The home cook book

This soup or stew is made afresh once or twice a week by every family in France who can afford to buy the meat for it. The families who can afford to live well eat it for its own merit; those who can not afford the most substantial foods every day take it in between their vegetable soups to keep up their strength and nourish the body in full force. It has been said that the temperance of Frenchmen is due to the delicious preparation of this dish by their wives. They eat at dinner of the nourishing pot au feu, followed by a vegetable salad or by fruit, and they have had a "square" meal. Their hunger is satisfied. A craving for something more does not lead them to a dram of whiskey, as has happened in unnumbered instances in our country. Men have sometimes become drunkards because their body is starved by poor cooking at home — their bodies crave substantial food, and they ignorantly stifle the craving with the poison of liquor. Let us have more of the French pot au feu. The French housewife begins to make this great dish of her people soon after breakfast on the day it is to be eaten. She puts the various things that go to make it gradually into the pot, attends to it throughout the day, keeps it simmering over a small fire, and when the good man comes in at night has it smoking hot, ready to dish in a hot bowl or deep platter. On the first day she commonly serves it with shces of bread soaked in it; on the second day with rice, vermicelH, macaroni, etc. And one more word as to the French housewife's process of making before we give full directions. In the way she goes at it, a great French cook says, she shows the most truly scientific knowledge. She first lays the meat in her pot and pours cold water to it in the proportion of about two quarts of water to three pounds of beef. She then places it upon the fire, where it becomes slowly, very slowly, hot. In this slow heating the heat enlarges the fibre of the meat, dissolves the albuminoids and gelatinoids which it contains, and diffuses the savory or extractive parts of the meat through the water. From this one fact of bringing to boil slowly and boiling in the gentlest manner, a tasty, nutritious dish is obtained. If, however, the housewife had heated the water quickly the albumen of the meat would have been coagulated, the fibres shrunk, the savory parts not diffused, and the result would have been tasteless broth and tough, hard meat. Housewives, do remember this difference between slow heating and boiling and quick heating and boiling of meats.