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then skim and pour off the butter from the dregs into jars. Keep in a cool place and closely covered. In any recipe use one-fourth less than of fresh butter.

This should be done with even more care, to avoid

Tried out suet. the tallowy flavor. Exact directions are given in "Cooking Methods," page 192. The "scraps" are often relished by children.

This beef fat (which we decline to call tallow) should be put away in cakes in a jar closely covered.

To use.

To use it, scrape it fine, sprinkling a little flour in it to keep it light. So prepared it may be used in any of the ways mentioned under "suet," and to this list still others may be added, since it does not need, as does suet, long cooking in order to mix it well with the other ingredients of the dish. It can be used successfully in warm breads of all kinds, and in all but the nicest cakes if mixed with one-half butter.

Lard.

Much of the lard now furnished is so poor, that unless one pays a high price to a well known dealer, it is better for each housekeeper to buy the leaf lard and try it out herself.

Cut fine and cook all the water out, taking care not to burn. The "scraps" are even better than those left from suet and should by no means be thrown away.

SAUCES FOR MEAT AND VEGETABLES.

The economical and busy housewife says she has no time nor money for sauces, but the fact is she cannot afford to do without them.

All vegetables must have some fat to season them and to use butter in every case is extravagant and gives no variety, while a cheaper fat if made into a sauce with flour and water, can be flavored in a dozen ways.

DRAWN BUTTER SAUCES.

Drawn butter, which is the foundation of most of the sauces is thus made.

Plain.

A heaping tablespoon of butter or beef fat is put into a saucepan; when it boils, 1 heaping tablespoon flour

is added and stirred as it cooks. To this add gradually 1 pint of water, 1 teaspoon salt and teaspoon of pepper. If you wish to unite economy and good flavor use tablespoon of beef fat in making the sauce, and add 1⁄2 tablespoon butter, cut in little pieces, just before serving.

Milk sauce is the same, made with milk instead of water.

In brown sauce, the fat and flour are stirred till they brown, then make as above.

Any number of sauces can be made from these three by adding different flavors; chopped pickles and a tablespoon vinegar are added to No. 1 when it is to be used on fish; or mustard for mustard

sauce.

The addition of eggs raw or cooked makes another variety.

Milk gravies.

With the help of milk we can make a gravy as in "milk sauce," with beef or pork fat, seasoning with salt and pepper and perhaps some powdered herb.

Children like all these gravies, if nicely made and flavored, to eat on bread as well as on vegetables.

MEAT SAUCES.

A few cheap sauces for meats alone deserve special mention.

Mint sauce.

Two tablespoons green mint or spearmint chopped, 1 tablespoon sugar, cup vinegar. Mix and let stand

an hour or two.

Tomato sauce.

Boil 1 pint fresh or canned tomatoes with a little onion, salt, and herb flavoring until quite thick, then strain and add 1 teaspoonful of flour cooked in a teaspoonful of butter.

Fruit sauce.

Any sour fruit, as apples or plums, makes an excellent sauce to eat with meat. Apple sauce goes especially well with pork.

Horseradish

sauce.

Add to drawn butter or any meat gravy cup grated horseradish. Simmer a few minutes.

CARBOHYDRATE-CONTAINING FOODS AND
THEIR PREPARATION.

We are now to furnish for the body the third great food principle, the carbohydrates. These we mean when we speak of the starches and sugars, and with unimportant exceptions, they are furnished by the vegetable world only.

Cellulose.

As we have seen, that troublesome body, cellulose, plays here a large rôle. It is the skeleton, so to speak, of plants, built by them out of sugar and starch; the chemist finds no difficulty in his laboratory in turning it back into dextrin and sugar, and our stomachs too can digest a large part of the cellulose of very young and tender plants,-from forty-seven per cent to sixty-two per cent it has been found, of young lettuce, celery, cabbage and carrots, but in older plants, the cellulose proper becomes all intergrown and encrusted with substances of a woody and mineral nature, from which even the chemist separates it with the greatest difficulty, while our digestive juices are entirely unequal to the task. Therefore it is that the whole art of the cook is needed in treating this substance; she must soften it, she must break it up, and in many ca es separate it as completely as possible from the sugars, starches and proteids which it hinders us from appropriating to our use.

Its use.

In some cases, as in oatmeal and graham flour, we leave the cellulose because of its mechanical action on the bowels To be sure, this is a wasteful process, for the cellulose carries with it when it leaves the body considerable undigested food, but better this waste than to give the muscles of our intestines so little work to do that they become unable to digest any but fine, condensed foods.

As a rule, however, we must think of cellulose not as a food at all, but as a tough, foreign body which we must reckon with before we can utilize the proteid and starch particles of many important vegetable foods.

Amount of Car

The carbohydrates, especially the starches. are the bohydrate. cheapest of the food constituents and therefore most

apt to be in excess, especially in the food of the poor. According to estimates already given, an adult at average hard work gets along nicely with one and one-eighth pounds of carbohydrate material (meaning, of course, the dry amount of this one principle), though fortunately, as mentioned under "Fats," it is found that some of this large amount can be exchanged for fat, if the body, for any reason can better use the latter. Brainworkers and the richer classes the world over take less of carbohydrates, at least in their starch form, and more proteids and fats.

Inasmuch as we get these carbohydrates from the vegetable kingdom, and because the housewife must furnish them combined with other principles as in bread and other things made of flour, and in various dishes in which vegetables are combined with meat, milk, eggs, etc., we will cease speaking of carbohydrates as such, and will give a few hints as to how to prepare vegetable foods so that we can get the most out of them, bearing in mind, however, what has been said about not following out this principle to the extent of weakening the bowels.

To what extent

This leads us, first, to examine the general digestidigested. bi'ity of the whole class of vegetable foods; meaning by this, not the rapidity nor the ease, but the extent to which the nutritive principle is yielded up to us. It has been found that, as usually prepared, vegetable foods give up to us from one-fourth to one-half less of their nutrients than do animal foods, and especially is this true of those that are rich in proteids. To illustrate: A workman eats as part of his dinner a dish of boiled beans, but though he rightly considers that he has been eating a nourishing dish, he has really absorbed only sixty per cent of the nitrogenous substances contained in it, the other forty per cent passing from him unused because of its intimate connection with the cellulose; at least this was the case with Prof. Strümpell who records the result of personal experiments on the digestibility of beans cooked whole. Now this workman digested of the meat part of his dinner ninety-seven and one-half per cent, and this comparison shows how the tougher kinds of cellulose interfere with the absorption of the food matters which they enclose.

The starch part of vegetable food we seem to get out much better than the proteid part, even with our ordinary methods of cooking; thus out of cooked rice we get almost ninety-nine per cent of the starch, but only eighty per cent of what proteid it contains; flour

in the form of noodles and macaroni yields up ninety-eight and onehalf per cent of its starch and eighty per cent of its albumen-in the form of bread a little less of each. The potato will give us only seventy-five per cent of what little proteid it contains, but as high as ninety-two and one-half per cent of its starch.

Effect of too much starch

iu the diet.

Although the starch-containing foods are cheap and although they yield up a good per cent of this nutritive principle, they must not be used to excess for the following reason. Starch must first be turned into sugar by our digestive juices before it can be taken up into the blood, and if the stomach is given more at a time than it can master, certain fermentations may take place, and digestion be influenced. The best authorities say that without doubt the continued and severe diarrhoeas of small children are due to the fermentation of starch foods for which their digestive organs are not yet ready.

These fermentations, the irritating action on the bowels of too much cellulose, and the loss of a good deal of proteid substance connected with it form the shady side of a vegetable diet. Even the ox with his many stomachs gets out of grass and unchopped hay only sixty per cent of the proteid and fifty per cent of the fat contained in it.

VEGETABLE PROTEIDS.

Even in our part of the world two-thirds of the proteid food of most people is taken from the vegetable kingdom, and in order to choose our food profitably, we must know where to look for vegetable proteids, and how to fit them for eating. Here the cereals and the legumes are our friends, the former furnishing from seven to fourteen per cent in their dried state, the latter giving the astonishing figure of twenty to twenty-four per cent; or as much as meat.

GRAINS.

The cereals or grains, though containing much less proteid than the legumes, are more valuable to us because of their excellent taste, their availability to the cook and the readiness with which when ground they yield us their nutrients.

Since the grains are such important foods, a table is appended showing the average richness in food principles of those in common use among us. We find that different analyses of the same grain differ greatly from one other, barley for instance, ranging from 8

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