BARING. The process of cooking meat in the dry heat. of an oven is properly termed baking. The oven of a stove generally receives its heat from the fire-box, although in very large estab lishments it is heated by steam under pressure. No matter how great. the surrounding heat., a thermometer plunged into the centre of the joint will register scarcely 200° F., the meat being thus cooked in its own juice at a gentle heat.. To avoid the considerable waste of fuel which may be involved by it, the process should be car vied out in an apparatus carefully lined and thus rendered capable of holding nearly all the heat produced by a small flame, as the 'Soyer cooker,' Aladdin oven, or Goodrich oven. The heat from an ordinary oil lamp under such an apparatus will bake a piece of meat quickly, thoroughly, and at a minimum cost. The 'feather' oven, an ordinary box entirely sur rounded by a thick layer of feather, is still used in many country places, meats and vegetables (such as old beans, peas, lentils) being placed in the feather oven after being heated to boiling, and thus cooked for several hours at a constant temperature slightly below the boiling-point of water.
In baking, a munber of mechanical and chemical changes take place. More or less water is driven off, so that the baked foods are, generally speak ing, drier than before cooking; heat and the moisture present in foods rupture cell-walls. In this way and by the coagulation of proteids, and possibly also in other ways, the texture and con sistency of food are changed. The chemical changes are of the following character: Proteids are coagulated; fats are more or less volatilized and broken down into simpler chemical bodies; and carbohydrates, especially on the surface of foods, are to a greater or less extent caramel ized.