Stale bread or cake can be freshened by plunging it into cold water and then setting it in the oven for a few minutes. It must be used at once. Pieces of stale bread may be thoroughly dried in the oven, then put through the meat chopper and kept in a glass jar for covering croquettes, fried oysters, etc. Pieces of meat which in appearance and quantity will not be suitable for a meal may often be used by arranging some vegetable on the same dish. The pieces can be warmed in gravy and wreathed with carrots or peas. Or they can be put through the grinder, packed into a mould lined with boiled rice and the whole heated. Or they can be chopped, put into ramakins, covered with potato crust and slightly browned. These are merely samples of the many ways in which vegetables can be made to conceal the fact that there is not meat enough for a main dish. Left-over breakfast food of any of the cooked varieties can be made into delicate little cakes which will make up for the lack of a vegetable or do for a luncheon dessert. If there are about two cupfuls or less, mix with one egg and a saltspoonful of salt. Fry in very hot grease using about a dessertspoonful of batter for each cake. They will sputter and be hard to turn, but that merely indicates their good qualities. If thickening remains lumpy instead of stirring smooth, strain it through a fine wire strainer. Curdled mayonnaise need not be wasted. If a new dressing is begun and stirred until it begins to thicken, the curdled dressing may then be stirred in as if it were oil. Cream tomato soup can be kept from curdling if a bit of soda not larger than a pea is stirred into the milk. This holds good for any cream soup or for milk which is to be boiled. A piece of soda not larger than a pea boiled with vegetables will keep them green. Boil this same quantity of soda with old, tough vegetables and they will soften. It makes less odour through the house, and makes the vegetables themselves less strong, if cabbage, cauliflower, onions and some kinds of beans are drained two or three times while boiling, and covered again with fresh hot water. It is better not to put a cover over such things. If potatoes baked in the meat pan will not brown, they can be browned in a frying pan on top of the stove. When water has boiled off vegetables and they are burning, remove the pot from the stove and turn the contents quickly and lightly into another pot. Let everything which is inclined to stick, stick. Put hot water on the vegetables and return them to the stove if they need more cooking. Put water and a tablespoonful of baking soda into the burnt pot. Yolks of eggs, also lemons, will keep longer if laid in cold water. Pieces of charcoal wrapped in bits of cheese cloth and laid with meat or tucked inside poultry help to keep either sweet. If the cook must be a long while absent from the kitchen while fowls are roasting, strips of bacon pinned across their breasts and legs will baste the fowls for her.