Cookery for beginners

As the frothing cream rises to the top, remove it carefully with a spoon and lay it in a perfectly clean and cold colander, or on a hair sieve, set over a bowl. If any cream drips from it return to the vessel in which it is whipped to be beaten over again. When no more froth rises, whip a tablespoonful of powdered sugar into the white syllabub in the colander, and it is ready for use. Swan's Down Cream. One pint of whipped cream. Whites of three eggs beaten to a stiff froth. One cup of powdered sugar. One teaspoonful essence bitter almond. Just before you are ready to send the dish to table, beat whipped cream, frothed whites, sugar and flavoring together in a bowl set deep in cracked ice. Heap in a glass dish and leave in the ice until it is to be eaten. Send sponge cake around with it Jellied Oranges. Cut a small round piece from the blossom end of each of six or eight oranges, and scoop out the pulp very carefully, so as not to widen the hole, or tear the inside of the fruit. Use your fingers and a small teaspoon for this purpose until the oranges are empty and clean. Lay them then in very cold water while you prepare with the pulp and juice you have taken out, and the grated peel of another orange, half the quantity of orange-jelly called for by the receipt for lemon jelly. When it is quite cold, fill the orange-skins with it, and set in a cold place to harden. In serving them, cut the oranges cross-wise with a sharp knife and arrange in a glass dish, the open sides upward. A few orange, lemon, or japonica leaves to line the edges of the dish, will give a pretty effect. Ambrosia. Peel fine, sweet oranges, and cut into small pieces, extracting the seeds. Put a layer in a glass dish and sprinkle well with sugar. In this scatter a thick coating of grated cocoanut, strewing this also with powdered sugar. Over the cocoanut lay thin slices of bananas, peeled and cut crosswise. Fill the dish in this order, the top being covered with banana. A nice dessert for Sundays and warm afternoons when one dreads the heat of the stove. How to make Coffee and Tea. If you wish to have really strong coffee, allow a cup of freshly-ground- coffee to a quart of boiling water. Put the coffee in a bowl and wet with half a cup of cold water. Stir in the white and shell of a raw egg, and turn into a clean, newly-scalded coffee-boiler. Shut down the top and shake hard up and down half a dozen times before pouring in the boiling water. Set where it will boil hard, but not run over, for twenty minutes, draw to the side of the range and check the boil suddenly by pouring in a third of a cup of cold water. Let it stand three minutes to settle, and pour off gently into the pot which is to be set on the table. Scald the milk to be drunk with coffee, unless you can serve really rich cream with it Tea. First rule. The water should boil. Second rule. The water in which the tea is steeped, must be boiling. Third rule. The water used for filling the pot must be boiling. I speak within bounds when I say that I could tell on the fingers of my two hands the tables at which I have drunk really good, hot, fresh tea. Sometimes it is made with boiling water, then allowed to simmer on the range or hob until the decoction is rank, reedy and bitter. Sometimes too little tea is put in, and the beverage, while hot enough, is but faintly colored and flavored. Oftenest of all, the tea is made with unboiled water, or with water that did boil once, but is now flat and many degrees below the point of ebullition. Scald the china, or silver, or tin teapot from which the beverage is to flow directly into the cups; put in an even teaspoonful of tea