As we all know, the flavor and appearance of a boiled sole or mackerel are decidedly different from those of a fried sole or mackerel, and it is easy to understand that the different results of these cooking processes are to some extent due to the difference of temperature to which the fish is subjected.
The surface of the fried fish, like that of the roasted or grilled meat, is "browned." What is the nature, the chemistry of this browning?
I have endeavored to find some answer to this question, that I might quote with authority, but no technological or purely chemical work within my reach supplies such answer. Rumford refers to it as essential to roasting, and provides for it in the manner already described, but he goes no further into the philosophy of it than admitting its flavoring effect.
I must therefore struggle with the problem in my own way as I best can. Has the gentle reader ever attempted the manufacture of "hard-bake," or "toffy," or "butter-scotch," by mixing sugar with butter, fusing the mixture, and heating further until the well-known hard, brown confection is produced? I venture to call this fried sugar. If heated simply without the butter it may be called baked sugar. The scientific name for this baked sugar is caramel.
The chemical changes that take place in the browning of sugar have been more systematically studied than those which occur in the constituents of flesh when browned in the course of ordinary cookery. Believing them to be nearly analogous, I will state, as briefly as possible, the leading facts concerning the sugar.
Ordinary sugar is crystalline, i. e., when it passes from the liquid to the solid state it assumes regular geometrical forms. If the solidification takes place undisturbed and slowly, the geometric crystals are large, as in sugar-candy; if the water is rapidly evaporated with agitation, the crystals are small, and the whole mass is a granular aggregation of crystals, such as we see in loaf-sugar. If this crystalline sugar be heated to about 320° it fuses, and without any change of chemical composition undergoes some sort of internal physical alteration that makes it cohere in a different fashion. (The learned name for this is allotropism, and the substance is said to be allotropic, other conditioned; or dimorphic, two-shaped.) Instead of being crystalline the sugar now becomes vitreous, it solidifies as a transparent amber-colored glass-like substance, the well-known barley-sugar, which differs from crystalline sugar, not only in this respect, but has a much lower melting-point; it liquefies between 190° and 212°, while loaf-sugar does not fuse below 320. Left to itself, vitreous sugar returns gradually to its original condition, loses transparency, and breaks up into small crystals. In doing this, it gives out the heat which during its vitreous condition had been doing the work of breaking up its crystalline structure, and therefore was not manifested as temperature.
