The new practical housekeeping

tered cup and place cups in frying-pan, pouring water around and in the cups ; when done take out carefully and add to soup. This is a nice way to cook them to be served alone, only bake them in oven and omit the water from the cup, putting a little salt and pepper on top of egg ; bake three minutes and serve at once in the cups ; or two or three eggs, well-beaten and added just before pourins in tureen, make a nice thickening. Cayenne pepper or a bit of red pepper pod, is considered an improvement in soup, but must be cautiously used. Forcemeat Balls, and Croutons, slices of fried or toasted bread, are also used. If soup is salted too highly, add a teaspoon sugar and a tablespoon vinegar, and it will help modify it. Soup Stock. — This is to soup what yeast is to bread and aUhough many soups are made as above, without any stock, yet when one has learned the art of making the latter she will always find herself ready to prepare a dish of delicious soup at almost a minutes' warning, and the mystery which seems to surround the simple word of "stock" will be unravelled with her first attempt. To make a Plain Stock, take in proportion of one pound meat and bones to one quart cold water, unless it is to be boiling seven or nine hours making a Jelly Stock, when a a little more water. It is better to cut the meat from the bones, cutting it in small pieces and breaking the bones fine, some indeed believe in crushing them almost to a powder and when so treated a little water must be added as they are being crushed, and they must then be placed in a sack. But simply breaking them, or rather having the butcher do it, is all that is necessary, as that allows the quicker freeing of the gelatine of which the bones are chiefly composed, two ounces of them containing as much gelatine as a pound!^ of meat ; so that when equal portions bones and meat are taken, the stock when cold will be a jelly, but if only meat is used and but little bone the stock will be liquid. Stock made only of bones lacks in flavor as they do not contain a particle of osmazome which is that part of the meat which gives flavor to the stock. The flesh of old animals contains more osmazome than that of young ones, and dark meats more than white, and make the stock more fragrant. ^ By roasting meat the osmazome appears to acquire higher properties; so by putting the remains of roast meats into stock a better flavor is obtained. There is also contained in the meat, fibres, fat, and albumen ; the fibres are inseparable and constitute almost all that remains of the meat after it has undergone a long boiling ; most of the fat dissolves by cooking and the ^bumen is of the nature of the white of eggs ; it can be dissolved only in cold or tepid water, and coagulates when it is put in water not quite at the boiling point. From this property m albumen, it is evident that if the meat is put into hot or boiling water or the water is made to boil up quickly afterward, the albumen, in both cases, hardens. In the nrst it rises to the surface, in the second it remains in the meat, but in both it prevents the gelatine and osmazome from