Extraction of Pigment from Cooked Cured-Meat Products

Abstract

IT is well known in the food trade that the colour of cooked cured-meat products fades rapidly on exposure of the products to air and light, the rapidity of fading increasing with the intensity of the light, and being particularly marked if the proportion of light of shorter wave-lengths is large. A considerable amount of investigation has been carried out in recent years into the chemistry of cured-meat products and of model nitrite–hæmoglobin systems, much of it with this practical problem in mind. Investigations have been rendered more difficult by the fact that denatured globin–nitric oxide myohæmochrome—the pigment to which cooked cured-meat products are generally agreed to owe their colour—is insoluble in most solvents. A method has been developed in these laboratories whereby an important part of the molecule—the highly coloured nitric oxide hæm moiety—can be rendered soluble in some organic solvents by treatment of the cooked cured meat with acetone. This greatly facilitates measurement of its spectroscopic characteristics and its general behaviour towards light, oxygen, etc., measurements from which some inferences may be drawn about the behaviour of the parent pigment.