Bacon
to be boiled, must be put into plenty of cold water and brought slowly to the boiling point. It is then to be simmered, and it takes a long time-say an hour and a half for a couple of pounds. Remove the rind when it is cooked and sprinkle it with bread-raspings. Those who dislike to eat this when cold can have it cut into rashers, sprinkled with bread-crumb, and toasted in a Dutch-oven, or by means of a wire toaster. Raw bacon can be either grilled or toasted in rashers-it is best toasted. To fry good bacon is to show ingratitude to the generous animal that lived and died for your benefit in the hope that feeding on his flitch you might one day become another Lope de Vega. See further on about Lope and his devotion to the flitch.
BADMINTON must have a word here, because the name is exceptional. There are crowds of French dishes named after the titles and country houses of the French nobility. In England the Earl of Sandwich in the last century gave his name to a well-known article of food and that is all, Bain Marie if we except Badminton, the seat of the Duke of Beaufort, which calls up a vision not of food but of drink-claret cup without the sugar and the curaçoa. Attempts no doubt have been made to immortalise great English names in the preparations of the table; but not one has achieved a universal renown except the Sandwich and possibly Badminton. If any English peer in this century could have had his name written in comestibles, we should have expected it might have been the late Duke of Beaufort, who gloried in a Neapolitan cook named Raffaelle. This great artist went one night to hear the opera of L'Elisir d'Amore. In the middle of the night the Duke was roused from sleep by a knock at his bedroom door. "Who's there?" he cried. "It's only me, Signor Duc," said Raffaelle, opening the "I have been to the opera ; I have been dreaming of the music; and I have an idea. I have invented a sorbet-I have named it the sorbet à la Donizetti; and I could not resist coming to tell your Grace." Surely the Duke who showed his appreciation of a cook so enthusiastic deserved to have his good taste recorded in the breast of a partridge or on a neck of venison. door.
BAIN MARIE (Mary's bath). - This Mary was a Jewess who lived in the fourth century of our era, and was devoted to alchemy. She required a bath that would retain heat long at an equable temperature for the metals and vessels upon which she made her experiments. To this end she heated sand and plunged her vessels into it. The modern Mary-bath is an imitation in hot water, which is not so good as sand, since it has no special aptitude for retaining heat, but has the advantage of being easily kept hot by connection with the boiler-and kept thus hot at a temperature which can never exceed 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Transferred with this change of sand into water from the laboratory to the kitchen, the Mary-bath is exceedingly Bake useful as a means of keeping things hot with no danger of their being too hot. Practically, however, this heat is a good way below the boiling point; and it is a mistake to suppose that the same bain marie will at once do for cooking and for keeping things hot. In the language of the French kitchen, to cook au bain marie means simply to cook in a double saucepan-the water in the outer saucepan being kept continuously at boiling point. This should be remembered by English people, who are disappointed when they find that the grand new bain marie they have ordered for their kitchens, though good for keeping things hot after they are cooked, will not at the same time cook like a double saucepan. The fault is probably with the French, who give a more extended use to the name of Mary's bath than that ingenious Jewess thought of. A bain marie in her view, and as commonly understood, is but a means of retaining heat. To cook au bain marie is to create a heat by means of a double saucepan which, rising to 212 degrees of Fahrenheit, shall have no chance of getting beyond that temperature. Let there be no mistake, therefore, as to a fact so elementary. A bain marie cannot have water in it which is both at boiling point for cooking purposes and below boiling point for keeping things hot.