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Australian Meat (frozen)

Of late years there has been an enormous development of the importation of fresh meat from Australia, New Zealand, South America, the United States, and Canada, owing to the insufficiency of home-bred meat for home consumption. The principal method by which it is preserved during the long period of transit is refrigeration. Everyone knows how much more rapidly meat becomes tainted in hot weather than in cold. Indeed, in tropical countries it is generally difficult to keep meat long enough to get rid of the toughened rigidity which pervades muscular fibre after death, and which in our climate takes one or two days to subside. Hence a cool larder makes a very great difference in the time for which provisions may be kept. By means of refrigerators on ocean-going steamships the temperature of the storage compartments may be kept down to a point below freezing, even during the hot passage through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. It may be well to remark that, according to the most reliable authorities, a uniform temperature several degrees above freezing point, say 38 F., is sufficiently cold to prevent decomposition. The popular prejudice against foreign meat has now almost entirely disappeared, and the low price at which it can be sold enables thousands of families to have a good meat dinner daily, when otherwise beef or mutton would be rarely seen upon their tables. It must be admitted, however, that foreign meat cannot compare, as regards quality or flavour, with home-bred and home-fed meat. Apart from the coarser, ranker herbage of foreign ranches and sheep-farms, there can be no doubt that the process of freezing, by solidifying the natural juices of the animal, exercises a deteriorating influence upon the constituents of the meat which no after treatment can entirely remedy.

Frozen meat should be carefully and slowly thawed by immersion in cold water, and then wiped dry, and hung up in the larder with the cut end uppermost, in order to preserve the juices, which would otherwise run out. In cooking, the pores should be closed by the application of great heat for a few minutes, and the joint should then be cooked very slowly. Foreign meat has usually a coarser grain and duller colour than home meat, the surface is usually moist owing to the escaping juices, and it is flabby to the touch.