FoodNet

The Queen Cook Book: A Careful Compilation of Recipes and Practical ...

1895

Page 94 · 2 recipe records on this page

Presented as published in 1895. Historical recipes may not meet modern food-safety standards. Cook from the modern interpretation, not the original instructions.
water, then mash and put through a colander into a crock, with the water they were boiled in, then add the other two quarts of hot water, making four quarts, then sugar, salt and flour; when it is cool enough to hold the finger in, add the yeast soaked in a cup of warm water. Let stand over night, in a warm place, stirring once an hour till bed time. Next morning let it get warm, give it a good stir, and use one pint of it for one large loaf of bread, an even teaspoon of saltBread. Knead it twenty minutes. Do not sponge it, but mix it right up as soft as you can knead it, as other bread, and put it in pans. It will be light enough in three hours to bake, while you are getting dinner. Put the rest of the yeast in glass cans, seal tight, keep in cel- lar. Remember, no other wetting but the yeast. Do not use the bread till next day, as no bread should be eaten the day it is baked. To Make Butter. Cream at a temperature of 58° Fahrenheit, will churn in from fifteen to twenty minutes. Do not churn on the gallop but with a quiet steady hand without leaving it. When it comes whirl the dasher some, to gather the particles of butter together. Do not have it soft, as no standing will make it right again. Some prefer to take it up into very cold water to work out the first buttermilk, others think it not well to do so. Put two heaping teaspoons of salt to every pound of butterButter, working out the buttermilk so as not to mash the grain (this is a knack or quality that few possess), work it ten minutes, then set it away till next morning, taste to see if it is salt enough, if not, add more and work it again till all the butter- milk is out. Make it into rolls and keep it in a cool 24^ The Queen Cook Book place, covered tight, as it absorbs everything in the atmosphere. Butter made while the cow can obtain grass, from the first of June to the last of Octo- ber, has a superior flavor and is esteemed more highly than that made in winter. Winter butter can be im- proved by feeding the cows silage that is clean and sweet, with plenty of grain or well cured green cut clover or corn stalks cut ^nd gathered green; add to these generous feedings of bran middlings with one quart of corn meal in it, or linseed meal. Put a little salt in her food and do not give her very cold water in the five winter months. One new milch cow will im- prove the flavor of all the butter from a small herd. Butter gains nothing by being kept over two or three weeks and loses much in delicacy of flavor by such treatment. The flavor of the Jersey milk and butter is going into disrepute. Cows fed upon rich nutritious food, with some corn meal and yellow carrots will make more highly colored butter than if fed on hay. The ripening of the cream decides largely the flavor of the butter in winter. Sour cream makes the best butter, but not aged. About sixty or sixty- five degrees will ripen it in twenty-four hours. Skim each milking when it is twenty-four hours old, whether sour or not, and for the cream from each cow put in the cream crock two cups of sour buttermilk from the last churning as a starter in the winter and keep the cream at a temperature of fifty-eight degrees, which is right for churning, some say sixty-two; try it. A thermometer to test the cream is as necessary as a churn. Irenaeus of the New York Observer tells us of a Mr. Starr, a friend of his that lived at Litchfield, Connecticut, who had a splendid dairy. " Mr. Starr's method of setting his milk for cream, is not in shallow pans, as the women of old were wont to do; but in * _ The Queen Cook Book 245