A Course of Lectures on the Principles of Domestic Economy and Cookery

dirty, and sometimes they are so that they blacken your fingers in shelling, wash the shells of the peas before you begin to shell them, but do not wash the peas after they are shelled. Of course the inside of the pod is perfectly clean, and if your hands are clean and the shells are clean, you do not need to wash them. In using green peas in summer time it is well to have a quantity of them, perhaps twice as many as you are likely to use for one meal, and shell them, because you know they are of different sizes always. Shell them and separate them into two different sizes, the smallest and the largest, and then cook one size for one day, putting the others in a very cool place, or refrigerator, and cook them the next day, because if you have the large and small ones mixed they do not cook evenly. You will find them very much nicer; if you keep them in a cool place it will not hurt to keep them. The length of time that it takes to boil lettuce or spinach depends somewhat on the time of the year. The tenderer the spinach is, of course, the quicker it will boil; when it is very young and tender it will boil in two or three minutes; when it is older it may take as long as ten minutes. Ladies very often make the mistake in boiling spinach that they do in boiling cabbage. They boil it sometimes until the leaves are destroyed, in order to soften the stalk. The better way is to tear away the stalk and use only the leaf. Of course, that gives you a smaller quantity of spinach than if you use the stalk, but when you use the tough, woody stalk you waste the leaf in boiling. Lettuce usually boils in a couple of minutes. One of the ladies speaks about cooking spinach without any water. You can do that if you wish. Just put in a sauce pan, after having carefully picked it over