Cooking and castle-building

the oysters will be badly damaged by it. When properly cooked, the oyster comes to the table of a light brown color, thinly coated all over with crumbs, — not warm, greasy, and leathery, but hot and juicy, and tasting precisely like — a fried oyster ! "For scalloped oysters, prepare the crumbs by drying bread very thoroughly in a cool oven. Broken pieces and crusts will answer as well as whole slices, if the bread is of good quality and the crusts not brown. Several hours will be required to dry the bread sufficiently ; and it will not be injured if lightly browned in the process. When dried, roll it very fine, rejecting whatever will not crush into fine crumbs. Season the crumbs well with salt, pepper, and butter, rubbing all between the hands until thoroughly mixed. Rinse and drain the oysters the same as for frying. The dish in which scalloped oysters are cooked should be shallow, — holding not more than three or four layers of oysters and crumbs. Scatter a thin layer of crumbs over the bottom of the dish, and place a layer of oysters upon them. Over these scatter a thin layer of crumbs, and lay in more oysters. So fill the dish, covering each layer of oysters with a layer of crumbs. Over the top, place the crumbs thickly, so as to form a coating or crust, which will protect the oysters from exposure. It requires three-quarters of an hour to cook scalloped oysters three or four layers deep. The oven should be hotter than for bread — hot enough to cook as quickly as possible without burning the crumbs. The dish should be of a rich brown all over the top, before it is moved from the oven ; and when served, the oysters should be plump and juicy. The juice, however, should be found inside the oysters, — while on the outside they should be so dry as to roll and tumble about on the plate. They should not be wet, sticky, and packed together ; nor shrunken, leathery, and sloppy, from too much moisture, and from slow cooking or over-cooking. Oysters — whether stewed, fried, scalloped, or broiled, — should never be cooked long enough to collapse and become tough and juiceless." "Kate, in the matter of food, my sympathies are with country people," observed Emeline. "They usually cook their food in sucii a careless, slovenly manner, and have so little variety in it, that but for their active out-door lives they would certainly lose all appetite, and die of starvation. It is hard to imagine how people manage to survive, who, day after day, for years, drink the sloppy tea and coffee, and eat the sour, heavy bread, and badly cooked meat and vegetables one is treated to at the average country house ! But the worst of it all is that they worry through life on such fare, and never realize the fact that it is possible to prepare food in any better way. Your cook-book will give them some useful hints on preparing frizzled beef, picked-up codfish, and many other staple dishes of plain, wholesome food. And I trust you will also' tell them how to make decent fish-balls. There is such a vast difference between a perfect fish-ball and a fish-ball as ordinarly made and cooked, that I think the subject deserves special mention."