Oatmeal should be kept fresh in a shut case or package.
If you think your brain requires a fillip, eat plenty of beans, but they must be very much cooked, and should be well buttered.
Vegetables.—Of vegetables I should like to say they can scarcely be too much cooked. Wash well in salted water; let leafy ones have a swim to get rid of grasshoppers and caterpillars and sand, then put them into boiling salted water and take off the lid. Roots may be allowed covers.
Peel and slice your onions under water or at a tap.
I once watched a grand chef cooking potatoes, and he told me that the best of the potato lies next the skin, so he never cuts it, but he peels his potatoes on a fork after boiling. The cunning cook boils a bunch of mint with the potatoes.
Excellent food for workers are parsnips, beetroots, or onions.
Boiling Meat.—If you want the meat and not the juice, you should have your pot boiling fast when the meat is put in. But if you want gravy or beef-tea (not meat), put your meat into cold water and bring it slowly to the boil.
Stock Pot.—Keep a pot going all day, into which you can put any broken-up bones or scraps left over, to make nourishing broth. Clean turnips, carrots, and onions improve it. Before using let it get cold, so as to skim off the fat.
Barley, rice, or tapioca may be added, and for flavoring add salt, pepper, chopped parsley, celery, a clove, or mace.
Milk.—Milk will take the flavor of any strong smell near it. Stale milk added to fresh will turn the whole of it sour. Sour milk need not be wasted. You can use it for baking or cooking, by adding bicarbonate of soda. Sour milk will clean ink or fruit stains, and in washing it bleaches linen. Yellowed linen should soak in it, so should spoons and forks. Sour milk cleanses oil-cloth as well as women’s faces and hands. Chickens and turkeys get fat and lay better for being fed on it.