Preserved and dried fruits are luxuries to be indulged in only at festivals or holidays. Nuts are full of nutritious oil, but are generally hard to digest; they do not come under the head of the necessaries of life.
CHAPTER II.
HOW TO COOK, SEASON, AND MEASURE.
Before beginning to give you receipts, I wish to tell you about the effect of cooking food in different ways. We all want it cooked so that we can eat it easily, and get the most strength from it, without wasting any part of it. I will tell you some very good reasons for making soup and stew out of your meat instead of cooking it in any other way.
Roasting or Baking.—The first is the most extravagant way of cooking meat, as it wastes nearly one third of its substance in drippings and steam; the second also is very wasteful, unless the meat is surrounded with vegetables, or covered with a flour paste. When you do bake meat without a covering of paste, put it into a hot oven at the start, to crisp the outside and to keep in the valuable juices; you can moderate the heat of the oven as soon as the meat is brown, and let it finish cooking slowly by the heat of the steam which is constantly forming inside of it. It generally takes twenty minutes to bake each pound of meat.
Broiling.—This is another extravagant way of cooking meat, for a great deal of the fat runs into the fire, and some nourishment escapes up the chimney with the steam. If you must broil meat, have your fire hot and clear, and your gridiron perfectly clean; and, unless it has a ledge to hold the drippings, tip it towards the back of the fire, so that the fat will burn there, and not blacken the meat as it would if the gridiron were laid flat, and the fat could burn under the meat. Never stick a fork into broiled meat to turn it; and do not cut it to see if it is done; for if you do either you will let out the juice. Study the following table, and then remember how near the time given in it comes to cooking according to your taste. Fish will broil in from five to ten minutes; birds and poultry in from three to fifteen minutes; chops in from ten to fifteen minutes, and steak in from ten to twenty minutes.
Boiling and Stewing.—Boiling food slowly, or stewing it gently, saves all its goodness. After the pot once boils you cannot make its contents cook any faster if you have fire enough under it to run a steam engine; so save your fuel, and add it to the fire, little by little, only enough at a time to keep the pot boiling. Remember, if you boil meat hard and fast it will be tough and tasteless, and most of its goodness will go up the chimney, or out of the window, with the steam. Boil the meat gently, and keep it covered close to save the steam; it will condense on the inside of the cover, and fall back in drops of moisture upon the meat.
The following table shows how much is wasted in the different ways of cooking we have just spoken of. Four pounds of beef waste in boiling or stewing, about one pound of substance, but you have it all in the broth if you have kept the pot covered tightly; in baking one pound and a quarter is almost entirely lost unless you have plenty of vegetables in the dripping pan to absorb and preserve it; in roasting before the fire you lose nearly one pound and a half. Do not think you save the waste in the shape of drippings; it is poor economy to buy fat at the price of meat merely for the pleasure of trying it out.