The housekeeper's guide to preserved meats, fruits, vegetables, &c

Suppose you have a beef-bone or mutton -bone left; put it on to stew with a carrot, a turnip, an onion with six cloves stuck in it, some trimmings of celery, and a little parsley. If the carrot and turnip are young they can be taken out and cut up to be served in the soup. When the bone has simmered, the longer the better, five or six hours, strain it off, then add the contents of one tin of essence of beef, and you have a first-class clear soup. If possible throw a handful of fresh-picked young green peas into the soup while boiling, about a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes before you send the .soup to table. Essence of beef will also be found invaluable for making gravy in a hurry. Add twice its bulk of water flavoured with onion or garlic, celery, parsley, etc., and thicken it with a tablespoonful of brown roux (see Roux). Let it boil, or rather simmer, a, little while to throw up the butter in the roux, and then serve. The gravy, if intended for roast fowl or turkey, can have a little mushroom catsup added to it, say a dessert-spoonful. If the gravy is intended for game a teaspoonful of sherry may be added, but not more. Cooks too often spoil gravies by adding too much wine. BEEF - TEA. — Beef -tea, and good, genuine beef-tea too, can now be obtained in tins, and I would strongly recommend this form of beef-tea to those who doubt their own ability to manufacture the article from gravy -beef direct. There is probably no form of medicine, if it may be so called, so valuable in the sick-room, and especially the convalescent sick-room, as beef-tea. Medical men who attend patients of the poorer classes, I fear, sometimes fail to grasp the idea of the helplessness and ignorance of even elementary cooking that too often marks the working man’s wife. The patient is ordered beef-tea, but he gets greasy ditch-water. I will take a higher case. Beef -tea is ordered ; the patient has to take nourishment, but loathes food. The gravy-beef is bought, cut up, and simmered, and after a time strained, and a breakfast-cup full of a liquid called beef -tea is brought up. It is white in colour, with a brown sediment, which, if left to stand, will settle at the bottom. The popular belief is that this sediment contains the goodness, whereas the contrary is the case. We will suppose that the beef -tea has been really well made, and that when cold it is a nice jelly. The patient takes a few spoonfuls and puts the cup down. It is left by the bedside. Alas ! what too often happens, even in good families, where every precaution is taken '! In an hour or two’s time the patient turns to the discarded cup, and makes another effort to swallow a few spoonfuls now it is cold, for often sick patients can take beef-tea cold when they cannot touch it hot, the very smell of any cook-