"Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."#665•
As Mark Twain said, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."#668•
Since time immemorial, people have cooked food in boiling water, essentially because it's easy to do. But Rumford had always wondered whether this was the ideal temperature for cooking. One day he decided to see what would happen if he placed a piece of mutton in his potato drying machine. Would the taste be different if the meat were cooked at this lower temperature? He checked on the mutton three hours later and saw that it showed no signs of being done and concluded that the heat was not sufficiently intense.
He abandoned the experiment, telling the maids to cook the mutton properly.
Apparently they forgot about the meat until the next morning and when they checked on it, they discovered that it had been perfectly cooked despite the fact that the fire that had supplied the heat had gone out during the night.
Rumford was delighted and the concept of slow cooking at low temperature was born.
The sous-vide method, currently championed by many chefs can be traced back to this fortuitous discovery made by Count Rumford.#663•