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the furnaces of the boilers and instantly and absolutely
cremate these food-odours. In order to accomplish this,
the kitchen is treated as an inverted tank of which the
bottom is formed by the lower of the two asbestos ceilings,
while the walls are sealed air-tight down to a level of
6 feet 6 inches from the floor. Free ingress and egress
upon the floor level are thus obtained, while above is a
large air space, or inverted tank, into which the heated air
and cooking odours rise, and out of which they are continually
drained by the pumps and cremated. Not only
does this arrangement protect the atmosphere of the hotel
from the invasion of air unseasonably heated, and laden
with the odours of other people's meals; it also secures
a pure atmosphere in the kitchen, and thus enables the
highest results to be attained for that delicate cooking
which is intended to be made a prominent feature of the
administration of the Carlton Hotel. In a foul, unventilated
hotel kitchen, burdened with heat and with the smells of
all sorts of meats and vegetables, the atmosphere has a
professional stink which never arrives with the intermittent
cooking of an ordinary gentleman's house. By means of
this stink all delicate flavours are merged in an indistinguishable
hotel - flavour—a flavour which destroys the
individuality of all choice viands, and soon makes
the guests long for their own home cooking. In some
hotels the viands are all alike in this awful hotel flavour,
but the guests do not see what it is that so soon makes them
sicken of the elaborate cooking—nor do the cooks know
what it is that blunts their perceptions so far as to prevent
their reaching the highest successes of the culinary art.
II. In order to provide against the possible contingency
of fire occurring at a moment when the Water Company's
pressure would not carry a full flow of water to the
roof of so lofty a building as the Carlton Hotel, the
Directors have had special pumping engines erected in
the basement, by which the low-pressure main-water,
which is always on hand in unlimited quantity, can at once
be made to deluge the roof or upper floor of the Hotel,