FOOD HINTS FROM FAR AND NEAR.
TIJNGLAND'S narrow range of daily food has always amazed 1 people from other countries, especially in view of a family expenditure averaging rather higher than anywhere else, unless in the United States. No doubt British meat is the best on earth ; its natural gravy renders it independent of foreign sauces, on the principle of the immortal Mrs. Poyser that "It's poor eating where the flavour o' the meat lies i' the cruets." But that's just it. The meat-eating habit of English folk kept them going in body and brain through years of plenty ; yet not without some intrinsic health disadvantages ; and only the comfortable classes could afford it, in any case. Countless households, no matter what their thrift, could not count on meat every day. Bread really was the inmates' staff of life—an idealized white loaf, artificially blanched and innutritive, deprived of the elements for muscle toughening and making sound teeth and the bones which make old bones. The variety of cereals used for breadstuffs elsewhere was short-sightedly despised. And the fact of food variety being in itself invaluable for health and efficiency was lost sight of altogether. Fruit at break- fast was deemed either a luxury or a fad, even where meat dishes were superabundant on the table. And the vegetables in average weekly use were relatively few and all too often badly cooked, potatoes in particular being spoilt and wasted by being peeled before boiling. An investigator in the " eighteen-sixties " found out that at least twenty millions' worth of food was then being wasted annually in England by unconscientious and incompetent housewifery. By July, 1914, this kind of loss in human pith and money's-worth was stupendous—on account of the sort of women who often literally make ducks and drakes of their duty as the family administrators, for when we hear one calculating on her household waste for poultry food we know just exactly the kind of a house she keeps. Thero never should be any household waste, and to see waste of bread is a crime against society.
Even in the midst of the present food crisis, when every ounce we eat to live means a buying not of food alone but of men's lives, there is a propaganda being financed by public funds to collect waste from hotels, canteens, schools and charitable institutions, besides private houses and anywhere else that will contribute to this clutter of scrapped eatables, sour and stale, and noisomely to be reckoned with in the hot weather. Do the promoters of such a scheme realize what a monstrous state of things they are taking for granted and encouraging, instead of aiming to reform it altogether ?
A friend of mine, resident several years in Portugal, highly praises its domestic arts, and thinks many of them could with isivantage be adapted nearer home. The national food is various, palatable, and managed with the best economic results as to avail- able material and fuel in rich and poor households, according to circumstance. Fish is the favourite fare, and the variety of excellent dishes evolved from it is surprising, including the pre-eminent nation a dish, bachilao, whose chief ingredient, dried codfish, is largely im- ported from Newfoundland, though in Great Britain itself this valuable product was never done justice to. Fish, flesh, and fowl, eggs and dairy produce, cereals, fruits, roots, and greens, constitute about all the food there is, and inevitably are interdependent—man, boast, and bird competing with one another for an equitable ration. Fish-and-vegetable dishes, inclusive of curries, can serve for break- fast, luncheon, dinner, or supper, and are savoury, sustaining meat and cereal savers, and an amateur angler inland or at the sea coast can often bait for his own household and eschew the shop. I have seen oven rough seafish well cooked eat better than sole misunderstood. And for people who cannot get enough sustenance out of an all-fish tare, as such a giant of body and intellect as Walter Scott confessed to be his case, chowder is a capital invention. Six ounces of pork 'will give the requisite body to a dish of fish ample for a large family. 'Clams, which by Americans, who invented chowder, are thought an indispensable ingredient, are procurable on the westerly coasts of Great Britain and Ireland, and cockles are only small clams. Soyer rather preferred both to oysters. And I wonder how many people know, too, that common limpets—flavoured, stewed, and then with the rough and tough parts strained off—make an excellent soup or fish-sauce. But much care should be taken in the selection of shell-fish, so that they do not come from contaminated waters, and mussels at all times are liable to prove unsafe.
All sound domestic and national economists are invincible believers in home baking. But some folk have an idea that a brick oven is indispensable for loaves. Now this is a mistake. /t has been found that any oven which will bake a joint of beef or leg of mutton will bake a loaf of bread. But it had better not exceed the half-quartem size ; and for convenience' sake, indeed, this is the size usually bought in bakers' shops. The oven should be quite hot—a little experience teaches the exact degree. As for dough-raisers other than yeast, carbonate of soda is too severe a teat for inexperienced hands. But a trustworthy baking- powder may be compounded at home with one quarter pound best cornflour, one quarter pound cream of tartar, and one quarter pound of strong live carbonate of soda, all thoroughly mixed and kept in a tin with a close-fitting lid.
Dough thus raised can be baked in a thickish round, scored crosswise so as to divide it in squares to eat hot or cold. Or it can be rolled flat—to cut into scones or thinner teacakes or breakfast cakes. These latter will bake in ten minutes in an oven at pastry heat ; and hot bread at breakfast is wonderfully sustaining for the day's work. A little whipped sour cream mixed in with the dough makes any cakebread superlative. Wheatmeal eakobread, thus reinforced and eaten with a little butter and cheese, constitutes an almost perfect food, available at first cost to any one owning a dairy. A little shortening, which means some admixture of fatty matter, is essential for good cakebread, and a useful addition to many kinds of yeast-broad. Where butter is not procurable for this purpose, margarine comes next best ; but if lard or dripping must be used, cream them first, with the addition of a few drops of lemon-juice if at hand, or even of vinegar, as this helps to remove their unpleasant taste. The modicum of whipped sour cream as well makes an almost incredible difference for the. better. < And the best chief liquid for dough is buttermilk. Next comes thick-milk—milk set aside in a large jug till thick-sour enough to cut with a knife. All breadstuffs are palatable and wholesome made on these principles. Barley flour or meal sieved free of the sharps of the husk, in a coarse sieve, makes excellent bread without any admixture of wheat flour. But rye flour is best baked in one-third proportion of wheat flour, and if yeast be used care should be taken not to over-sour the dough in The Continental manner. Finest ground yellow Indian meal is the best kind for cakebread and the most nutritious kind of maize, as it retains most of the natural oil ; besides, the golden colour is in itself appetizing. And it is the staple of a palatable pudding, an American national dish. But it requires one-third mixture of wheat flour for cakebread, else this will bake too brittle. Judicious selection is needful among the numerous published recipes for maize bread; half of them are execrable. Yellow Indian meal makes that excellent porridge, polenta, or yellow meal stirabout, as it is called in Ireland. Some people acquire a taste for it with thick sour milk. Most people prefer it with sweet milk and sugar or syrup when these are to be had ; and the more people fall back upon what sweetstuff their bees will Manufacture and yield up to them, the better now. That is how people managed in the Middle Ages, when loaves of sugar were so scarce and dear that three of them ranked as a Royal gift for Henry III. But the idea that the people had no sweetstuff at all in those days, and did very well without it., is sheer nonsense. Sugar and honey are among the most valuable foods on earth. As to polenta left to get cold and then sliced and fried, that is an acquired taste ; but the coarse white maize products, hominy and samp, are both excellent as sweet or savoury in this fashion or fresh cooked.
As for binding mediums in cookery, a tablespoonful of sago will save two eggs in a pudding otherwise needing three ; one duck egg will go as far as two hen eggs, and any egg beaten white and yolk separately, the white to a stiff froth stirred in at the last moment., will act as good as two eggs beaten white and yolk together. Oat scenes and teacakes are best made with the flour like Scotch oat- meal, so called in the trade, but good sweet flake oatmeal will serve as a good substitute. All the brown meals—wheatmeal, barley- meal, rye, buckwheat, even oatmeal—are excellent for puddings, with or without some mixture of breadcrumbs, but with some baking-powder, a little finely chopped beef suet, a few stoned dates or chopped cooking figs, which are most wholesome. Syrup is the proper accompaniment to these puddings, or honey, if at all procurable, and the children should be the first considered, as this food is a specially good meat sub- titute. Dates cooked with rhubarb are a valuable food now, and the dates mellow the acid and add nourishment ; but rhubarb should always be peeled before cooking. The proportion of oxalic acid in the peel so disagrees with some constitutions that it may bring on a serious illness, and no words can express the poisonous folly of recommending rhubarb-leaves boiled as a substitute for greens. Another trap for the unwary is sorrel as a French-commended flavouring for soups and made dishes— it also reeks of oxalic acid. But young boiled nettles really am an edible substitute for greens at this season, and have medicinal value ; but they are best cooked in the Irish manner, which gives them a preliminary boil-up for ten minutes or so. Then the water is drained off and thrown away as unwholesome ; the leaves, care- fully freed of stalks and stringiness, are then cooked tender ita_a little broth. If this be pot-liquor in which meat was boiled, es much the better, provided the meat was not salt or only a little so. In Ireland watercresses are cooked as a substitute for greens, in a similar manner. But all vegetables for cooking should be well washed in three waters, with salt in the last. Nor should the virtues of barley in broth by Scottish recipes be forgotten ; but, indeed, Scotland's soups are among the best in the world. Very good also are the Slav and Scandinavian soups and salads with beetroot for their staple, and sour cream instead of salad
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