RECIPES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 36, 5 September 1891, Page 351

RECIPES.

A kind correspondent sends the following for * Elaine ’ (two Scotch recipes for shortbread): —No. 1 : Take ilb of flour, of fresh butter, 4 oz of white sugar, a pinch of salt, 2 oz sliced citron, and 2 oz sliced almonds. Beat the butter to a cream, add the sugar, peel, and flour, lastly the salt. Knead the paste very little, and roll it out smooth on a buttered paper to the thickness of half an inch. Crimp the edges, ornament with almonds or comfits in rows all over, and bake in a slack oven to a pale brown. No 2 : To 11b of flour add 4 oz of white sugar, 4 oz of sliced almonds, and 1 oz of carraway seeds. Beat ilb of butter to a cream, add the other ingredients, and the flour last. Roll out the paste on butterecT paper, and mark with a knife in squares or triangles. Place a piece of candied peel on each, and bake to a pale brown colour in a slow oven. When cold cut it into pieces.—Ella F. Plain Suet Pudding.—This is much nicer than the ordinary way of making the above. Ilb flour, ilb suet chopped fine ; put ilb of sugar in the frying pan, and stir over the fire till a dark brown ; add about i pint of boiling water. Mix the flour, suet, and 1 teaspoonful of soda together, and make into soft dough with the sugar and water ; add a little more water if necessaiy. Boil in basin or cloth three hours. Nature’s Nervine. —Dandelion is the coming nervine tor women. More than one experienced physician tells of its use in cases of nervous depression and melancholy almost suicidal. Hysteria with indigestion are most successfully treated by dandelion alone, using a strong decoction of the roots. For school girls growing green and black with overstudy or bad circulation from any cause, for excitable women and those hysteric subjects who make their friends' lives a burden if not their own, the simplest remedy is a cup of strong dandelion coflee three times a day. But it must be strong and from the roots, fresh as possible, not

the dried stuff' sold as dandelion, which is half bread crumbs and the other half any age with the life roasted out. No official pre|>aration compares with the decoction of herbs and roots fresh from the garden or well kept at first hand. Pumpkin Pie.—You had some recipes for this lately. I now send you another. Boil and mash the pumpkin ; add sugar, tartaric acid, or essence of lemon to taste (about half a teaspoonful of the former to a large pie-dish full of pumpkin); to that add a pint of cream, no eggs. For a more economical one add buttermilk (perfectly sweet) instead of cream. Tartaric acid will curdle milk, but not buttermilk or cream, and it gives a pleasant flavour. Bake in shallow dishes with top and bottom crust. Turnovers with moderately thick plain crust are capital for boys’ school-dinners. —Clevedon. [Many thanks.] Agreeable Disinfectants.—According to M. Keldyche, who has experimented in hospital wards, air saturated with eucalyptol is perfectly disinfected, and will no longer breed bacilli in gelatine. If this is true, and everything points to its truth, we have a pleasant disinfectant which is an incense of itself, and will prevent disease without warning the neighbours off', like carbolic acid or iodoform, or raising unutterable thoughts of sulphur, not to mention chloride of lime. One recalls with a sigh the air of Hobart Woods, balmy with eucalyptus, and the long summer days, hazy ana aromatic as with the fumes of a perpetually burning censer. Eucalyptol has a clean scent, like pine and santal and thyme together. A writer in the Popular Science News reports that he has watched the action of perfumes on the system for years, and believes that not only is inhaling the perfumes of flowers and plants a valuable therapeutic agent, according to Professor Schonlein’s opinion, but that living in pertumed air will prevent lung disease and arrest consumption. In his connection with the perfumery business for thirty years he has employed several persons of both sexes condemned to die young of the inherited disease, but who lived to a good age in the saturated air of perfumes. Flower Cure and Work Cure.—The same belief is found at Grasse, in the South of France, the flower mart of the world, where the air is full of escaping vapour from the distilling of perfumes and ethereal oils, which is the chief manufacture of the region, and the air out of doors and in is saturated with the exhalations of flowers the year round. Imagine the flower cure, the next aesthetic craze after the faith cure and Christian science. I beg pardon of the flowers —there is truth in their cure, the others are delusions. Apropos, the Queen of Sweden has been renewing her health by the working cure, making her bed in the morning and sweeping her room and spending most of the day at work in the garden, by order of her physician. When women take to real work in gardens half their maladies and more than half their ugliness would disappear.