Cooking for profit

Boil rich milk or cream with stick cinnamon or broken nutmeg in it and sugar to sweeten. Stir in a spoonful of starch mixed with cold milk. Supper. No meat in the huuse, b'lt some fish left yet. Good country lake house supper. Fried trout (18 pieces, 4^ lbs gross, @ 8, 36; 2 eggs and cornmeal 4; lard, y2 lb, 7 — 47 cents.) Potatoes plain boiled (3 cents.) French rolls (24, 10 cents.) Cherries (2 cans, 28 cents.) Cake (No. 547—13 cents.) Butter 10, milk and cream 20, coffee, tea, sugar 9 (39 cents.) $1 40; 20 persons, 7 cents a plate 549-ls Fish Cheaper Than Meat? A few meals back some pickerel, home caught, is credited in our account, to the boys, as w^orth ten cents a pound, that is net weight. That is what the fish we get by express seems to cost as it is put in the pan. It is bought at Whitefish Bay at severi cents, packed in ice and boxed; but it has to be expressed over two railroads in some way that makes it pay double rate, and twentyfive pounds costs 50 cents, and there is another carriage from the depot. Although they come clean as to the insides, the heads, fins and backbones take away one-sixth of the weight, on an average, of different kinds of fish. Therefore, 25 lbs @ 7 cents and 50 cents added costs, $2 25. Take off one-sixth in trimminj^ before cooking and we have scarce 21 lbs of fish for that sum, it being pear eleven cents per pound than ten. As there is waste, likewise, in all other kinds of meat, the only fair comparison that can be made is with the sohd, boneless round of beef (No. 516) which we buy at thirteen cents. There is then a difference of three cents in favor of the fish, but if we cook it by breading and fryin;,^ the cost of fish and meat is about the same and our fish supper with fruit and cake is not one of the cheapest meals. The conditions are, of course, only local but are stated at length because they are likely to be much the same at a great number of resort houses. 550— Fried Lake Trout. 'None of these tea-kettle cooks, either in this house or around at the neighbors', I find, have ever seen frying by immersion in hot fat before. Mrs. Tingee, too, I remember, although she had kept house fifteen years and a boarding house ten, had never known that potatoes could be cooked by dropping them raw into hot fat— as French fried, and Saratoga chips — neither did the two ladies who boarded with her, the retail merchant's wife and the photographer's wife, they all thought that in every case potatoes must be boiled iirst. After thinking it well over I concluded not to mention frying fish that way to her, being afraid to go into her kitchen and take her whole pound of lard at once, if 1 could ever find so rnuch there, and \ proceed to make it hi:3sing hot over the fire, because it is dangerous to have a kettle of hot lard on the fire and a lady .fainting around, both at one time. We grow reckless of lard where we cook tor a number of people every day, who pay a fair price for board and have something good to eat, and generally, besides, have a jar full of roast meat fat and melted suet that helps out without depending upon it except for a tew things that must be fried of a good clean color.