The art of cookery

Ice Cream No. 3. — To one quart of boiling milk add two tablespoonfuls of flour mixed with three quarters of a cup of sugar, and cook five minutes. Add the wellbeaten yolks of three eggs, and as soon as the eggs are lightly cooked remove from the fire, add a tablespoonful of butter, and stir until the latter is melted and mixed uniformly with the cream. Flavor to taste, when cold add the whites of the eggs unbeaten, and freeze. Strawberry Ice Cream. — Scatter a cup of granulated sugar over two cups of strawberries, and mash and strain them. Add a cup of the strained juice to three cups of ice cold cream, and freeze at once. More sugar can be added to the mixture, if needed, before freezing it. Pine- Apple Ice Cream. — To three cups of thin cream, ice cold, add one cup of pine-apple juice or pine-apple syrup, sweeten to taste, and freeze. Coffee Ice Cream. — To half a cup of strong coffee add one cup of sugar caramel and four cups of thin cream. Sweeten to taste and freeze. The unbeaten whites of eggs may be added to any cream or mixture that is to be frozen, if it is desired to have it lighter. PART V.-SEASONING. Some edibles are improved in flavor by having salt cooked with them, while others should only be salted when served. It is safe to say that all delicately flavored food is, as a general rule, salted too highly and seasoned too heavily. The more delicate the flavor of an article of food, the more careful one should be not to disguise or destroy it by the use of too liberal a quantity of sugar or salt. Delicately flavored fruits and cereals are often ruined with sugar and salt, as are also white flour bread, graham bread, and corn-bread. Pepper, spices, and other flavoring condiments and extracts are used principally in three capacities— to stimulate and strengthen, to soften and tone down, or to modify and change, the flavor of an article or dish. There is a seeming aflinity between certain foods which makes it appropriate to serve them together. They are so like they blend harmoniously ; or so unlike that one seems the complement of the other, and when mingled produce the best results. The fact should never be lost sight of that we season food to render it more palatable, digestible, and nutritious—not to give the taste of the seasoning to the food, but to render finer and more potent the flavors of the edible seasoned. Each edible, whether fish, flesh, fowl, 264 The Art of Cookery. vegetable, fruit, or cereal, should be so cooked and seasoned as to develop its flavor in the greatest degree. Each should be so cooked and seasoned that a first taste would enable one, though blind, by the clear, distinctive flavor, to discover its legitimate place in the animal or vegetable kingdom. The palatability of food — its appetizing quality — is of vital importance in rendering it digestible. Food, no matter how simple or nutritious it may be, never perfectly digests and assimilates unless it can be eaten with a relish, and is appetizing and pleasing to the taste.