Try to get as much variety in your food as possible, especially in the matter of the more substantial things, such as vegetables, meats, fish, soups, and breads. Try to educate your family and yourself up to the point where pies, cake, doughnuts, etc. need not be a daily dish on your table. Instead of these, have plenty of fresh stewed fruits when in season, and canned fruits at other periods. These fruits, with good bread, rolls, rusk, buns, etc., are healthful, and so simple that one does not tire of them.
Learn to make simple puddings and other desserts for the noonday meal. If you follow these suggestions you will reap a rich reward in a healthy, clear-headed family. You must think for yourself, too. Keep up, as much as possible, with the outside world. Take a part of a day at least once a week to meet other people, and manage to get in a visit to town now and then. Read some bright new books. Do not devote all your spare moments to fancy work or the trimming of underclothing for yourself and your children; you would be wasting your energies and making extra work for ironing day. Keep yourself, as much as is in your power, a bright, happy, thinking woman, and you will be an inspiration and tower of strength to your family and neighborhood. This, perhaps, seems a little like a sermon, but I mean every word of it.
To Prepare Meat for Corning.
All meats should be kept until free from animal heat before being put into brine. This will take at least forty-eight hours. Have the meat cut into suitable pieces and sprinkled lightly with fine salt and saltpetre in the proportion of one tablespoonful of saltpetre to four of salt. Lay the meat on a board that is slightly inclined, so that the surface blood which is drawn from the meat can run off. At the end of forty-eight or more hours put it in the brine.
All meats should be completely covered with brine. If there be any tendency to float, lay pieces of board on the meat and put weights on these. Large stones will answer.
Pickle for any Kind of Meat.
12 gallons of water.
3 gallons of salt.
3/4 pound of saltpetre.
3 pounds of brown sugar.