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

of pickles. Except when eaten in combination with meats and other oily foods, they are actively unwholesome. The schoolgirl habit of champing pickled cucumbers and pickled limes, as a starving pauper might gnaw a crust, is pernicious and disgusting. The skins of raisins and grapes are indigestible. Figs are a well-known cathartic, a fact the housemother should avail herself of where a doctor, if summoned, would prescribe a drug. It is always better to control digestive irregularities by diet than by medicines, each of which is a poison which cures one ill by creating another. Pears dispose one to constipation. Ripe peaches and ripe apples regulate the bowels in a vast majority of cases; an orange, eaten at bed time, is a gentler agent than Rochelle salts, and does as good work. The veteran practitioner who insisted fifty years ago that “cupboard cures” were safer and surer than those wrought by materia medica was in advance of his age. The twentieth century is just growing up to his standard. I have spoken of qualifying milk with lime water for bilious people. Other articles of food unwholesome to some constitutions may be modified with wholesomeness by the use of certain condiments which act as correctives to hurtful qualities. For example, nuts may be eaten freely when salted. Thus treated they are introduced at dinner as digestive agents and appetizers. When accompanied by fruits, nut-oils are readily assimilated by the gastric juices. Hence, nuts and raisins go naturally together upon the menu. Cayenne pepper makes oysters and fish a safe enjoyment for those with whom they disagree actively if this be not used, and lemon-juice further counteracts the evil effects of fish-oil and the dreaded ptomaine. THE IMPROMPTU LARDER Some of her friends call it “The Emergency Pantry.” The owner objects to the term because it conveys an idea of bandages and styptics. Whereas, the cozy closet devoted to the comfort of possible guests—to be welcomed and fed, although unexpected—contains substantial food and appetizing delicacies. She belongs to the great and growing host of suburbanites dependent upon peripatetic butcher and baker, and