Fruit recipes

Use fully grown but not thoroughly ripened berries, removing blossoms and stems and bruising fruit without crushing seeds or skins. To twenty pounds of berries add .two gallons rain-water, stirring and mashing fruit until it is cleared from the skin. Let stand six hours then strain free of seeds and skins and bring resulting juice to a boil. Have dissolved fifteen pounds sugar and add this to juice as it heats. Meantime let seeds and skins be soaking in a gallon of water. When the sugar and first liquor are at boiling point add this second quantity, strained. Measure it all and add sufficient water to bring whole quantity up to five gallons. Let this ferment in cask, covering bunghole with cheesecloth and allowing room for fermentation. When this has ceased stop the bung and let wine stand six or seven months before using. GOOSEBERRY CHAMPAGNE Take well-filled-out but green berries and top and tail them. To each three pounds allow one gallon soft water. Place berries in a large crock or tub with a little of the water and pound them heavily, mashing thoroughly. Add the rest of the water then stir briskly. Cover with cloth and for each of four days succeeding stir well and often. Then strain off, adding to the clear liquor four pounds of sugar for each gallon. Also, add to each five gallons one quart best brandy. Mix and place in a cask, filling lat-. ter full. Place bung lightly on top—the cask on its side in a cool dry place where it will not be shaken in the slightest degree. Let ferment thoroughly—perhaps three weeks— then bottle, corking well and placing bottles on sides. This will be fit to use in eight months and if rightly made will be very like champagne. GOOSEBERRY WATER ICE Squeeze juice from stewed berries unsweetened, or the very ripe berries, allowing a pound of sugar to each pint. Mix well and freeze. The juice from the stewed fruit may be used further, for custards and creams as well. CHAPTER XIV THE LEMON (Citrus limonum: Rutacee) EMONS are not often enough used as food, drink, or medicine. There is nothing more wholesome in natural foods, more effective in toning the system and purifying the blood (unless for some special reason the acid is directly prohibited; see note on potash in Introduction) than this most positive of citrus fruits. It is a special agent with the liver, acting directly upon it and assisting with the proper action of the bowels, cooling the blood and reaching or preventing a long list of ailments which take their rise in disorders of the liver. It is true that the liver may be made torpid by the nerves, which affect it strongly, so that worry, for instance, will partially paralyse its freedom and cause heavy colds and more serious troubles, but whether from improper physical or mental diet—from whatever cause—a clogged liver can make one as miserable, as discouraged and ill as one can be and live. If too late to remove the cause the condition should be relieved or it goes further, being, without doubt, the cause of suicides from the resulting mentai depression, as well as ‘‘death from natural causes,” through disordering the functions of other vital organs of the body. Vividly picturesque descriptions of the horrors of these various resulting complications may be found in almost any patent medicine circular, for it is upon the liver that the authors of these literary gems place the blame for most of the ills to which flesh is heir. The public is not so apt to seek or dwell upon written 185 :