This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1857. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... PUBLIC OVENS. (For Baking Bread, and for General Cookery.)' The establishment of large, well-regulated public ovens, to which the bread and other food of families could be taken to be baked, without danger of loss from dishonesty or mis-management, would be an inestimable boon to the labouring classes of the English people, and a valuable one to many others; and if the charge of such ovens were entrusted to persons who combined integrity and intelligence, with a due knowledge of the practical operations required from them, a new and profitable system of cookery might be generally adopted through their means, by the agency of a low, but equally sustained degree of temperature. When enclosed in earthen jars with covers, or other suitable vessels, pasted down, or secured in such a manner as to prevent the escape of the steam arising from them, and mingled with so much liquid only as is necessary for their preparation, meat, fish, fruit, rice *, and an infinite variety of other articles of food may be cooked in the very best manner, and without the loss of any portion of the nourishment * The value and wholesomeness of rice as food, depend entirely on the mode of preparing it, which is ill understood in this country, and to which the ahove system is peculiarly adapted. which they contain. A thick layer of pie-crust will often be a convenient substitute for the cover of a jar, in baking these, and will effectually confine the steam if carefully fastened to the edge. The favourite but most unfrugal baked joints of meat of the people, on which often a large portion of a poor man's weekly wages is expended for one day's meal only, have been too often the subject of comment and remonstrance, for their wastefulness not to be generally recognised; and yet one woul...