THE CULINARY ART.

Northern Advocate, 26 April 1921, Page 4

THE CULINARY ART.

SUGAR AND ACIDS,

How many cooks know how to make cranberry sauce' jufet. right? There are many wrong \vvays to make it, but there is one right way. Allow half a ciipful of cranberries for each person and measure out half a s much water and sugar. Boil the cranberries and the water together in a sauce pan without cover- All bright-coloured vegetables or fruit, if cooked in a dish without a cover," are clearer and prettier than when they are kept closely covered during the cooking- , When the berries are soft mash them with a spoon, remove from the fire, add the sugar and stir it in well. The result will be a thick sauce that will jelly when it is quite cold, and' the skins of the berries will be of a bright, clear red, and so tender that there will be no need of straining the sauce-

The reason that berries cooked in this way are better is a very simple one. All vegetable' cellulose is toughened by being Iboiled with sugar, but is made tender and soft by being boiled with acids. That is why a sour apple cooks more quickly than k sweet apple. When you wish pears, peaches and aples to keep their shape you cook them in a sugar syrup. If cooked in water alone they would "cook to pieces" because of the acid in them. Acids have a similar effect on the tough connective tissue of meat. A stew made of the particularly tough but well flavoured pieces of beef .from the lower part of the shank will be tender in a shorter time if a dash of vinegar is ndded to the stew pot. A well-known practice of the chefs at the hotel s Orj clubs is to marinate a steak that is likely to be, tough by rubbing it 'with a mixture of vinegar and a little oil—one part of oil to three or more parts of the vinegar. Some cooks immerse such a steak in a bath of oil and viegar and leave it there two hour s or longer; then they wipe dry and boil it. The result is a steak that is tender and of delicious flavour-