Table butter, wrapped in dampened cheesecloth squares, keeps sweet and firm. These squares are as large as a child’s pocket handkerchief, and hemmed to prevent raveling. Half a dozen will last a year, unless the “hired gurrel” takes them for dish-cloths.
Butter, made into balls for the table, should be kept in a bowl of cold water in the refrigerator, and the water changed every morning.
Keep in your own mind, and so far as you can, impress upon the conscience of servants, that whatever has been once in the refrigerator must be returned to cold storage, unless used. Meats soften and taint, butter turns rancid, fruits and vegetables decay when this precaution is neglected.
KITCHEN UTENSILS
It is not my purpose to discourage the housewife by a list of culinary furniture.
The readers of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” may recall that Mr. St. Clair declared the evolution of irreproachable course dinners through such means as his negro cook employed in a smoky little kitchen with scanty store of pots and kettles—to be “nothing short of genius.” I have, before now, visited kitchens environed with pot-closets, where hung a glittering assortment of every conceivable patented “indispensable”—and sat down in the dining-room to greasy, watery soups, scorched meats, soggy bread and curdled custards.
It is well to have a plentiful supply of tools. If there be not sense and skill behind them, failure is a foregone conclusion.
The object of this brief chapter is to tell our housemothers how to keep such pots and kettles, griddles and pans in working order, and how to make them last a reasonable time.
To begin with—get good ware. The clumsy iron vessels that gathered grime and soot over the fires kept up by our grand-dames have been pushed aside by lighter and cleaner utensils of various sorts. Coppers—that must be as bright outside as they were within, and gathered unto themselves murderous verdigris, if not cleaned before each using, with salt and scalding vinegar—were banished, and righteously, long ago, in favor of galvanized, porcelain, granite, agate-iron and nickel-steel-plated wares that neither rust nor green-mold. These wares are as easily kept clean as stone china, and if less durable than iron and copper that descended from mother to daughter and even down to the third generation, last reasonably well when properly handled.
Pots, kettles and the like should be set upon the range—not thumped and banged. A nicked cooking utensil is a disgrace to the handler thereof.