Virginia Cookery-book

Boil a handful of dried hops, or a two-inch cube, if you use those put up and pressed for market, in two quarts of water, and add four large potatoes, boiled, mashed, and strained ; scald six table-spoonfuls of flour in the liquid, adding one cup of sugar and one cup of salt ; when cold, add yeast to ferment it, thinning the liquid to two and a half quarts. This, put in well-corked bottles, will keep six weeks in the warmest weather. Use half a teacupf ul for each quart loaf of bread. Potato Ybast. After removing the peel, slice eight common-sized white potatoes and put them in a kettle to boil, with five pints of water; add a double-handful of hops, tied up in a thin muslin bag; let all boil together until the potatoes are thoroughly cooked; then take the potatoes out of the kettle with a perforated ladle, put them into a bowl, and mash them perfectly smooth; then stir into them a teacupful of pulverized sugar and a smaller teacupful of salt; then strain over them the hop-tea from the kettle, and you have new yeast; wait until the heat is only tepid, and then add a cupful of already risen yeast to make the new ferment. In twenty-four hours it is fit for use. Do not put any flour into this yeast. The salt is put in, during warm weather, to prevent it from turning sour, and therefore may be omitted in winter. If you prefer doing so, make it into cakes with com meal and dry them in the shade. Biscuits. At present this favorite bread is generally made with the help of Horsford's, Boyal Baking, or Rumford's yenat powders, particular recipes being given on their several packages; but a few general hints concerning their preparation may be useful to inexperienced house - keepers. The cook should be instructed to roll her dough till only half as thick as you wish your biscuits to be when done, if any of the above powders are used, as it will rise a great deal, in spite of being stuck with a fork — a part of the biscuit - making process never to be neglected. Nothing can be more inelegant than a large, thick biscuit. Let the oven be well heated before the cook begins to make up her dough even, for, the quicker the process, the more likely it is to be successful. Biscuits should be baked in about ten minutes, brown and crisp, but not hard. Occasionally a person is found who likes a soft, white biscuit; if so, special directions may be given to that effect, for this may be considered an idiosyncrasy of taste. A biscuit should be cut not more than three inches in diameter, and not more than a third of an inch in thickness. For variety, biscuits may be made out with the hand, instead of being cut with a cutter. Strange as it seems, so small a matter makes a decided change in the look and taste of the article, and it is well worth a house - keeper's while to study all these little ways of gratifying that love of novelty so inherent with us all, but with the young especially. Thin Biscuit. A popular bread for the tea-table is supplied by merely taking as much biscuit - dough as would suffice for one biscuit, dividing it into two parts, and rolling each part out round, until the circumference is five inches instead of three. Stick with a fork here and there over the surface. The cakes will be very thin, of course, and can be cooked in five minutes; the oven being moderately and steadily heated. Let them brown, but not be the least burnt. Prepare as many as your family require. A pint of flour will furnish a nice plateful. Beatbn Biscuit.