Mix flour, baking powder and 1/2 teaspoonful salt, then sift twice, work in Crisco with tips of fingers, add milk gradually. The dough should be just soft enough to handle. Toss on floured baking board, divide into two parts, pat lightly and roll out. Place in two shallow Criscoed cake tins and bake in quick oven fifteen minutes. Spread them with butter. Moisten cornstarch with cream, put into pan with oysters and seasonings and make very hot. Allow to cook a few minutes then pour half over one crust, place other crust on top and pour over rest of oysters. Serve at once. Sufficient for one large shortcake. Salmon Mold 1 can salmon 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 cupful rolled crackers 3 eggs 1 tablespoonful Worcestershire sauce Salt and pepper to taste Sauce 1 tablespoonful Crisco 1 tablespoonful flour 1 egg 1 cupful milk Salt and pepper to taste Parsley _For the mold._ Remove oil, skin and bone from the salmon. Rub salmon smooth, add eggs well beaten, crackers, and seasonings. Turn into a Criscoed mold, and steam for one hour. Turn out and serve with sauce. _For sauce._ Blend Crisco and flour in a saucepan over fire, add milk, and stir and boil for five minutes. Add egg well beaten, and seasonings, pour at once over salmon. Garnish with parsley. Sufficient for one small loaf. [Illustration] MEATS [Illustration] Cookery is a branch of applied chemistry. To cook anything, in the narrower sense of the term, means to bring about changes in it by submitting it to the action of heat, and usually of moisture also, which will make it more fitted for food; and it is on the nature of this action on different materials that the _rationale_ of the cook's art chiefly depends. Good cooking can make any meat tender, and bad cooking can make any meat tough. The substance in meat called albumen becomes tougher and more indigestible, the higher the temperature to which it is subjected reaches beyond a certain point. It is this effect of heat on albumen, therefore, which has to be considered whenever the cooking of meat is in question, and which mainly determines the right and the wrong, whether in the making of a soup or a custard, the roasting or boiling of a chicken or a joint, or the frying of a cutlet or an omelet. We now will see to begin with, what are the special ways in which it bears on meat cookery. Take a little bit of raw meat and put it in cold water. The juice gradually soaks out of it, coloring the water pink and leaving the meat nearly white. Now take another bit, and pour boiling water upon it; and though no juice can be seen escaping, the whole surface of the meat turns a whitish color directly.