How few cooks,
unassisted, are competent to the simple process of broiling a beefsteak
or mutton-chop! how very generally one has to choose between these
meats gradually dried away, or burned on the outside and raw within!
Yet in England these articles _never_ come on the table done amiss;
their perfect cooking is as absolute a certainty as the rising of the
sun.
No one of these 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 ghost 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 writhe!"
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
_cotelettes_ of France are not flopped down into half-melted
grease, there gradually to warm and soak and fizzle, while Biddy goes
in and out on her other ministrations, till finally, when they are
thoroughly saturated, and dinner-hour impends, she bethinks herself,
and crowds the fire below to a roaring heat, and finishes the process
by a smart burn, involving the kitchen and surrounding precincts in
volumes of Stygian gloom.
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