The Farm Table. 613 



Each new cook book presents such a bewildermg variety of recipes for 

 bread, cake and similar mixtures that an inexperienced housekeeper 

 naturally looks upon cookery as a most complex art. But the woman 

 who studies domestic affairs closely is able to classify her recipes in much 

 the same fashion in which the scientist groups plants and animals. If 

 we recall the formulas in daily use in our own kitchens, or if we glance 

 over the recipes for doughs in any cook book we may happen to possess 

 • — even those given away with patent foods or medicines — we may learn 

 much that will be of practical use in simplyfying the processes. 



Beside the essential materials already mentioned — flour or meal, liquid 

 and salt — another thing is now-a-days considered necessary, although 

 the primitive forms of bread were made without it. This is what the 



^'^mm- 



^^ J T ■/ 







.;iiH^. 



iVl^V; 



■^^ 



Fig. 155. Corn, an important cereal, suggests corn meal mush, Indian meal 



pudding, Johnny cake. 



old-time housekeeper, for want of a better name sometimes called " light- 

 ening " — that is, something to separate the solid substance in a loaf, 

 fill it with air, and make it light and porous and thus give it greater pala- 

 tability and digestibility. The other types of material which produce 

 variation in these mixtures may be briefly described as shortening, sweet- 

 ening, and seasoning. 



All the ingredients then, which, by being combined in different pro- 

 portions and served in different shapes, give us so many kinds of food, 

 may be reduced to these classes — (i) flour, (2) liquid, (3) air, (4) 

 shortening, (5) sweetening, and (6) seasoning. Let us consider each 

 of these from the standpoint of the housekeeper. 



