Food and health

What shall we say about a cool cellar for food ? For the sake of the family the cellar should be dry, well aired, and not cold and damp. Even a dry, cemented cellar is cooler than the ground floor of the house ; but it is not cold in the way that the old-time farmhouse cellar used to be. When the Stark family made their old cellar into a dry new cellar, they felt that they could not plan for an ice house that year. They dug a place below the level of the cellar and cemented it ; they cut a trapdoor in the kitchen floor and made a set of shelves to run up and down on pulleys from the kitchen into the small subcellar. This may seem more trouble than it is worth, but Mrs. Stark and Mollie did not think so. A box fastened outside the window by strong iron brackets gives a handy place for cooling food, and for keeping some foods that do not spoil quickly. It is easily made from a watertight wooden box, painted outside and in, with the opening toward the window, having a curtain of table oilcloth. A piece of wire netting set in the^ bottom of the box 'lets in the air. Remember, too, that evaporation cools. In tropic countries water is cooled in porous earthen jars which Courtesy of New York State College of Agriculture of Cornell University. Fig. 117. — These shelves inside a window give a place for cooling food. Netting must be used to keep out flies. hang in the veranda. When all other means are missing, put the food to be cooled in a jar, wrap a clean cloth around and over the jar, put one end of the cloth in a basin of water, and stand all in a window. Keeping food dry. This means having dry walls and floors. Have jars and boxes for keeping your materials, label them, and place them in neat rows. Even when food of certain kinds should be kept moist for a time, they still should stand in a dry place. For example, we may wish to keep bread moist by wrapping it in paper, but we must keep the bread box dry and clean. , Mice and insects. It must, indeed, be a well-built house that has no visitors of this kind. Watch for cracks and holes ; and, if you find them, use metal over them. Try traps for mice and rats, and buy poison recommended by the druggist ; only be careful, then, of other animals. The Woman's Club of Pleasant Valley offered a prize for something that would actually keep off ants, and as yet no one has taken the prize. Look for ant hills outside and pour in kerosene. In the Starks* old home there were tiny red ants that had their home in some timber that could not be reached. The only trap for them was a saucer of fat in the pantry, in which they collected by thousands. Borax and other powders are recommended; but Mollie Stark remarked that the Stark ants seemed to be especially fond of borax. In one old house they could do nothing better than to put each of the four legs of a table in a pan of water, and stand the food on the table. Cleaning off the table. Mollie and Marjorie put the scraps of food from the plates into the clean-food scrap pail to be taken out to the chickens. The pieces of bread from the bread plate were returned to the bread Courtesy of the New York Agricultural CoUege at Cornell UnU/ersUy. Fig. 118. — A broad piazza for rest after work. box to be used for toast, and the butter was put in a small bowl to be used for cooking. The left-over mashed potato was kept for potato cakes; and the meat and dessert were finally set away in the refrigerator. The sweet corn was all eaten, but the cobs were given to the chickens to enjoy. Later they were to be collected and burned. You know that the food remnants, when the farm