THE BATTLE OF THE FRYING PANS.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1898, 24 March 1880, Page 3

THE BATTLE OF THE FRYING PANS.

[“ Sydney Town and Country.”J “Did you ever have to eat, or pretend to eat, fried potatoes in an English house where things are done in an English way, and to talk of ‘ French cookery ’ would frighten the folks into fiddleetrings ? ” asks a twriter in a home paper. “It may be that you know all I mean. The meal, whatever name it may bear, may be a good one of its sort, but whatever its name, the fried potatoes are likely to be full of fine character, and thoroughly English. You smell them afar off long before they arrive, as the camel scents the water in the wilderness—only differently. When they come to the table they declare themselves uneatable except by savages, who know not what good cookery means. They are in flat thin slices, brown or black, very hard, tough, rank in flavour, and altogether obnoxious. And yet they are what they profess to be, fried potatoes. In Paris and in many a London restaurant, you obtain quite a different article under the same name. The appearance of the dish is elegant, and its odor is appetising. The potatoes are out into fingers, and these are of a very light golden or amber color, and each neat little finger is puffed a little as if inclined to burst with its fulness of fine farina ; and so it is, for when you eat one you crush out from a delicate skin that was formed by the process of cooking a very pleasant pulp, consisting of the perfectly cooked flesh of the potato. In the first instance you had potatoes spoiled; now you have them rendered exquisite in flavor and delicate in appearance. The difference as regards cookery between these two samples is very slight. The first lot were fried a long time in a dry pan, and the process filled the house with a smell like that of an oil lamp out of order, and it ended in spoiling the potatoes. The second lot wore quickly cooked in a large body of boiling fat, and practically therein is all the difference. The subject thus brought before us has broader bearings than may appear to all our readers. The whole difference between good and bad cookery is illustrated by this particular instance of cooking potatoes. The usual aim of the incompetent cook is to drive the goodness and flavor out of the food, and subI stitute for the real flavor another that is I equally nauseous and unwholesome. The case of the family fried sole may be cited as another and equally important case in point. When well cooked, a fried sole is elegant, delicious, nutritive, and easy of digestion ; but when fried in a dry pan it is repulsive n appearance, hard, greasy, badly flavoured, and unwholesome. Whatever in the way of food is plunged into a large body of boiling fat is instantly sealed up by the formation of a film or skin, which preserves the juices and their flavours, and excludes the grease, so that scientific frying is really one of the very best modes of cooking, while on the other hand the blundering, starve-farthing way is not only worthless, but on the score of health and decency objectionable. Good frying preserves the whole of the quality and gives the food a most elegant appearance and a tempting flavour ; moreover, it protects us against grease, but bad frying is necessarily a greasy business, for when there is but a little fat the whole of it is absorbed, and the result is a mere mixture of fat and charcoal.