Miss Parloa's kitchen companion

The refrigerator must be perfectly clean, and with these precautions there need be no trouble in keeping all kinds of food in a good refrigerator. People who live in flats are so dependent on this mode of keeping the daily supply of food that too much care cannot be used to have the refrigerator sweet and healthful. How to Prepare Liquid Cochineal. Put into a small saucepan half a cupful of water, half an ounce of powdered cochineal, a level table-spoonful of cream-of-tartar, a piece of alum the size of a large pea, and one table-spoonful of sugar. Place on the fire, and boil gently for fifteen minutes. Take the saucepan from the fire, and let the liquid cool slightly. Put a small tunnel in the mouth of a small bottle ; place a piece of cheese-cloth over the tunnel, pressing it down a little. Pour the liquid on the cheesecloth, and strain it into the bottle. With a teaspoon press as much of the cochineal as possible through the sieve. Cork the bottle, and keep in a cool, dark place. All the work must be done carefully ; for if a drop of the cochineal falls on the fingers or table, it makes a stain that will last a good while. A few drops of this preparation will color an icing, a cream, or a jelly. It will keep several months. How to Make Soft Soap. All the strong-flavored fats, such as the fat of mutton, goose, and turkey, should be tried out and strained while fresh and sweet. Keep this strained fat by itself, and use it when soft soap is to be made. If it be strained into five-pound lard-cans, there will be no trouble about weighing or measuring it at the time of making the soap. To make nine gallons of soap put into a large kettle a pound can of Babbitt's pure potash and one quart of water. Place on the fire, and boil for fifteen minutes. At the end of that time add a five-pound can of grease, and boil slowly an hour longer, stirring frequently with a wooden stick. At the end of an hour Pour the boiling mixture into a large soap-tub. Stir into this two gallons of hot water. In about fifteen minutes add two more gallons of hot water. Stir well, and add four gallons and a half of water, this last quantity to be either hot or cold, as suits your convenience. Stir the soap three or four times in the next hour. When cold, it will be thick and white. What to Do if Fat Boils Over. Everybody who reads the newspapers knows that fires are frequently caused by fat boiling so high in the kettle in which it has been placed that it escapes over the sides of the utensil and falls upon the stove. In such cases the common impulse of most spectators, in their desire to extinguish the blaze, is to do what is really the worst thing possible,—throw water on the fire. A pailful of water may put out the blaze quickly, but a pailful only spreads the flames. Firemen say that ashes are the best extinguisher at all likely to be at hand. If fat boils