Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and HappinessBeecher, Catharine Esther
General
Miss Beecher's Housekeeper and Healthkeeper: Containing Five Hundred Receipes for Economical and Healthful Cooking; also, Many Directions for Securing Health and Happiness
Beecher, Catharine Esther
Cooking; Home economics
=To cleanse Calf’s Head and Feet.=—Wash clean, and sprinkle pounded
resin over the hair; dip in boiling water and take out immediately,
and then scrape them clean; then soak them in water for four days,
changing the water every day.
=To prepare Rennet.=—Take the stomach of a new-killed calf, and do
not wash it, as it weakens the gastric juice. Hang it in a cool and
dry place five days or so; then turn the inside out, and slip off the
curds with the hand. Then fill it with salt, with a little saltpetre
mixed in, and lay it in a stone pot, pouring on a tea-spoonful of
vinegar, and sprinkling on a handful of salt. Cover it closely, and
keep for use. After six weeks, take a piece four inches square and put
it in a bottle with five gills of cold water and two gills of rose
brandy; stop it close, and shake it when you use it. A table-spoonful
is enough for a quart of milk.
=To Salt down Fish.=—Scale, cut off the heads, open down the back, and
remove most of the spine, to have them keep better. Lay them in salt
water two hours, to extract blood. Sprinkle with fine salt, and let
them lie over night. Then mix one peck of coarse and fine salt, one
ounce of saltpetre, (or half an ounce of saltpetre and half an ounce
of saleratus,) and one pound of sugar. Then pack in a firkin. Begin
with a layer of salt, then a layer of fish, skin downward. A peck of
salt will answer for twenty-five shad, and other fish in proportion.
As in most country families, when meat is salted for the year’s
use, pork is the meat most generally and most largely relied upon,
considerable space is devoted to its proper preparation. Special
attention is given to various modes of curing and preserving it.
=To try out Lard.=—Take what is called _the leaves_, and take off all
the skin, cut it into pieces an inch square, put it into a clean pot
over a slow fire, and try it till the scraps look a reddish-brown;
take great care not to let it burn, which would spoil the whole. Then
strain it through a strong cloth, into a stone pot, and set it away
for use.
Take the fat to which the smaller intestines are attached, (not the
large ones,) and the flabby pieces of pork not fit for salting, try
these in the same way, and set the fat thus obtained where it will
freeze, and by spring the strong taste will be gone, and then it can
be used for frying. A tea-cup of water prevents burning while trying.
Corn-fed pork is best. Pork made by still-house slops is almost
poisonous, and hogs that live on offal never furnish healthful food. If
hogs are properly fed, the pork is not unhealthful.
Pork with kernels in it is measly, and is unwholesome.
A thick skin shows that the pork is old, and that it requires more time
to boil. If bought pork is very salt, soak it some hours. Do not let
pork freeze, if you intend to salt it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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