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

stuffed with giblets Extract the seeds from large sweet green peppers, and cut the latter into halves. Pour boiling water over them to mellow their pungency. Leave them in this until they are cold and set them on ice to get firm. When ready to cook them fill each half with minced giblets seasoned and moistened with gravy. Put the halves together, fasten in place with skewers or toothpicks, set in a bake-dish; pour in enough stock to prevent scorching and bake, covered, twenty minutes. FAMILIAR TALK LIVING TO LEARN When one is too old to learn anything, his day of life is virtually over, so far as usefulness to his kind goes. The ten or twenty years left to him upon earth are a blunder on the part of some one, and we know that the Creator and Father of us all makes no mistakes. In the eloquent (and pessimistic) description of old age from the pen of the royal preacher-poet, we read that the aged shall be afraid of that which is high. The shrinking from new emprises, characteristic of the days when the almond-tree shall blossom and the knees that upbear (or keep) the house, shall tremble, is excusable when physical infirmity has enfeebled nervous forces and digestion. There is no excuse except this for the cessation of mind-growth. This may sound didactic. It is written with a purpose. Given a sane mind in a sane body, and learning should go on indefinitely. The man or woman of mature years leaves off lessons because he chooses to get out of the habit of study. The prejudice against old cooks—said by one authority to be either drunk or crazy as a class—is founded upon this disinclination to learn novel methods. She who honestly aspires after excellence never thinks that she has reached it. When, in saying, “that is not MY WAY,” a cook believes that she has put an end, not only to controversy, but to any suspicion that the world may have moved an inch or two since she learned her trade—she registers herself among the incurables.