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

hot enough to brown it--hot enough to heat the plates, which are very thick, and to cook the fish within twenty or twenty-five minutes. If you wash the board on which the fish is cut, at once, in plenty of hot water, with soap and a little soda or borax all the odor of the fish will be removed. Don't let any of the utensils stand with the fish drying on them, because if you do it will be very much harder to destroy the odor. And, by the way, ladies, the odor of onions is another thing that troubles some persons. The odor of onions on boards, knives and dishes you can do away with entirely by using parsley. If you take a knife with which you have cut onions, and chop a little parsley with it, or draw the knife through the root of parsley two or three times, it entirely destroys the odor of the onion. So that you see you never need have any trouble in that way in the kitchen. One of the ladies asks me how to prevent the odor of onions going through the house when you are cooking them. What makes onions, cabbage and turnips smell when you are cooking them is the escape of an exceedingly volatile oil which they all contain; in all of them it has the same characteristics; it does not begin to escape until they are tender. The oil does not begin to escape until the vegetables are tender; if you continue to boil them after that, it will escape. If you take up cabbage or turnips as soon as they are tender, that is, as soon as their substance begins to grow tender, you will notice there will be comparatively little odor; but if you keep on boiling them, according to the old-fashioned rules, for an hour, two hours, or three hours,--you know you sometimes boil cabbage all day long,--you will be sure to have a nice odor through the house. In cutting the onions, of course, if you bend over them, that same oil rising