Many cooks still use sour milk and soda, or cream of tartar and soda, methods of leavening which at the very best are uncertain and wasteful because occasionally the whole baking raised in this way must be thrown away.

No cook can tell just how sour the milk is, that is, the amount of acidity it contains, and therefore trusts to "guess-work" in putting in soda to neutralize it.

Cream of tartar and soda are better, but they are unsatisfactory, for it is very difficult for the housewife to get pure cream of tartar and it varies so much in strength that the cook does not know just how much soda to use. If she uses too much, yellow spots appear in the cake or biscuit. If she does not use enough, it does not raise batter or dough. If she does get pure cream of tartar it is difficult to get the exact proportions. Spoon measure, the only practical measure in the kitchen, is not accurate; it requires a just weight to produce the best leavening agent.

A dozen years ago we gave up, once for all, the use of the home-made mixture of cream of tartar and soda, and we find as a matter of every-day experience that a pure baking powder is really in the end more economical and better in every respect than the old-fashioned methods.

In the preparation of chapters upon breads, biscuits, cakes, muffins, etc., for this work we have found it necessary (as with "The Majority Edition of Common Sense in the Household," published in 1892) to choose a standard baking powder, the use of which, as enjoined in the recipes, will ensure uniform results.

Strength and excellence in such compounds vary far more than in different brands of flour. With the latter the cook soon learns, by the consistency and general appearance of dough and batter, whether to hold her hand or to increase the prescribed quantity. Baking powders give no sign until the fire has made alteration impossible. If the writer of the recipe has Baking Powder, No. I, in mind when she says "Two teaspoonfuls," and the cook uses No. 2, which is half - or twice - as strong, failure is inevitable.

Furthermore, boxes bearing the same brand often vary in quality. When first opened, certain powders are powerful, but lose virtue steadily by exposure, until, when the bottom of a box is reached, three spoonfuls hardly do the work that one accomplished a fortnight before. Dampness and the chemical action of the air explain and perhaps palliate this defect. There is no excuse for the fact that the cook must learn with the using of each new package of a compound she has handled for years how much she may safely put into her flour.

At least eight well-advertised baking powders have been patiently tested in our kitchens within the past fifteen years in the effort to select one that might be conscientiously recommended as sure and safe, to our constituency. In adopting as our standard Cleveland's Baking Powder we are moved by the following considerations:

1. During the six years in which it has been in regular use in our households we have never opened a box that was not in perfect condition.

2.   Every box has been of like quality with all others bearing the stamp of this company.

3.   A rounded teaspoonful is equal in strength and efficiency to a heaping teaspoonful of any other baking powder tried by us.

4.   Breads and cakes raised with this are less friable than those in which other compounds are used, and remain fresh longer.

5.   Careful tests have failed to detect in this powder the presence of ammonia, alum, or other deleterious substances.

6.   It suffers little from humidity and time. On two occasions a box that had been partially emptied and left inadvertently in the store-room for several months was found at the end of the time uninjured and ready to do its work satisfactorily.

These are some of the recommendations to housewifely confidence that justify us in naming Cleveland's Baking Powder as the basis of such articles of food as are dependent for lightness and digestibility upon effervescent powders or other volatile agencies.