ladies’ department. 
355 
£aVm JDqmiinuni. 
COMFORT AND COOKER I. 
We have often asked why simple cookery is 
not made part of the education of the girls 
brought up in the various schools. We know 
how easily soldiers and sailors learn cookery, 
when obliged to take their turn at cooking; 
and the girls in the schools might he employed 
in turn in the kitchen of their parents, masters, 
and mistresses, or their patrons and patron¬ 
esses. 
The services that might be rendered to this 
class of society, in respect to comfort, temper, 
health, and economy, by a more general and 
competent skill in cookery, is hardly to he esti¬ 
mated. Little have the rich an idea of the vex¬ 
ation, the ill-humor, the bad digestion, and 
waste, that come of those cooks proverbially 
sent upon this earth by the enemy of mankind, 
as an offset to heaven’s bounty in furnishing 
good food. What is commonly self-called a 
plain cook, (plain in the sense in which the 
term is applied to a woman,) is a cook who 
spoils food for low wages. She is a cook, not 
because she knows anything about cookery, 
but because she prefers the kitchen fire to 
scrubbing floors, polishing grates, or making 
beds. A cook who can boil a potato and dress 
a mutton chop is one in a thousand. 
If we could see by the help of an Asmodeus 
what is going on at the dinner hour of the humbler 
of the middle class, what a spectacle of dis¬ 
comfort, ill-temper, and consequent ill-conduct 
it would be ! The man quarrels with his wife 
because there is nothing he can eat, and he 
often makes up in drink for the deficiencies in 
the article of food. Liquor is the consolation 
to the spirits, and the resource to the balked 
appetite. There is thus not only the direct 
waste of food and detriment to health, but the 
further consequent waste of the use of spirits, 
with its injury to the habits and the health. On 
the other hand, people who eat well, and drink 
moderately, have the satisfaction of appetitewith 
relish, dispensing with the use of stimulants. 
Good humor, too, and good health follow a good 
meal; and by a good meal, we mean anything, 
however simple, well dressed in its way. A 
rich man may live very expensively and very 
ill, and a poor one very frugally but very well, 
if it be his good fortune to have a good cook in 
his wife or servant; and a ministering angel a 
good cook is, either in one capacity or the oth¬ 
er, not only to those in humble circumstances, 
but to many above them of the class served by 
what are self-termed professed cooks, which is 
too frequently an affair of profession purely, 
and who are to be distinguished from the plain 
cooks only in this, that they require much 
larger wages for spoiling food, and still much 
more in quantity, and many other articles to 
boot. 
Great, we repeat, would be the benefit both 
to the subjects of the instruction, and to the 
public generally, of miking cookery a branch 
of female education; and amongst the prizes 
which the bountiful of both sexes are fond of 
bestowing in the country, we should like to see 
some offered for the best boiled potato, the best 
grilled mutton chop, and the best seasoned 
hotch-potch soup, or broth. In writing of a 
well-boiled potato, we are aware that we shall 
incur the contempt of many, for attracting im¬ 
portance to a thing they suppose to be so com¬ 
mon; but the fact is, that their contempt arises, 
as is often the origin of contempt, for their igno¬ 
rance, there not being one person in ten thou¬ 
sand who has ever seen or tasted the great 
rarity-—a well-boiled potato .—Condensed from 
the London Examiner. 
Anotta Dye. —This beautiful summer color 
is one of the readiest known to the good house¬ 
wife; but as there are some who have to 
make it, we will give them the simple direction. 
First, be careful to procure the article pure, as 
it is one very subject to adulteration. Cut it 
into small pieces and boil it in soft water with 
an equal weight of pearlash, in a copper boiler, 
say one pound to four gallons of water. Rinse 
the articles to be dyed, in clean water, and then 
dip them in the dye and air them, and then let 
them boil some time; take out and rinse. The 
quantity of anotta used must be regulated en¬ 
tirely by the depth of color required. A little 
experience will soon teach that. 
Elder-Bud Pickle. —The clusters of elder 
buds just before they expand into blossom, 
make an excellent pickle of a peculiar, and 
rather pleasant flavor. Another pickle, much 
liked by some epicures, is made of the young 
elder shoots in spring. To prepare them, peel 
off the outer skin and soak the stalks twelve 
hours, in weak brine, and then boil them a few 
seconds in vinegar. Take them out and pack 
them close in a jar with pepper, ginger, mace, 
pimento, and pour the vinegar boiling hot over, 
to fill the jar, and keep hot for a couple of 
hours ; then set away to cool and tie up for use. 
Making Brine—For the Use of Young House¬ 
keepers. —Dissolve four pounds of good salt in 
each gallon of water. Add a few handfuls of 
small lumps of rock or other coarse salt to each 
cwt. of meat, as you pack it, before putting on 
the brine. This will maintain its strength. If 
the pieces of meat are small and lean, they will 
absorb salt enough to be palatable, in three 
days. You may then take it out, and if the 
weather is cool, keep it hung in a dry room, or 
pack it dry in coarse salt. 
Jerked Beef.— This is the name given to a 
plan of preserving meat, much in use in South 
America, and often practised in the frontier 
settlements of the United States and Canada, 
where salt is costly and scarce. All the lean 
parts of the carcass of beef or venison are cut 
into fine shreds, and thoroughly dried in the 
sun; or if the weather proves bad, sometimes by 
the fire and smoke. When well prepared, they 
will keep sweet for years. 
