It is a well-known fact that, especially in hot weather, meat, poultry, and game, although apparently quite fresh, prove, on closer examination, or often only when cooked, to be tainted and of bad odor. This can be entirely removed by either watering and washing the meat in a lukewarm solution of salicylic acid (three to four teaspoonfuls of acid to two quarts of water), or by adding a small pinch of the dry acid in powder, during the cooking.
To keep meat for several days from becoming high or tainted:
Place it for twenty or thirty minutes in an aqueous solution of 8 drachms of salicylic acid to one gallon of water.
Rub into the surface of the meat some dry salicylic acid, particularly about the bony and fatty parts; the meat to be afterward cleaned before cooking as usual.
Although the raw meat treated with the acid turns slightly pale on the surface it suffers no change whatever internally. Meat thus treated with salicylic acid requires, also, less cooking to render it tender.
PURE MILK.
A third of a teaspoonful (or, if the temperature be high, a little more) of the solid acid to a quart of milk delays the process of curdling for thirty-six hours, without influencing its property of yielding cream.
BUTTER.
Washed with an aqueous solution (four drachms of acid to a gallon of water), or kept in it, or wrapped in cloths soaked in this water, keeps fresh for a very long time. Butter already rancid can be improved by treatment with a stronger solution (8 drachms of acid to 1 gallon of water), followed by washing in pure water. The bad smell often arising in salted butter is entirely prevented by addition of the acid.