All vegetables, when cut, may be kept fresh by putting the stalks into water. Servants generally insist on immersing them, which favours decomposition. Parsley in particular can seldom be guarded from a watery grave. Carrots, turnips, and the like, if placed in layers in a box of sand, will keep for many weeks, if not months. Clean new-laid eggs will keep quite fresh for months if buried in dried salt well closed. Boiled potatoes ought to be laid out on a plate, and are then as good for frying or mashing as if they were freshly cooked. Servants have an unaccountable fancy for throwing them away, or, if desired to fry them, chopping and mashing them first, which entirely spoils them. If left heaped up, they will often spoil in one night, and must be burnt. No vegetables should be put into soup until the day that it is to be used. If any soup, complete, is left, it must be sharply boiled the next morning, and put into a fresh, clean pan. The grey earthenware jars made for salt are most valuable for such purposes and for keeping viands hot or stewing things. Chopped spinach can be warmed in one of them, and, as it takes time to prepare, may be boiled, &c., the day before, and thus served in perfection at the early dinner or luncheon. Cabbage, French beans, and vegetable marrows are better dressed as salad if they have cooled, and in hot weather are almost as treacherous for keeping as shell-fish.
Fruit, like vegetables, will keep very fresh if you can manage to put the stalk into water, only it must not be in a close or dark place. When apples, oranges, pears, lemons, &c., are to be stored, they must not touch each other, and must be protected from heat, cold, and damp as much as possible; sunshine is not desirable. It would be easy, if an amateur carpenter was at hand, to make a frame of laths, like a Venetian blind, which would contain a very large quantity of such fruit, and take up hardly any room. Flour and meal, sago, macaroni, semolina, and all like substances, are sometimes attacked by mites. They are so small as to be invisible singly, but a peculiar fine powder is to be seen at the top of the farina, and is not motionless. There is also a smell something like honey or fermentation. They never appear in a dry storeroom, though they are sometimes brought from the grocer’s. The only thing to be done is to burn the infected store, and heat the jar almost red hot before using it again. (Exchange and Mart.)
Every one is familiar with the beneficial influence of ice in preserving foods in hot weather. It is the active medium in the various kinds of refrigerating safes now in use. But the first matter is to secure a supply of ice for summer use, unless it is to be bought of the ice merchant at enhanced prices. Various contrivances may be adopted with success, as enumerated below:—
(1) Build round a brick well, with a small grating for drain at bottom for the escape of water from melted ice. Cover the bottom with a thick layer of good wheat straw. Pack the ice in layers of ice and straw. Fix a wooden cover to the well.
(2) Fire-brick, from its feeble conducting power, is the best material to line an ice-house with. The house is generally made circular, and larger at the top than at the bottom, where a drain should be provided to run off any water that may accumulate. As small a surface of ice as possible should be exposed to the atmosphere, therefore each piece of ice should be dipped in water before stowing away, which, by the subsequent freezing of the pieces into one mass, will remain unmelted for a long time.
(3) Make a frame-house the requisite size, with its floor at least the thickness of the bottom scantling from the ground, thus leaving space for drainage and a roof to shed off the water. The boards of the wall should be closely joined to exclude air. Then build up the blocks of ice, cut in the coldest weather, as solid as possible, leaving 6 in. all round between them and the board walls; fill up all interstices between the blocks with broken ice, and in a very cold day or night pour water over the whole, so that it may freeze into a solid block; shut it up till wanted, only leaving a few small holes for ventilation under the roof, which should be 6 in. above the top of the ice. It is not dry heat or sunshine that is the worst enemy of ice, but water and damp air. If all the drainage is carried promptly off below, and the damp vapour generated by the ice is allowed to escape above, the column of cold air between the sides of the close ice-house and the cube of ice will protect it much better than it is protected in underground ice-houses, which can neither be drained nor ventilated; sawdust also will get damp, in which case it is much worse than nothing.
65. Ice-house.
(4) An improved sort of ice-house, recommended by Bailey, gardener at Nuneham Park, Oxford, is shown in plan and section in Fig. 65, where the dotted line indicates the ground level. The well or receptacle for the ice a is 10 ft. 6 in. wide at the base, and 3 ft. wider near the top; the walls are hollow, the outer portion being built of dry rough stone, and the inner wall and dome f of brick. The outer wall e might be replaced by a puddling of clay, carried up as the work proceeds. Over the top is a mound of clay and soil g, planted with shrubs to keep the surface cool in summer. The drain i carries off the water formed by the melted ice, and is provided with a trap h to prevent the ingress of air through the drain. There is a porch or lobby b provided with outer and inner doors c; and apertures at d, to get rid of the condensed moisture, which, if not removed, would waste the ice. These ventilating doors should be opened every night, and closed again early in the morning. The most important conditions to be secured are dryness of the soil and enclosed atmosphere, compactness in the body of ice, which should be broken fine and closely rammed, and exclusion as far as possible of air. (Gard. Mag. Bot.)
(5) A very cheap way of storing ice has been described by Pearson of Kinlet. The ice-stack is made on sloping ground close to the pond whence the ice is derived. The ice is beaten small, well rammed, and gradually worked up into a cone or mound 15 ft. high, with a base of 27 ft., and protected by a compact covering of fern 3 ft. thick. A dry situation and sloping surface are essential with this plan, and a small ditch should surround the heap, to carry rapidly away any water that may come from melted ice or other sources. (Gard. Jl.)