For all cooking purposes clean rain water is to be preferred. Among cooks a great difference of opinion exists as to whether meat should be put into cold water and gradually brought to the boiling point, or should be put into boiling water. This, like many other unsettled questions in cookery, is best decided by careful scientific experiment and observation. If a piece of meat be put into water at a temperature of 60°, and gradually raised to 212°, the meat is undergoing a gradual loss of its soluble and nutritious properties, which are dissolved in the water. From the surface to the interior the albumen is partially dissolved out of the meat, the fibres become hard and stringy, and the thinner the piece of meat the greater the loss of all those sapid constituents which make boiled meat savoury, juicy and palatable. To put meat into cold water is clearly the best method for making soups and broth; it is the French method of preparing the pot au feu; but the meat at the end of the operation has lost much of that juicy sapid property which makes boiled meat so acceptable.