FRIED FOODS by Marion Harland

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 22, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 49.

FRIED FOODS.

By Marion Harland

WHAT the spit is to the English cook, and the bain-marie to the French, the frying-pan is to the American. The Canadian lumberman slings his soup-pot over his pack; the British sportsman cuts a stick, trims it, and impales his game over or before the embers; our native who "roughs it" cares for no kitchen utensil beyond the culinary vade mecum of his grandmothers. In it he grills bacon, venison, and fish, makes gravy, fries flapjacks, and stews the maple sugar and water that is to drench them, boils water for tea, coffee, and shaving, and washes the dishes when what was prepared in it has been eaten.

The dietetic chord for the day is sounded at our national breakfast in fried chops, fried cutlets, fried eggs, fried ham or bacon, fried fish, fried fish-balls, fried potatoes, fried sausage, fried tripe, and fried beefsteak. The relative mirror is indicated in fried buckwheat or other griddle-cakes, fried mush or hominy, or, what some prefer to all these, fried bread. Luncheon and dinner maintain the theme in fried vegetables of all sorts, in fritters and pancakes, and, if supper be served, croquettes, fried oysters, and doughnuts "give the diapason closing full."

The reasons for the preference we display for this mode of cookery are neither various nor many. It is the easiest way of making ready raw material or "left-overs" for the table. The steady, slow simmer that from toughness brings forth tenderness; the steaming, roasting, boiling—to perfect which attention must be paid to degrees of heat, to basting and turning—require skill and time. Our middle-class women are overladen with work, and ambitious to accomplish what they consider as higher things than cookery. What can be hurried up is "put through" in what Americans (and no other people) call "less than no time." The frying-pan makes short work in unrighteousness of whatever is cast into its gaping maw. The housewife—with no conception of the valuable truth that cooking of the right sort will take care of itself, if once put properly in train, while she is busy with other matters—delays setting about it until the margin of time is reduced to a minimum.

The best writers on dietetics proscribe fried foods so unsparingly that even she whose chief aim in the day is to run through a given quantum of labor, might pause to read and ponder. The pernicious properties of hot grease and substances soaked in it are published in the market-place of medical and domestic journals. "As a broad rule," says Dr. Fothergill, "the harder the fat, the less digestible is it." When all that is volatile and soluble is driven out of it by rapid heating and cooking, and the ever nauseous touch of calcined grease is superadded, the digestive organs give over trying to assimilate it.

Yet our dear sisters continue to fry everything that can be fried; to grow sallow and spleeny; and to take patent medicines to patch up the coats of their stomachs.—Marion Harland, in Journal of Reconstructives.