Harper's cook book encyclopædia

Claret Cup. — Pour a bottle of claret into a large jug, and add two glasses of sherry, brandy, or any wine, spirit, or liqueur that may be preferred. Put in the thin rind of a lemon and two table - spoonfuls of powdered sugar. Let it stand for half an hour till the sugar is dissolved, then put in a little sliced cucumber. Just before using, add a bottle of soda or seltzer water and a large piece of ice. Sliced nectarines, peaches, or raspberries may be used instead of lemon-rind. Cocoa, Iced Coffee Cocoa, Iced. — Put in a saucepan six ounces of sugar and one-quarter of a pound of pulverized cocoa, and one quart of water. Boil the mixture until it is like a thick syrup; then remove from the fire and stir occasionally until it is cool, when three table-spoonfuls of vanilla extract may be added. This syrup may be kept in a cool place for several weeks and used as needed. Serve the cocoa in glasses with shaved ice and whipped cream. Cocoa Shells. — To a large handful of shells allow one pint of cold water. Let them soak overnight in a warm place. In the morning, boil steadily for one hour. Serve, with boiled milk, hot. Coffee. — A coffee expert, in an article which appeared in the New York Sun, says : Get good coffee. The larger grocers will have coffee fresh roasted every day or two, and you should never buy more than a week's supply at a time. If your grocer has more than one color of roast, get the bright, or Boston, roast. Grind the coffee at home, and only enough at a time to make one drawing. For the French coffee-pot, or any other of the filtering pots, the coffee has to be ground very fine, and this is the first element in their wasteful character. Every appetizing whiff which comes from that mill is just so much lost to the coffee. Everything should have been made ready for the making of the coffee before the grinding was done. Now I will tell you the most important of trade secrets. The water must be cooked. Water that has merely been brought to a boil, for some reason will not absorb the essence freely. For making both tea and coffee the water must be boiled for fifteen or twenty minutes. Now for the pot. Let it be just an ordinary plain coffee-pot, either of tin or granite ware, but be sure that -dt is clean, and that the tinning or granite enamel is perfect, so that no iron is exposed. If the iron is exposed it will be certain to make ink with the tannin in the coffee, and your coffee will be spoiled. Put your ground coffee into the pot, and then pour in the cooked water while it is boiling hot. Put in all the water that will be needed at once, so as to have the greatest quantity at hand to absorb the coffee essence. Then let the pot stand on the stove until the water has again come to a good hard boil. Remove it and the coffee is ready. If you want milk, have the milk boiled, and remember that milk is better than cream to bring out the coffee flavor. There is one other good way to make coffee. That is the old-fashioned Yankee method of putting the coffee in the pot with cold water, and leaving the pot on the fire until the water comes to a brisk boil. The Yankee coffee-pot has a whistle on it which blows when the steam comes out and gives notice that the coffee is ready.