In Marketing and Cooking Meat in all parts of the country, whether in city, town, or village, every housewife who looks carefully to the matter of current expenses makes complaint that the rise in the price of meat adds a few dollars each month to her accounts. The meats which have gone up most alarmingly in cost are the staple roasts, stews, and broils of every creature, and if one must have these regularly the bills will necessarily be larger. Yet there is a possibility of setting very tempting dishes each day before your family with a quite infrequent appearance of roast beef, lamb chops, or porterhouse steak. When nicely cooked, the meats which appear as a substitute will be so well relished that the expensive cuts will not be missed.

Besides knowing how to cook, the woman who would economize along this line must know how to market. It is not the marketing which can be done over the telephone, or by orders given to a clerk. There are exemplary butchers and exemplary clerks, I have no doubt but it pays, even if it cost ten cents carfare, to visit the market yourself. A study of the counters will be sure to reveal something good and cheap which would not have been thought of in the kitchen or at the telephone.

Best Time To Market

Except in hot weather, marketing trips need not be made every day. With a good refrigerator or wellchilled store closet at hand, meat may be purchased which will not only keep but prove better for being kept several days. In the depth of the winter market trips may be well arranged for Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

Except in large cities the markets of Monday are not altogether attractive; they suggest that the careful vender is trying to dispose to the best advantage of Saturday's leftovers. It is an excellent thing to market at the earliest hours of the morning. At that time there is the largest choice of meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables; besides, you are apt to receive more attention than later in the forenoon when the place grows thronged.

The Market Basket

If you have good commonsense you will carry a market basket. I am not of so doubting a humor as one housewife I know, who markets accompanied by a rubber stamp, branding her name upon a convenient part of all fish, flesh, or fowl she purchases. I feel sure, however, with a market basket on my arm, I am receiving what I have selected. This plan has another advantage: in summer you will not receive meat or fish slightly tainted from long exposure to the sun in a delivery wagon, or in winter frozen almost to the very point of being spoiled.

In the coldest weather if I can not carry home such tender vegetables as lettuce, cress, parsley, or celery I do not buy them. I have been taught this lesson by the appearance of too many wilted, frostbitten vegetables. There is a third good reason for the housewife's market basket. With her purchases carried straight home, there is no waiting for an erratic delivery wagon. I am not the only housewife who can tell of afternoons spent in watching for the butcher's wagon and the roast or leg of lamb for which a hot oven anxiously yawned. The dinner which followed was frequently made memorable by a makeshift dish of frizzled beef or ham and eggs!

Mutton

When it comes to the subject of reasonable priced meats which provide nourishing and appetizing dishes they are many and of large variety. A leg of mutton might be placed in the front rank as a wise purchase for a large family. Where there are only two or three at the family table the mutton would grow tedious by virtue of its many visits.

If it can be used, however, in a few meals it is excellent boiled very slowly and served with caper sauce. It also provides a pot of excellent stock, which, with barley and vegetables, makes a tureen of the best mutton broth. Usually a good leg of mutton remember, it is of mutton I am speaking, not lamb can be purchased for ten or twelve cents a pound.

Another good way to cook a rather tough leg of mutton is by brazing it. Brush the meat over with butter, sear it quickly over a hot fire, then put with three cups of boiling water in a closely covered soup pot. It should be well seasoned with cloves and peppercorns, carrots, turnips, celery and onions cut in dice, also parsley and a bit of bay leaf.

Fasten the lid on the soup pot with a thick paste of flour and water, and allow it to cook for five or six hours in an oven about at the temperature required for baked beans. Mutton prepared in this fashion is tender and delicious.

Soup Meat

There is a knack in knowing how to choose a good soup bone as well as in knowing how to cook it. It ought to be about twothirds meat and onethird bone and fat. In the winter it is an excellent plan, provided you have a large enough soup kettle, to purchase two bones for soup one the knuckle, which seldom costs over four or five cents a pound, the other a solid flesh piece, costing perhaps seven or eight cents. When the meat is cooked to the point where, if it were a stew, you would take it from the fire, lift out with a skimmer on a large platter the meaty soup bone and cut away from it the nicest pieces of beef. You can often obtain two or three pounds of this meat, well seasoned and tendered by slow cooking.