made from cherries. Ripe wild cherries are freed from their stalks and bruised without breaking the stone. They are then allowed to ferment and the kernels are broken and thrown in. The whole is then distilled and Kirschwasser is the result. Mara- schino is prepared in like fashion from a fine delicately flavored variety, but more care is taken to preserve the flavor, and only the finest sugar is used to sweeten it. Dates. Dates are the fruit of the date-palm, which flourishes all over the north of Africa and supplies food to millions of people from Morocco to Persia. They rank with grapes as a high-class food-stuff, containing, as they do, 58% sugar and kindred sub- stances. The fruit is eaten fresh or dried, and in the latter state it is made into flour. Solid masses of pounded dates are a familiar sight at a fruiterer's and this is a regular storage form of food for the cara- vans. Date stones are roasted and used to adulterate coffee, and an oil is often expressed from them when ground, the refuse being used for feeding cattle. Palm wine is made by fermentation of the sap of the date palm. The toddy palm is generally regarded as the wild date. From its sap, by boiling, jaggery or date sugar is obtained in the form of a sjTup, four poimds of syrup yielding one pound of sugar. If this liquid be fermented it forms palm wine in the ordi- nary way, and arrack by distillation. Olives. The olive is another stone fruit much used, especially in the South of Europe and the East. Pickled olives act as appetizers. The fruits are gathered before being quite ripe and are steeped in lime-water to remove their disagreeable taste, and FRUITS 111 then are pickled^ in various ways. The taste for pickled olives is an acquired one. Olive oil occupies the first place among vegetable oils. It is very valuable as food, never gets rancid, does not dry, nor does it freeze at ordinary tempera- ture. It is quite tasteless and might be more largely used in this country than it is, to the exclusion of cod- Uver oil. At present it is used chiefly for salad-dress- ing. The oil is obtained from the lime-seed olive by pressure, the seeds yielding 58% of ohve oil. It tends to become cloudy upon long exposure to light, as in a shop window, and it is best kept in the dark. As a household hniment, hot olive oil has no rival. Cotton- seed oil is now largely used as an adulterant, or even as a substitute, for oUve oil, and so excessively diffi- cult is it to detect this that the Italian government offered a prize for the best method of doing so. ACID FRUITS Grapes, Grapes are probably native to West Asia and the region south of the Caspian Sea, and are grown in France, Germany, South Europe, AustraUa, etc. With the exception of dates, they exceed all other fruits in amount of sugar, which in ripe grapes is never below 12% and may be as high as 26%. The ratio of sugar to acid in very good grapes is 29.6 to 1, and in ordinary seasons 16.1 to 1; in unripe sour grapes, 10.1 to 1. Even this last ratio is very high and one would expect such a fruit to be sweet, but in unripe grapes the ex- tremely sour juice of the thick skin completely overpowers the sweetness of the grape itself, and in those grapes the juice is always sweeter than the 112 DOMESTIC SCIENCE whole fruit. The acid in grapes is mainly tartaric acid, combined with potash lime and magnesia. When taken in excess grapes act as an aperient.

AI-modernized reading of the original text

made from cherries. Ripe wild cherries are freed from their stalks and bruised without breaking the stone. They are then allowed to ferment and the kernels are broken and thrown in. The whole is then distilled and Kirschwasser is the result. Maraschino is prepared in like fashion from a fine delicately flavored variety, but more care is taken to preserve the flavor, and only the finest sugar is used to sweeten it. Dates. Dates are the fruit of the date-palm, which flourishes all over the north of Africa and supplies food to millions of people from Morocco to Persia. They rank with grapes as a high-class food-stuff, containing, as they do, 58% sugar and kindred substances. The fruit is eaten fresh or dried, and in the latter state it is made into flour. Solid masses of pounded dates are a familiar sight at a fruiterer's and this is a regular storage form of food for the caravans. Date stones are roasted and used to adulterate coffee, and an oil is often expressed from them when ground, the refuse being used for feeding cattle. Palm wine is made by fermentation of the sap of the date palm. The toddy palm is generally regarded as the wild date. From its sap, by boiling, jaggery or date sugar is obtained in the form of a sjTup, four poimds of syrup yielding one pound of sugar. If this liquid be fermented it forms palm wine in the ordinary way, and arrack by distillation. Olives. The olive is another stone fruit much used, especially in the South of Europe and the East. Pickled olives act as appetizers. The fruits are gathered before being quite ripe and are steeped in lime-water to remove their disagreeable taste, and then are pickled in various ways. The taste for pickled olives is an acquired one. Olive oil occupies the first place among vegetable oils. It is very valuable as food, never gets rancid, does not dry, nor does it freeze at ordinary temperature. It is quite tasteless and might be more largely used in this country than it is, to the exclusion of cod- Uver oil. At present it is used chiefly for salad-dressing. The oil is obtained from the lime-seed olive by pressure, the seeds yielding 58% of ohve oil. It tends to become cloudy upon long exposure to light, as in a shop window, and it is best kept in the dark. As a household liniment, hot olive oil has no rival. Cottonseed oil is now largely used as an adulterant, or even as a substitute, for olive oil, and so excessively difficult is it to detect this that the Italian government offered a prize for the best method of doing so. ACID FRUITS Grapes, Grapes are probably native to West Asia and the region south of the Caspian Sea, and are grown in France, Germany, South Europe, Australia, etc. With the exception of dates, they exceed all other fruits in amount of sugar, which in ripe grapes is never below 12% and may be as high as 26%. The ratio of sugar to acid in very good grapes is 29.6 to 1, and in ordinary seasons 16.1 to 1; in unripe sour grapes, 10.1 to 1. Even this last ratio is very high and one would expect such a fruit to be sweet, but in unripe grapes the extremely sour juice of the thick skin completely overpowers the sweetness of the grape itself, and in those grapes the juice is always sweeter than the whole fruit. The acid in grapes is mainly tartaric acid, combined with potash lime and magnesia. When taken in excess grapes act as an aperient.

Domestic science (Clark, Cornell home economics)