A calendar of dinners, with 615 recipes

When cake or other food 1s not flavory: Salt should have been added to the Crisco, for Crisco contains no salt. When there 1s smoke in the kitchen: Crisco has been burned or heated too high for frying. Or some may have been on the outside of the pan or kettle. When Crisco 1s too hard: Like butter, it is susceptible to heat and cold. Simply put in a warmer place. Ss Hints to Young Cooks Also, How to Choose Foods, Methods of Cooking, Cooking Time Table, The Art of Carving, by Marton Harris NEIL. “AEFORE commencing to cook, look up the =) required recipe, read and think it out. Note : down on a slip of paper the materials and quan- [D) tities required. Collect all utensils and materials } required before commencing. Success in cookery depends on careful attention to every detail from start to finish. Quantities, both liquid and dry, should be exact. Small scales and weights should form part of the kitchen equipment where possible, and the measuring cups cost so little that no one need be without them. Throughout this book the measurements are level 24 How to Choose Foods “ONEY can be spent to infinitely better advan- tage in the store, than by giving orders at the door, by phone or mail. Every housekeeper knows how large a proportion of the housekeep- ing money is swallowed up by the butcher’s bill, es CT) that with the meat item careful selection is most necessary in order to keep the bills within bounds. In choosing meat of any kind the eye, the nose and the touch really are required, although it is not appetizing to see the purchaser use more than the eye. Beef In choosing meat it should be remembered that without being actually unwholesome, it varies greatly in quality, and often an inferior joint is to be preferred from a first class beast to a more popular cut from a second class animal. To be perfect the animal should be five or six years old, the flesh of a close even grain, bright red in color and well mixed with creamy white fat, the suet being firm and a clear white. Heifer meat is smaller in the bone and lighter in color than ox beef. Cow beef is much the same to look at as ox beef, though being older it is both coarser in the grain and tougher; bull beef, which is never seen however, in a first class butcher’s may be Tecognized by the coarseness and dark color of the flesh, and also by a strong and almost rank smell. Mutton To be in perfection, mutton should be at least four, or better five or six years old, but sheep of this age are rarely if ever, met with now-a-days, when they are constantly killed under two years. To know the age of mutton, examine the breast bones; if these are all of a white gristly color the animal was four years old or over, while the younger it is the pinkier are the bones, which, in a sheep of under a year, are entirely red. Good mutton should be of a clear dark red, the fat firm and white, and not too much of it; when touched the meat should feel crisp yet tender. If the fat is yellow and the lean flabby and damp, it is bad. A freshly scraped wooden skewer run into the meat along the bone will speedily enable anyone to detect staleness. For roasting mutton scarcely can be hung too long, 25 How to Choose Foods as long as it is not tainted; but for boiling it must not be kept nearly so long or the meat will be of a bad color when cooked. Lamb The freshness of lamb is comparatively easy to distinguish, as if fresh the neck vein will be a bright blue, the knuckles stiff, and the eyes bright and full. Veal