Common-Sense Papers on Cookery

pale cheeks, foretelling of returning health and strength, as surely as the first blush of dawn upon the eastern mountain-tops foretells the coming day! Again, too, the refreshment taken, the first long sound sleep, nature’s great restorer, how different to watch now, to when the restless patient tossed and turned and muttered, and seemed to suffer more than when awake! There is something very beautiful in a calm and tranquil sleep— “An infant when it gazes on the light, A child the moment when it drains the breast, * * * * * Feel rapture, but not such true joy are reaping As they who watch o’er what they love while sleeping. “For there it lies, so tranquil, so beloved, All that it hath of life with us is living, So gentle, stirless, helpless, and unmoved, And all unconscious of the joy ’tis giving.” But let us leave the convalescent chamber with the watcher and the watched, and descend to the kitchen, and see what we there can do to help on the recovery so happily going on above. First let us take that probably most valuable of all invalids’ preparations—viz., beef-tea. The quickest and best method of preparing good beef-tea is as follows:—Take a pound of good lean gravy-beef, cut it up into little pieces, pour over them a pint of _cold_ water, and add a little salt. Then take a fork and squeeze these pieces in every direction, in order, as much as possible, to extract the juices out of the pieces of meat. Next place it all—_i.e._, water and meat—in an enamelled saucepan, and place it by the _side_ of the fire, not on the fire, and gradually heat it, taking the greatest care that it does not boil. Having continued this process for about an hour and a half or two hours, during the last half-hour keeping the beef-tea hot without boiling, strain the whole off through a strainer, pressing the meat again with a spoon, so as to squeeze as much as possible all the goodness out of it. Then remove all the fat. This