Meat will keep three weeks in dry, frosty weather, and more than a week in cold dry weather, but not one week in damp, and hardly a day in very hot weather. If it has been frozen, it must lie in a rather warm place 3-4 hours before it is cooked. Meat should be taken down from the hooks every day, well looked over and wiped dry, and the hooks scalded and dried before the meat is put up again. Do not flour it. In very hot weather it is sometimes necessary to rub salt over the outside of a joint which is not to be cooked that day; but putting into a pan of treacle is much better, only it requires care, so as not to leave bits of fat, &c., in the pan when you take out the meat, and plenty of cold water to wash off what sticks to the joint when it comes out. It must, however, be carefully looked over when it comes from the butcher, and any doubtful bits pared off and burnt. If meat shows signs of “turning,” it must at once be put into a very hot oven for ½ hour, so as to be partly cooked. If it has really spoilt, nothing will save it, because the inside of the joint is then bad; but if it is browned, not just scorched, in time, the inside will be found perfectly nice. Of course, in a doubtful case, it may all be sliced up and fried; but then, as a joint, it is spoilt. The dripping from a half-spoilt joint is useless for food, and the bone will certainly spoil soup. Some cooks will plunge the meat into boiling water to save it, but this additional wetting is much more likely to hasten the catastrophe. In hot weather every bone must be baked, whether it is to make stock that day or not. Soup is just as good from baked bones as from raw ones. Every bone that has been boiled must be placed in a sharp heat and quite dried, and “scraps” which would help to make stock must be burnt if the cook has no time or room to make it. For one little bone is enough to spoil all the milk and cream, and will cause all perishable things in the larder to be just ready to decay. The microscope helps us to understand the amazing rapidity with which germs multiply and diffuse themselves, but no one is yet able to say where their venom stops; probably they do harm to the entire house at the least. If bones are thoroughly dried, they will do no harm. All fat and suet should be cooked as soon as possible after it comes into the house; it should be wiped, sliced thin, and boiled for 2-3 hours, then strained, and the skin, which seems like leather, burnt in the middle of a hot fire. As soon as the fat is hard, it should be removed from the gravy, soup, or stock, wiped dry, and folded in thin paper. In very hot weather, sometimes it will not cake. Then a plate must be spared for it. The superfluous fat from a joint reduced to mince should be treated in the same way.