Cassell's dictionary of cookery

may be sweetened and flavoured with nutmeg, ginger, or grated lemon, ale, wine, or spirit ; or it may be seasoned with salt and pepper, and flavoured with spices, herbs, mushroom jjowder, celery-seed, shallots, or onions. When sweetened with treacle, and taken just before getting into bed, it is one of the best suppers that can be partaken of by any one who is suffer- ing from a cold in the head or on the chest. It is most usually served with a small piece of butter dissolved in it, and either sweetened with sugar or seasoned with salt. Water Ices. — Water ices are made of the juices of ripe fruits mixed with syrup and frozen ; and it must be remembered that if the juices are sweetened excessively they will not freeze. It is, therefore, necessary to test them with an instrument called a sacchai'ometer. To do this, put the mixture prepared for freezing in a tumbler, place the saccharometer gently in it : if it is mixed con-ectly for freezing -\\ith powder it will stick to the highest red mark ; for freezing with ice and salt to the lowest red mark. To make it sink, add water to the mixture ; to make it rise, add syrup. These remarks apj^ly also to ice creams, ice puddings, and all drinks which are to be frozen. For water ices clarified sugar should be used ; and this may be made by boiHng for ten minutes, and skimming thoroughly, a quart of water with three pounds of sugar and half the white of an egg well whisked. Having prepared the mixture and also ascertained its strength, put it into an ice-pot. Place it in the ice-pail, and surromid it with ice which has been broken almost to powder and mixed with salt and a little saltpetre. Work the freezer rapidly for ten minutes ; then remove the ice from the sides of the freezer with the ice-spattle, and work it again till it is stiff and smooth. Put it into the mould, and leave it in ice mixed with salt and saltpetre till it is to be served. To turn it out, wipe it with a cloth, dip it in cold water for a minute, and wipe it dry ; lift off the ends of the mould, and with the fingers push the ice upon its dish. • Hecipes for the following water ices will be found under their respective headings : — Melon Orange Pine-apple pomegkanate EuM Stbaw] Easpberry Cherry GlNGER Gooseberry- Grape Lemon Water in Food. — " The action of water in our food," says a medical writer, "is very important. There would be no carrjang of food into the system but for the agency of water. It dissolves everything that we take, and nothing that we take as food can become nutriment that is not dissolved in water. It would not do to test that by taking things and putting them into water and seeing whether they dissolve, and rejecting them as food ac- cording to that circumstance ; because food un- dergoes a considerable change in the stomach. It undergoes a change to begin with in our mouth. One of the great objects of that change is to render things soluble which had been before insoluble in water. Starch, which we cannot dissolve in water out of the stomach, is dissolved in water directly it gets into the mouth, for the starch is changed by the saliva into sugar, and that which would lie unchanged in water for months is so changed by the saliva of the mouth and the gastric juice of the stomach that it is speedily dissolved.