Page:Scouting for girls, adapted from Girl guiding.djvu/173

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COOKING
159

Excellent food for workers are parsnips, beetroots, or onions.

Boiling Meat.—If you want the meat and not the juice, you should have your pot boiling fast when the meat is put in. But if you want gravy or beef-tea (not meat), put your meat into cold water and bring it slowly to the boil.

Stock Pot.—Keep a pot going all day, into which you can put any broken-up bones or scraps left over, to make nourishing broth. Clean turnips, carrots, and onions improve it. Before using let it get cold, so as to skim off the fat.

Barley, rice, or tapioca may be added, and for flavoring add salt, pepper, chopped parsley, celery, a clove, or mace.

Milk.—Milk will take the flavor of any strong smell near it. Stale milk added to fresh will turn the whole of it sour. Sour milk need not be wasted. You can use it for baking or cooking, by adding bicarbonate of soda. Sour milk will clean ink or fruit stains, and in washing it bleaches linen. Yellowed linen should soak in it, so should spoons and forks. Sour milk cleanses oil-cloth as well as women's faces and hands. Chickens and turkeys get fat and lay better for being fed on it.

To weigh roughly, tie a loop of strip to your package of tea, sugar, etc., and pass it on to your first finger. I find three pounds is as much as I can hold on my nail. If the loop is shifted to the root of the nail, four pounds is all one can hold. If the