This section is from the book "Miss Beecher's Housekeeper And Healthkeeper", by Catharine Esther Beecher. Also available from Amazon: Miss Beecher's Housekeeper And Healthkeeper.
Children never love tea and coffee till they are trained to it. They always like these drinks. Put two tea-spoonfuls of sugar to half a cup of hot water, and add as much good milk. Or crumb toast or dry bread into a bowl with plenty of sugar, and add half milk to half boiling water.
Milk is not only drink, but rich food. It therefore should not be used as drink with other food, as is water or tea and coffee. Persons often cause bilious difficulties by using milk in addition to ordinary food as the chief drink. It is a well-established fact that some grown persons as well as young children can not drink milk, and in some cases can not eat bread wet with milk, without trouble from it.
Pour boiling water on mashed cranberries, or grated apples, or tamarinds, or mashed currants or raspberries, pour off the water, sweeten, and in summer cool with ice.
Pour boiling water on to bread toasted quite brown, or on to pounded parched corn, boil a minute, strain, and add sugar and cream, or milk.
Mix equal quantities of milk and boiling water, add wine and sweeten.
Take one third brisk cider and two thirds cold water, sweeten it, crumb in toasted bread, and grate on a little nutmeg. Acid jelly will do when cider is not at hand.
Toast two or three crackers, pour on boiling water and let it simmer two or three minutes, add a well-beaten egg, sweeten and flavor with nutmeg.
Scald half a tumblerful of fresh ground corn-meal, add a table-spoonful of flour made into a paste, boil twenty minutes or more, and add salt, sugar, and nutmeg. Oat-meal gruel is excellent made thus.
Pepper and salt some good beef cut into small pieces, pour on boiling water and steep half an hour. A better way is to put the meat thus prepared into a bottle kept in boiling water for four or five hours.
Put a pound of sugar to a quart of juice, bottle it, and use for a beverage with water.
Soak the pith of sassafras till a jelly, and add a little sugar.
Beat the yelk of an egg in some sugar and a little salt; add either cold tea or coffee or milk. Then beat the whites to a stiff froth and add. Flavor the milk with wine. Some do not like the taste of raw egg, and so the other articles may first be made boiling hot before the white is put in.
Four table-spoonfuls of grits, (unbolted oat-meal,) a pinch of salt and a pint of boiling water. Skim, sweeten, and flavor. Or make a thin batter of fine oat-meal, and pour into boiling water; then sweeten and flavor it.
Boil two and a half ounces of pearl barley ten minutes in half a pint of water, strain it, add a quart of boiling water, boil it down to half the quantity, strain, sweeten, and flavor with sliced lemon or nutmeg.
Put two even tea-spoonfuls cream tartar to a pint of boiling water, sweeten and flavor with lemon-peel.
Rennet Whey, (good for a weak stomach after severe illness.) - Soak rennet two inches square one hour, add half a gill of water and a pinch of salt; then pour it into a pint of warm (not hot) milk. Let it stand half an hour, then cut it, and after an hour drain off the liquid. Let it stand awhile, and drain off more whey.
Mix sprigs of sage, balm, and sorrel with half a sliced lemon, the skin on. Pour on boiling water, sweeten and cork it.
 
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