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browned or roasted. Roast rice as you would coffee, cook as usual and eat with a little cream. Remember that bread for toast must be cut thin and first dried out at a little distance from the fire, then brought nearer and browned. You may then serve it as dry toast lightly buttered, or in addition to the butter and a little salt, pour hot water or milk on it just before serving.

Panada of toasted brown bread, white bread, or crackers is made by piling the pieces in a bowl, having sprinkled either salt or sugar over, and then pouring over enough boiling water to soak them well. It should be kept hot for an hour or more, the pieces then lifted out carefully on a hot saucer and served with a little cream and perhaps more salt or sugar. Nutmeg may be added.

Rice is also a very valuable food for use in sickness, as it does not tax the most delicate digestion.

Macaroni is easily digested and of high food value. It should be boiled in salted water till tender and served with a little butter or cream. Or it may be added to a custard and lightly baked.

Barley, thoroughly cooked, is good food for an invalid. Oatmeal must be used with caution until the digestion becomes stronger.

As to vegetables proper, a mealy baked potato is perhaps the first to be introduced into the bill of fare; remove the inside, mash fine and season with a little salt and cream. Beware of potatoes cooked in any other way.

The juice of fruits may be used early as a flavor in drinks, but the pulp must be discarded. A baked apple is safest to begin with, when the time comes to introduce fruit as such into the diet.

As to the serving, use the best china, silver, and linen that you have in the house, and let exquisite neatness never fail.

Remember that surprises are delightful to a sick person; never let the bill of fare be known beforehand, and if you can disguise a well known dish, so much the better. Beaten white of egg is a good fairy, and serves you cheaply. Snowy white or made golden brown in the oven, it may top many a dish, concealing at one time a custard, at another a mold of chicken jelly, or even a cup of delicate apple sauce.

The processes of cooking, if simple, an invalid loves to watch, and the sight is often a whet to the appetite. Bring his gruel to him in the form of mush and thin it before his eyes with milk or cream, coddle his egg in a stoneware bowl while he eats another course, and by all means make his tea at his bedside.

BILLS OF FARE.

The following bills of fare are made out for a family of six persons, consisting of a working man, two women, and three children between the ages of six and fifteen, the size of the family and the ages attained being considered sufficiently near the average. The amount of food and the proportions in which the great food principles are represented approximate to what is demanded by standard dietaries for such a family. For the man of the family we have taken, as has been said, the one proposed by Prof. Atwater for an American at average manual labor, for the women and children those proposed by Prof. König.

Dietary adopted. The amounts represented by them are:

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In calculating these amounts we have followed almost entirely the analytical tables compiled by Prof. König.

Meat is reckoned without bone and moderately fat, and in nearly all the bills of fare the amount of proteids enough exceeds that required by the dietary adopted so that we can afford this loss. Flour is of medium quality, eggs are reckoned without shell, and milk as weighing 34.4 ounces per quart.

As to prices, they are mainly those of Baltimore markets, corrected in some cases by those of New York. Eggs are reckoned as costing in the spring eighteen cents, in fall and winter twentyfive cents; canned fruit is put down at the price paid for the

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fruit in summer. The cost of raw material is given in all cases, bread being reckoned at the cost of the flour contained in it. In three different seasons, four days in succession are selected, these days being the ones considered most trying to the housekeeper Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday- and this gives an opportunity to show how the food should be planned and cooked ahead. It is intended that on Saturday the food for Sunday should be cooked as nearly as possible, as the Sunday dinner should be a good one, but requiring a minimum of labor on that day; the dinner on Monday should be such as can be cooked on the back of the stove and in the oven.

The recipes will have to be varied a little according to advice given in appropriate places as to economy, e. g., substituting beef fat for butter, or adding it when skimmed milk is used instead of whole milk.

It is intended that each day there shall be a small surplus of money for purchasing seasonings and flavors.

INTRODUCTION TO BILLS OF FARE, CLASS I.

(To the Mother of the Family.)

In the general introduction the writer has stated a few principles that should guide us in choosing our food. We have learned that to keep us in good health and working order we ought to have a certain amount of what is best furnished by meat, eggs, milk, and other animal products, and that we must also have fats as well as what is given us in grains and vegetables.

But now our work has only just begun, for we are to furnish these food principles in the shape of cooked dishes to be put on the family table three times a day, and the dishes must not only be nourishing but they must taste good, and there must be plenty of variety from day to day; and last—and this is the hardest point of all we are to try to do this for the sum of thirteen cents per person daily.

I am going to consider myself as talking to the mother of a family who has six mouths to feed, and no more money than this to do it with. Perhaps this woman has never kept accurate accounts, and does not know whether she spends more or less than this sum. She very likely has her "flush" days and her

poor" days, according to the varying amounts of the family earnings, and it may be a comfort to her to know that if she could average these days and plan a little better, she could feed her family nicely on this sum.

A few facts as to what the writer knows to have been done in this line will not be amiss. I knew a family of six belonging to one of the professional classes, half grown people, and half children, that lived for a year on an average of eleven cents per person daily, and no one would have said that they did not live well enough. They had meat about four days out of the seven, there was always cake on their supper table, and they used plenty of fruit.

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Here is an average bill of fare: Breakfast-milk toast, fried potatoes, coffee; dinner soup made of shank of beef, fried liver, rice, and potatoes; supper-bread and butter, fried mush, stewed pears, and cake. Next day there was pressed beef made from the soup meat chopped and flavored, and next day there was cheap fish nicely fried. The head of this household was a skillful economist, absolutely no mistakes were made in cooking, and not a scrap was wasted. She had a long list of simple dishes at her command, and she especially studied variety. "I abandon even a favorite dish for weeks," she said, "if any one tires of it." I give this as a sample of what I know to have been done by a highly respectable family in a city of small size in one of our Eastern States.

It must be mentioned that the price on which this family lived in comfort could not have been as low as it was but for one great help; they had a small garden that furnished green vegetables and a little fruit. But then, almost every family has some special advantage that would lower the rate somewhat; one buys butter or fruit advantageously of friends in the country, another can buy at wholesale when certain staples are cheapest, still another may be able to keep a few fowls, and so on. Numerous instances could be brought to prove that the food for a family can be purchased in a raw condition for the sum per head for which we have undertaken to buy it, and that by skill in cooking, flavoring, and giving right variety, a healthful and very acceptable diet can be furnished, though it cannot, of course, contain luxuries.

Another thing, when I speak of a woman who is to buy the food of a family for 13 cents apiece daily, I have in mind the wife of a man who earns this sum himself, the wife having her time to attend to the housework and children. If a woman helps earn, as in a factory, doing most of her housework after she comes home at night, she must certainly have more money than in the first case in order to accomplish the same result, for she must buy her bread already baked and can only cook those dishes that take the least time.

I shall take for granted that you have the kitchen utensils already described; if not, buy them, because you cannot afford to do without them. Food is very expensive compared with pots and pans; you must not spoil food for lack of the right things to cook it in.

I only ask you in advance to try the recipes I shall give and to try to lay aside your prejudices against dishes to which you are not accustomed, as soups and cheese dishes for instance. You cannot afford to reject anything that will vary your diet, for many good tasting things you cannot buy.

I know it is hard for a busy woman to give to her cooking a bit more time than will "just do," but if you make it a rule to determine the night beforehand just what you will cook on the following day, no matter how simple the food may be, you will gain this result with the materials at your disposal you will put before your family much better food, and they will call you a good cook and think that no family need live better than they; and this impression will be made principally from your having the right variety. Let us understand to begin with that it is your business just now to conquer this food question as it affects your family. Just as the business man must watch the market and take advantage of a half cent a pound on an article, that he may successfully compete with his neighbor, so you must be on the alert to use every possible advantage. It is a struggle in which energy and calculation will tell for a great deal, and you will have solid enjoyment in every point that you gain.

In buying meat, your saving cannot be so much in quantity as in quality. Try to learn the different parts of an animal, and to distinguish between the meat from a fat ox and that from a lean one, for, as we have explained, the former has less water in it,

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