CHEERFUL NURSERY FARE.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 October 1933, Page 7 (Supplement)

CHEERFUL NURSERY FARE.

QUESTIONS OF PORRIDGE.

Most people can remember occasions in childhood when meal-times were also tear-times, so unacceptable did they find the food, and so “hard-hearted” the nurse or parent. Nowadays, the grownups are more sensible, managing in devious ways to coax down the necessary vitamins and calories without reducing the cheerfulness of the child!. Here are some of the ways in which the end is achieved. Many children’s specialists still insist that the day should begin with a dish of porridge. But porridge has a nasty way of growing cold and unpalatable long before it is finished. So, in order that it may remain as appetising as possible to the bitter end, it is served on a hot-water-plate, that keeps both it and its accompanying milk hot all the time. Also it is made more "amusing” by having a spoonful of raisins added during the cooking process. These are nourishing as well as cheering. So why not ? Porridge, too, is not entirely bounded by oatmeal. Excellent porridge, nutritive and appetising, is to be made from hominy, from lentil flour, and from Indian maize meal, a finer type of hominy. The hominy is best when it has been soaked ah night, boiling water having been used to immerse it. The lentil porridge can be varied with a mixture of barley or wheat-flour.

F?od that I used to weep over as a

child included boiled dumplings, which I was told were especially good for. me. But they always acquired in the boiling a particularly distasteful surface of white clammy paste. This does not happen when they are made with bread dough and cooked for ten minutes in a saucepan of rapidly boiling salted water. Dumplings are most suitable, fon. small people when they, too, are in a small size—not bigger than an egg. Wholemeal dough makes a good change in place of the ordinary. Tears innumerable have been -spilt over eating the fat served with meat, hot and cold.' When dislike is evinced, remember that food eaten with aversion fails to produce nuritive results.-’ So give fat in other ways—a bit of toast fried in bacon-fat for instance, or sliced tomatao or banana cooked in a.similar fashion. . . The meal that is eaten in depression will not benefit any child greatly. Make it a cheerful, acceptable sort of business and the results will be very different.