With a saucepan over the sea

In making soup stock, strain it, after long simmering, but let it cool in an open bowl. Next day, remove the cake of fat on top ; clarify it by cooking it in a pan of water. The impurities will sink to the bottom, and the fat in a solid piece can be used for frying or braising, as the flavor, including vegetables and herbs, is better tasting and more wholesome than lard. French cooks, too, take the fat from chicken broth when it cools, clarify it, then use it instead of butter for pastry or delicate frying. Fish should have a separate pan of fat, clarified after each time of using, and this, instead of being thrown away, will keep some time in a cold place. In preparing stock, cut up the meat into dice, split the bones so that the marrow will come out, and add to the nutriment, then clean and cut the vegetables with exceeding care. Potatoes should first be parboiled before using in soups or stews, as they belong to the deadly nightshade family, and the poison passes off with the first water. Onions With a Saucepan over the Sea and garlic, so beloved by the French and Italians, lose their sharpness and rank flavor by parboiling. One of the best French hotels in New York, where the opera stars always go for certain country dishes, dear to their childhood, has a special sauce of garlic, for entrees, a recipe of Gascony, but so delicate, because of this first boiling, that few people can resist it. About a quart of cold water to each pound of meat, with one teaspoonful of salt added, when the stock is strained to be put away, one spoonful to each quart of stock, is the right proportion. Use as little pepper as possible. Some of our most expensive hotels ruin their cooking with too much pepper. A French cook would be offended if more pepper or salt was asked for at the table, for the proper amount should be added before serving. Cold cooked vegetables are never nice warmed up ; a foreign cook would turn the beans or peas, or whatever it is, into a cream soup, made with milk and yolk of egg, if stock is not at hand, or would use them to garnish meats, or served with mayonnaise as a mixed salad. Equal parts, say a cupful each, of peas, string beans, potatoes, carrots, or cauliflower, make a salad fit to give the most fastidious guest. Pretty garnishing of lemon or With a Saucepan over the Sea parsley, hard-boiled eggs, or any vegetable, has much to do with the looks of a dish, as well as to the taste, for the mouth literally waters when hunger is exdted by the eye or the sense of smell, and digestion is easier when food is enjoyed. The water in which vegetables or rice has been cooked — excepting potatoes and cabbage — would be used by a French cook, with additions, to make good soup; the water from boiled mutton, with herbs, onions, carrots, rice, or barley, is not bad when served as mutton broth, and the water from boiled fish, with the same seasoning, some milk and oysters, with the liquor from the oysters, and flour and butter to thicken it, results in a nice soup, richer in flavor than the usual stewed oysters. Even a chicken can be cooked with water to make soup, then taken out, stuffed in the way generally done, with bread-crumbs, etc., and dredged with flour, and basted with butter or the fat of bacon, in the oven, will provide a palatable roast. This is because most of the flavor, as well as the weight, departs in smoke or steam, in cooking. Meats, fried or roasted before the fire, lose from onequarter to one-third their size and considerable of their succulence. That is why cooks grow fat, absorbing the best of what they send to the diningroom while bending over the fire. Braising is the With a Saucepan over the Sea