The Pocumtuc Housewife, a Guide to Domestic Cookery as it is Practised in ...

Thoroughwort, Yellow Dock and Golden thread are good in bitters. Food for the Sick Wine Whey. One pint of cream sweetened to your taste, warmed hot. Stir in sweet wine until curdled, grate in cinnamon and nutmeg. — — *After. Cook.* 1808. A Sick Bed Custard. Scald a quart of milk, sweeten and salt it a little, whip three eggs and stir in. Bake on coals in a pewter vessel. — — *After, Cook.* Milk Porridge. Boil new milk. Stir flour thoroughly into cold milk in a bowl, and pour it into the boiling milk. Let it cook six or eight minutes. Season with salt and if the patient likes with sugar and nutmeg. Dr. Ratcliff's Restorative Pork Jelly. Take a leg of well fed pork, beat it and break the bone. Set it over a gentle fire with three gallons of water, half an ounce each of mace and nutmeg and simmer it down to one gallon. Strain, cool and take off the fat. Give a cupful the first and last thing and at noon, putting salt to taste. Chicken Panada. Boil the chicken in a quart of water. Take off the skin. Put the white meat when cold into a marble mortar. Pound it to a paste with a little of the broth. Season with salt, a grate of nutmeg, and the least bit of lemon peel. Boil gently a few minutes to the consistency you wish. It should be such as you can drink, though tolerably thick. This conveys great nourishment in small compass." — *Lady from Phila.* 1808. Caudle. Make a fine smooth gruel of half grits. Strain and cool, stir at times. When to be used, add sugar, wine, lemon peel and nutmeg. Some like a spoonftd of brandy beside. ''[illustration: Caudle to give away to Poor Families.] Set three quarts of water on the fire. Mix smooth, enough oatmeal to thicken it with a pint of water. Pour this into the boiling water with twenty powdered Jamaica peppers. Boil to a good middling thickness, then add sugar, half a pint of well fermented table beer and a glass of gin. Boil all." — *A lady, Phila.* 1808. Miscellany Soap Making. Save some weak lye when you make soap and put it in the soap-grease barrel down cellar. Drop into it all your bacon rinds, bits of fat meat, the top of the pot after boiling salt meat, your cake fat when it gets dark, and everything fat that comes along. It is amazing how much comes along in the course of a year. The lye will work on it and keep it. In the spring when the ash hole is cleared have five or six bushels of ashes put in the ash leach, if you have one; if not, a hogshead with holes bored in the bottom, set up on sticks will do. Pour on enough water to wet the ashes thoroughly, but not to drip, and let them stand several days. Then pour on boiling water and let it drip into a tub. Continue putting on water until the lye grows weak. If it is strong enough to bear up an egg so that you can see a piece as big as a ninepence, it is about right. On soap day morning get breakfast out of the way early and plan an easy dinner. Swing the six pail kettle on the crane for the soap, and a smaller one for the grease which should be put on to heat with some strong lye. As it dissolves dip it off into the big pot and add more lye and water. A little experience will teach how much of each. Too much lye will make it thin, and the soap will eat your clothes and your hands. Water will make it jelly, but don't use too or it much will not keep. Boil until it becomes thick and ropy. If it does not "come," take out a little in a dish and try first water, then lye and then grease until it does thicken. Then add to the big pot whatever seems needed and boU again. When it comes, empty the kettle and start again. This is a good job done. — Compiled, Making soap in the new of the moon may make no difference in its commg, but it certainly does no harm.