Cooking for profit

Cost of material— cake 27, strawberries 2 quarts 50, meringue 10; 87c for 16 plates or 5Jc per plate- -or, according to size and the price of berries. THE ICE CREAM SALOON. 196— Ice Cream— Best. 1 quart of good sweet cream. 10 heaping tablespoons sugar. 2 tablespoons extract vanilla. Put the sugar and flavor into the cream. Set the pan or tin pail containing it in ice water and whip with the wire egg-beater for about five minutes tiU the cream is half froth. Put it into a freezer that will hold twice as much, pack with ice and salt and freeze, and either by rapid motion of a freezer having an inside beater, or by beating the frozen cream with a paddle make it fill the freezer before leaving it. Other flavoring extracts can of course be used m place of vanilla Cost of material — cream 24, sugar 6, vanilla 4, twelve pounds ice 12, three pounds salt 3 — 49 cents for 2 quarts of ice cream or 12 plates, or 4c per plate. 197— Cost of Ice Gream. There are but few things so uncertain as this, so much depending upon the price of ice and salt and so much more upon the method of proceeding to freeze it. We have stated a supposable average with cream at 90c per gallon, sugar at lie per pound and ice and salt each at Ic per pound. But undoubtedly while the cream is generally considered the most costly item the real expense is the freezing mixture. Ice at the cheapest is about .50c per 100 pounds, yet it generally rules higher and ice cream often has to be made with ice at 3 dollars per hundred, and salt even of the coarsest, on account of the cost of transportation in some places runs up to an equal figure. It is necessary then to pay particular attention to the freezing process, for one person can freeze the cream as well with ten pounds of ice as another may with thirty. One will have it done and ofi hand within half an honr and another take all the forenoon to accomplish the same thing and may have to replenish the freezer three or four times over. When custards are to be frozen or imitation cream made by enriching milk with eggs and starch it is obviously the best to let the boiling mixture become cold before putting it into the freezer Still where ice is very plentiful, as in winter, some time and trouble may be saved by not going through that prepation, but the hot custard is strained direct into the freezer. In summer, however much it may be desired to make the custard cold beforehand it ought never to be made over night without special care to make it thoroughly cold at once, for otherwise it is almost sure to acquire a curious sort of fermented taste, and will even in large quantities, throw up tiny bubbles of fermentation before morning, and all the high-priced flavoring extract that can be added will not quite disguise the spoiled taste. The proper way to do is to make the custard early in the morning, strain it into a freezer or tin pail and set it in ice water or the cold brine that is left in the freezing tub from the previous day, and when made cold by occasional stirring change it into the packed freezer it is to be frozen in. 198- How to Freeze Ice Cream.