But spite of our receipts and our philosophy, the briskness of the fire, the skill of our cook, the excellence of the oven, and the bright array of pots, kettles, pans, moulds, griddles and gridirons, and the presiding genius of even a half Fortu-natus sort of a purse, or the most rigid scale and measure of economy, one grand puzzle besets alike all kitchens, the difficulty of really getting the ingredients on which the mystery of food manufacture is to be exercised.

The very water we have to cook with, is crowded with millions of monsters - things with two heads and no heads, with countless legs and no legs, with jaws and pincers and claws, and most wonderfully springy tails; in some water well nigh enough of them to make a sort of soup, to say nothing of the chalk, lime, iron, and a host of other impurities.

The sugar, if it be brown, without taking note of such items as a little lead, a good deal of sand, some clay and flour, is pretty nearly as thick as it can hold of chips of cane and swarms of mites.

Our tea, if green, is painted and polished with Prussian blue, turmeric powder, and China clay, and is a mixture of all the leaves that the wonderful industry and ingenuity of the Chinese, and for marvellous economy of honesty by our own grocers can accomplish; we have old tea-leaves dried and twisted up, and coloured and glazed, and sold for black and green; we have even gunpowder made up of dust and sand, and gum, faced as they call it with plumbago.

Coffee, fragrant and refreshing, has almost become a myth, we may have pneumatic coffee-pots that will not let the finest dust pass through their strainers, French coffee-pots, German coffee-pots, and all kinds of traditional directions for the manufacture, just as it is to be had in Paris; but not one of them can help us to make coffee, unless, as good old Mrs. Glass would say, "we have first got our coffee;" and what with foreign roguery and home roguery, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the sore temptations to cheat the customs, the chances are twenty to one against us* that the brown powder we are at so much pains with, once flourished at the end of a blue flower, on a long stalk under our own hedges, being known where it grew under the name of wild endive, christened in trade chicory, and being in reality a tall and aristocratic sort of dandelion, possessing too the medicinal properties of dandelion, and none whatever of the properties of coffee. But even if people be taken with a liking for this dandelion tea instead of coffee, they cannot even have it pure, the chicory itself is far too costly to content the avaricious roguery of a number of dealers, and so the chicory itself is adulterated with roasted corn, parsnips, mangle wurzel, beans, Egyptian lupin seed, biscuit powder, burnt sugar, roasted carrots, oak bark, tan, acorns, mahogany sawdust, and no little sand, the result of the original dirt judiciously left as a make-weight upon the root of the chicory itself.

Mustard can scarce be said to have even the colour of mustard, for it is coloured with turmeric, and what passes for mustard is in many a case little more than mere husks and flour.

Pepper is messed up with wheat-flour, mustard-seed husks, sago-meal, pea-flour, and warehouse sweepings; nor does it fare better with food for invalids, oatmeal is mingled with far less digestive barley-meal at half the price. Arrow-root (which it should be understood is the produce of under ground branches or bulbs of the maranta plant, growing in the West and East Indies, and having gained its name of arrow-root from the belief that it was a remedy against the deadliness of poisoned arrows), is to the utmost economized; and though its purity is often of great importance to the invalid, there is for the most part sold instead, sago-flour, tapioca-flour, and most commonly of all and worst of all, potato-starch.

Milk and bread, the laborious and able sanitary commission of the "Lancet," to whose reports for more full information we would refer our readers, has shown are not much adulterated. But the milk, partly by the kind of keep of the cows, partly by a little careful skimming, and in a multitude of cases by the liberal aid of the pump, is duly thinned. Flour and bread, of old mixed with plaster of Paris, ground bones, and potato starch - thanks to the cheapening of pure materials, has come to content itself with alum only, and instead of other adulteration, customers are cheated with light weight, a matter on which there is no need to say anything, but that its best corrective is a pair of household scales and the nearest police office. But this running account of roguery, except for its curiousness, would be of little use without a few hints, if not as to detection and prevention, at least as to how our readers may escape from amongst the number of dupes and sufferers, who are daily and hourly swindled in the kingdom.

As to tea (the fact being that since the experienced officers of the East India Company have ceased to hold the Chinese traders in terrorum, almost no real green tea reaches this country, but all pretending to be such are painted with poisons), it is best to be content with black tea alone.

For sugar, the best advice is - if you like to pay for dirt and to mix it with your preserves, puddings, and pastry, and choose to believe the grocers, that sugar that moistens even the thick paper they place it in, and which looks dark, smells strong, and sticks to your fingers, is richer in sweetening than clear sparkling white sugar, out of which none of the sweetening but all the dirt has been washed - then buy brown sugar.

"Please tell the people over the way," said a gentleman, "that I would take it as a particular favour, if in future they will send me the cow's hairs on one plate, and the butter on another, and I can mix them myself as I want them." Such is our advice as to coffee. It seems beyond the reach of average human honesty to sell it pure. The chicory is so fragrant - so wholesome - such an improvement on the flavour of the Arabian berry, and withal so much cheaper, that mixed it must be. We say therefore, Buy your coffee in the berry, raw; your chances are at all events fifty to one better of having coffee only. Roast and grind it for yourselves, and, if you like chicory or dandelion, endive, or any other weed with it, why, buy the roots, scorch them and grate them, and, like the man with the hairs in his butter, mix them to your taste. But do not, unless you choose to cheat your stomachs, buy ground coffee, a mill will soon pay for itself; and at all events never purchase canistered or bottled coffee, for in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred an additional dose of dust is made to pay for the tin or glass.*

As to water - every one knows that plumbers make the bottoms of the cisterns thicker than the sides because the water eats the lead away; hard water does so more than soft, and water from the same source more at sometimes than others. Lead, as the phrase is, accumulates in the system, so that ever so little taken day by day, at length sums up to a poisonous dose sufficient to mar the health. The remedy for this mischief is simply to have the service-pipes made of, and the cisterns lined with, gutta percha. Some towns - Glasgow, Nottingham, Manchester, for instance, are fortunate in having supplies of pure soft water, and though the change is comparatively recent, the good effect has already begun to show itself in the returns of the public health.

Thames and other river waters, with which London and many other cities and towns are supplied, contain in every gallon from twenty to four and twenty grains of ingredients, which have more or less a medicinal effect, besides the many injurious living animalculae and matters of animal refuse. Many spring waters, though of course free from the animal impurities, abound still more in the medicinal. To render such waters fit for healthful use, some process of purification is absolutely essential, and such purification very perceptibly improves both their cooking and washing properties.

Ordinary filters certainly free water from a considerable quantity of dirt, but not from the medicinal ingredients, nor even from all the animalculae, some of which, though quite visible as monsters with a microscope, nevertheless find their way through the filter. One of the simplest processes of purification, if people will only take the trouble to perform it - and it is surely worth it for the increase of comfort and the advantage to health - is, - for every forty gallons that the cistern holds to pour in one gallon of lime water; this has the effect of throwing down from the water a large proportion of the chemical ingredients, and no small multitude of the animal-culas. Such water filtered is perhaps as nearly pure as it can be made from the present source of the supplies. Another method of purification is by long slow boiling, then allowing the water to cool, and filtering it. Some trouble no doubt there is in any such course, but pure water, like pure air, is essential to a life of health, and those who will not be at the trouble must make up their minds to some degree of infirmity and unhappiness.

* It may not be amiss to show how tea is made in China, and coffee amongst the Turks.

The art of making tea consists in pouring the water on and off immediately, so as to get the flavour.

Coffee making is a more intricate affair, and cannot be fully conveyed in a receipt. But a docile spirit that will dismiss every received idea and not reason, may make something out of the hints I now submit. - The coffee must be slowly roasted, not burnt, and brought only to an amber brown, it must be roasted day by day. The flavour dissipates in a few hours, it must be reduced by pounding to an impalpable powder. In making it, two opposite and apparently incompatible ends are to be secured - strength and flavour. To obtain the first, it must be boiled; by boiling, the second is lost. The difficulty is surmounted by a double process, - one thorough cooking, one slight one ; by the first a strong infusion is obtained, by the second that infusion is flavoured. Thus a large pot with coffee-lees stands simmering by the fire ; this is the sherbet. When a cup is wanted the pounded coffee is put in the little tin or copper pan, and placed on the embers ; it fumes for a moment, then the sherbet is poured on; in a few seconds the froth (caimah) rises; presently an indication that it is about to boil is made manifest, when the coffee is instantly taken from the fire, carried into the apartment, turned into the cup, and drunk." - Urquhart's Pillars of Hercules.