Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

The netting excludes insects, yet allows the air to enter, and by drying the surface forms an impervious coating which will keep in the juices. Get large tin boxes for BREAD AND CAKE. Scald them frequently, drying thoroughly in the sun, and have clean, dry cloths in which to wrap each fresh batch of cake and baking of bread and biscuits. It is an excellent plan to make cotton bags in which to put LETTUCE, CELERY, TOMATOES, SPINACH and other green things you wish to store in the refrigerator. The shelves and ice-box are kept clean, the esculents fresh. Many housewives have adopted the expedient within a few years, and none has abandoned it after a trial. The bags are of coarse, light cotton cloth, or of cheese-cloth, and go into the weekly wash. TABLE BUTTER, wrapped in dampened cheesecloth squares, keeps sweet and firm. These squares are as large as a child’s pocket handkerchief, and hemmed to prevent raveling. Half a dozen will last a year, unless the “hired gurrel” takes them for dish-cloths. BUTTER, made into balls for the table, should be kept in a bowl of cold water in the refrigerator, and the water changed every morning. Keep in your own mind, and so far as you can, impress upon the conscience of servants, that whatever has been once in the refrigerator must be returned to cold storage, unless used. Meats soften and taint, butter turns rancid, fruits and vegetables decay when this precaution is neglected. KITCHEN UTENSILS It is not my purpose to discourage the housewife by a list of culinary furniture. The readers of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” may recall that Mr. St. Clair declared the evolution of irreproachable course dinners through such means as his negro cook employed in a smoky little kitchen with scanty store of pots and kettles—to be “nothing short of genius.” I have, before now, visited kitchens environed with pot-closets, where hung a glittering assortment of every conceivable patented “indispensable”—and sat down in the dining-room to greasy, watery soups, scorched meats, soggy bread and curdled custards. It is well to have