The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, Adapted to the Use of Private Families

for the table, it is seldom well prepared. Mix on a trencher, in the proportion of a tea-spoonful of flour to four ounces of the best butter. Put it into a saucepan, and two or three table-spoonfuls of hot water; boil it quick for a minute, and shake it all the time. Milk used instead of water, requires rather less butter, and looks whiter. MICE. The poisonous substances generally prepared for the destruction of mice are attended with danger, and the use of them should by all means be avoided. Besides the common traps, baited with cheese, the following remedy will be found both safe and efficacious. Take a few handfuls of wheat flour, or malt meal, and knead it into a dough. Let it grow sour in a warm place, mix with it some fine iron filings, form the mass into small balls, and put them into the holes frequented by the mice. On eating this preparation, they are inevitably killed. Cats, owls, or hedgehogs, would be highly serviceable in places infested with mice. An effectual mousetrap may be made in the following manner. Take a plain four square trencher, and put into the two contrary corners of it a large pin, or piece of knitting needle. Then take two sticks about a yard long, and lay them on the dresser, with a notch cut at each end of the sticks, placing the two pins on the notches, so that one corner of the trencher may lie about an inch on the dresser or shelf that the mice come to. The opposite corner must be baited with some butter and oatmeal plastered on the trencher; and when the mice run towards the butter, it will tip them into a glazed earthen vessel full of water, which should be placed underneath for that purpose. To prevent the trencher from tipping over so as to lose its balance, it may be fastened to the shelf or dresser with a thread and a little sealing wax, to restore it to its proper position. To prevent their devastations in barns, care should be