These days, parchment paper outside of a food context refers to a writing material-thick paper made from wood, cotton, or flax-while vellum refers to translucent paper stock. When butter is compactly wrapped in such paper, you not only manage to retain a good deal of the original flavor-of course, not as deli-cate as when first made, but still enough to enhance its value-but you also add to its keeping qualities-a great desideratum during the summer season-and make it look attractive and inviting to the buyers. The best material so far devised for that purpose is, we unhesitatingly say, parchment paper. The one aim in packing, therefore, should be to get a package as near air-tight as possible before shipping. ![]() It is a well recognized fact that where any part of the surface of butter is exposed to the air such exposure tends to diminish the aroma, which is so highly prized in a first-class article. In a 1889 edition of the Kansas Farmer, parchment paper is called out for its ability to store butter for storage and delivery. The material, often called “backpapier” in Germany, also found a home in food preservation and distribution, as it proved an effective tool to prevent the spoiling of foods. “In closing the orifices of vessels for preserves, et cetera, few housewives will hesitate to substitute an elegant material like vegetable parchment paper for the animal membrane, so frequently offensive, which is now generally in use,” Hoffman wrote. But he was quick to note that it would find a home in kitchens the world over-especially given the relative grossness of the alternative. Hoffman wrote of the potential for the substance in a variety of settings, including in chemistry. In an 1859 edition of The Pharmaceutical Journal, researcher A.W. ![]() It didn’t take long for observers to see the potential in the kitchen. “If unsized paper be dipped for a few seconds in a cold mixture of two volumes of concentrated sulfuric acid and one volume of water, and then washed with water and ammonia, the so-called parchment paper is obtained,” the book states. As explained in the 1874 book A Manual of the Chemistry of the Carbon Compounds, the use of sulfuric acid played a key role in giving parchment paper its distinctive qualities. In 1847, when French scientists Jean-André Poumarède and Louis Figuier came up with a chemical treatment process for plant-based paper that kept many of the qualities of parchment.Ī key element of parchment paper is its treatment. It took us until the 19th century to find a non-animal replacement for parchment, which came to be known as parchment paper. This use goes back thousands of years, and because the modern alternatives didn’t exist yet, was probably the stuff that Apicius used to bake his creamed kid. National Archives note, it’s generally associated with animal skin that has been scraped and prepared for writing another, similar term for this material is vellum, which is generally made from calf skin. Parchment, in its base form, isn’t in reference to wood-generated cellulose, which is a key element of most types of paper along with some bioplastic products like cellophane and rayon fiber. More on the silicone in a second-the cellulose makes a good starting point, as it exposes a fallacy in using “parchment” to describe parchment paper right off the bat. In the case of parchment paper, it helps to break it down to its main basic parts in the modern day: Cellulose, the basic chemical compound that composes plant life, and from which paper is made and silicone, a kind of polymer made from a mixture of a silicon-oxygen compound, carbon, and hydrogen. In that way, the comparison point is probably nail clippers, an object where its industrial history leaves enough questions that much of its story is lost to time. But in the case of parchment paper or baking paper or whatever it’s called, you’re dealing with literally centuries of history, along with decades of more recent innovations that helped turn it into an object that makes life a little easier. When an object is a branded product, like, say, Windex, you can generally find a starting point tied to a corporate history. ![]() The thing about searching for information about the basis or history of a term or idea is that you’re effectively starting from a position where it’s already everywhere, and you have all the benefits of the object’s existence, but often, none of its history. ( Nadya Spetnitskaya/Unsplash) Parchment paper and parchment are not the same thing, just an FYI Now I want a pizza, and it’s not even pizza time. Admit to totally being hungry when writing this cutline.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |