Pewter: Remove spots with a swab of whiting lightly dipped in oil. Wash in weak suds, rinse well with boiling water, dry, and polish with hot sand and a stiff brush.
Silver Tarnish: Tarnish, like a bad habit, must be checked in the beginning. Prevention is better than cure. Keep big things, when not in use, well wrapped in wax paper with blue paper outside that, and absorbent cotton added. Put inside canton-flannel bags, tie tight, and keep dark and dry. Watch all things not thus ambushed closely. Remove spots as soon as visible, either with salt and whiting wet with borax water or ammonia and French chalk. Rub hard and quickly, wash off, wipe dry, and polish with dry whiting or plate powder, or what you will. Treat egg-stained spoons with wet salt. Fortnightly at least wash every bit of silver in sight in warm borax soapsuds, rinse in boiling water, dry with clean towels, and rub lightly with sifted whiting. Cover chasings and engraving with wet whiting, let dry, and brush it off. For things in high relief fold chamois skin over the point of a blunt skewer—thus you can rub the deeps. Count at each washing and keep sets together. Upon a damp cleaning day lay a trayful of small things in a half-warm oven, letting them stay till hot and dry.
Clean toilet silver with oxalic acid of one-third strength, taking care to touch with it nothing but the metal. Wipe with a cloth wrung very dry out of hot water, and polish with a chamois dipped in alcohol and whiting. Wrap a cloth about the bristles in cleaning brush backs, and wipe with old silk after the polishing.
Things Gilded: Wipe dust carefully from anything gilded with a soft silk cloth, then polish with a clean chamois sprinkled lightly with alcohol and dipped in thrice-sifted whiting. Rub steadily but not hard. Blow dust from deep carvings with a hand bellows unless a vacuum cleaner is in use.
CHAPTER VIII
FOOD: CHOOSING AND KEEPING
Flour: Perfect flour has a slight yellow tinge and a faint, pleasant smell, especially after wetting. Dazzling whiteness indicates bleaching; a gray tinge or minute black specks, showing only under the microscope, grinding from spoiled grain. Test by gripping a handful—if it remains the shape of the hand and shows the lines of the palm, buy it. Gluten is a most desirable element. Test for it by wetting a pinch to a stiff dough, and washing the starch out of it in cold water. The greater and tougher the stringy residue the greater the gluten content. Wet another pinch very soft, take it betwixt thumb and finger, and try to spin a thread. If it spins, all well; if it does not, but makes only blobs on the finger tips, there is likely to have been corn ground with the wheat. Another test for corn admixture is to dry a pinch, but not scorch it, and rub between the finger tips. Pure wheat flour will not feel gritty, but corn, no matter how finely ground, remains a little rough.
Set flour barrels a little above the floor, and do not use the same one continuously. Any wooden container may become a harbor for insects. A japanned tin can, emptied and aired monthly, is best for keeping flour, meal, or oatmeal in bulk. All should be kept where it is dry, airy, and free of smells, as all take up taints very readily.
Cornmeal: Fresh water-ground cornmeal has a pleasant smell, and runs through the fingers without caking or clotting. A musty odor shows it is too old. Meal from white flint corn is much the most desirable. Sift it at need—the bran helps to keep it. Cornmeal kiln-dried and bolted, as it has to be for the grocers to save it from spoiling, is, in a sort a libel on the real thing. In it there is not much choice save between fine and coarse grinding. Fine-ground makes clammy bread, hence is to be avoided. But even kiln-drying should not quite take away the original fragrance. Perfect meal shows under the microscope round white grains like fairy hail.
Oatmeal: Beware that which has much grain dust between the grains. Examine carefully a double handful before buying in quantity; if you find even one trace of weevil, reject it. Weevil and sundry mites—Acari in scientific parlance—are the bane of grain foods if they are kept over long. Hence the caution of keeping them in bright metal away from dampness and molds.