which, as I have already stated, are specially demanded as an addition to cheese-food.

Hasty pudding made, as usual, of wheat flour, may be converted from an insipid to a savoury and highly nutritious porridge by the addition of cheese in like manner.

The same with boiled rice, whether whole or ground, also sago, tapioca, and other forms of edible starch.

Supposing whole rice is used—and I think this is the best—the cheese may be sprinkled among the grains of rice and well stirred or mashed up with them.

The addition of a little brown gravy to this, with or without chicken giblets, gives us an Italian _risotto_.

The Indian-corn stirabout of the poor Irish cottier would be much improved both in flavour and nutritive value by the addition of a little grated cheese.

Pease pudding is not improved by cheese.

The chemistry of this will come out when I explain the composition of peas, beans, &c. The same applies to pea soup.

I might enumerate other methods of cooking cheese by thus adding it in a finely-divided state to other kinds of food, but if I were to express my own convictions on the subject I should stir up prejudice by naming some mixtures which many people would denounce.

As an example I may refer to a dish which I invented more than twenty years ago—viz.

fish and cheese pudding, made by taking the remains from a dish of boiled codfish, haddock, or other _white_ fish, mashing it with bread-crumbs, grated cheese, and ketchup, then warming in an oven and serving after the usual manner of scalloped fish.

Any remains of oyster sauce may be advantageously included.

I find this delicious, but others may not.

I frequently add grated cheese to boiled fish as ordinarily served, and have lately made a fish sauce by dissolving grated cheese in milk with the aid of a little bicarbonate of potash, and adding this to ordinary melted butter.

I suggest these cheese mixtures to others with some misgivings as regards palatability, after learning the revelations of Darwin on the persistence of heredity.

It is quite possible that, being a compound of the Swiss Mattieu with the Welsh Williams (cheese on both sides), I may inherit an abnormal fondness for this staple food of the mountaineers.

Be this as it may, so far as the mere palate is concerned; but in the chemistry of all my advocacy of cheese and its cookery I have full confidence.

Rendered digestible by simple and suitable cookery, and added with a little potash salt to farinaceous food of all kinds, it affords exactly what is required to supply a theoretically complete and a most economical dietary, without the aid of any other kind of animal food.

The potash salts may be advantageously supplied by a liberal second course of fruit or salad.

One more of my heretical applications of grated cheese must be specified.

It is that of sprinkling it freely over ordinary stewed tripe, which thus becomes _extraordinary_ stewed tripe.

Or a solution of cheese may be mixed with liquor of the stew.

It may not be generally known that stewed tripe is the most easily digestible of all solid animal food.

This was shown by the experiments of Dr. Beaumont on his patient, Alexis St. Martin, who was so obliging (from a scientific point of view) as to discharge a gun in such a manner that it shot away the front of his own stomach and left there, after the healing of the wound, a valved window through which, with the aid of a simple optical contrivance, the work of digestion could be watched.

Dr. Beaumont found that while beef and mutton required three hours for digestion, tripe was digested in one hour.

[14] I add by way of postscript a recipe for a dish lately invented by my wife.

It is vegetable marrow _au gratin_, prepared by simply boiling the vegetable as usual, slicing it, placing the slices in a dish, covering them with grated cheese, and then browning slightly in an oven or before the fire, as in preparing the well-known ‘cauliflower _au gratin_.

’ I have modified this (with improvement, I believe) by mashing the boiled marrow and stirring the grated cheese into the midst of it whilst as hot as possible; or, better still, by adding a little of the solution of cheese above described to the purée of mashed marrow and stirring it well in while hot.

To please the ladies, and make it look pretty on the table, a little more grated cheese may be sprinkled on the top of this and browned in the oven or with a salamander.

People with weak digestive powers should set aside the pretty.

Turnips may be similarly treated as ‘mashed turnips _au gratin_.

’ I recommend this especially to my vegetarian friends, who have no objection to cheese, but do not properly appreciate it.

Taking as I do great interest in their efforts, regarding them as pioneers of a great and certainly approaching reform, I have frequently dined at their restaurants (always do so when within reach, as I am only a flesh-eater for convenience’ sake), and by the experience thus afforded of their cookery, am convinced that they are losing many converts by the lack of cheese in many of their most important dishes.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] I am greatly disgusted with the cookery-books, especially the pretentious volume of Francatelli’s, on being unable to find any recipe for this delicious Italian dish, and a similar absence of a dozen or two of equally common and excellent preparations familiar to all who have dined at the Lepre (Rome), or other good Italian restaurants.

[12] Forty or fifty years ago these cheese _fondus_ were one of the usual courses at many-course banquets, but now they are rarely found in the _menu_ of such dinners.

There is good reason for this.

They are far too nutritious to be eaten with a dozen other things.

Their proper use is to substitute the joint in an ordinary respectable meal of meat and pudding.

[13] Before the Adulteration Act was passed, mustard flour was usually mixed with well-dried wheaten flour, whereby the redundant oil was absorbed, and the mixture was a dry powder.

Now it is different, being pure powdered mustard seed, and usually rather damp.

It not only lies closer, but is much stronger.

Therefore, in following any recipe of old cookery-books, only about half the stated quantity should be used.

[14] The reader who desires further information on this and kindred subjects will find it clearly and soundly treated (without any of the noxious pedantry that too commonly prevails in such treatises) in Dr. Andrew Combe’s _Physiology of Digestion_, which, although written by a dying man nearly half a century ago, still remains, like his _Principles of Physiology_, the best popular work on the subject.

Subsequent editions have been edited and brought up to date by his nephew, Sir James Coxe.

CHAPTER X.