1. With fruit pies use a deep dish and have a top crust over it.

2. When you want a pie without a top, like pumpkin or squash pie, bake the under crust first, brushing on a little white of egg before you bake it. Then fill and bake again.

3. Bake the pie crust in squares or diamonds or rounds by itself, and serve on a plate with cooked fruit.

What can we use in place of pie crust? A baking-powder crust makes a very good substitute for a pie crust, and, while your father may not like it so well at first, he probably will find it much better for him in the end. A light baking-powder crust can be used for the top of a fruit or meat pie. Bake this kind of crust in a jelly-cake tin, making it rather thin, until it is quite brown. Split, and put fruit between the crusts. This becomes a shortcake when more butter is used, but the ordinary baking-powder crust is rich enough for everyday use. The crust can be baked and cooled and served cold with the fruit, or it may be reheated and served.

Fig. 107. - Squares of pie crust served with jam.

Fig. 108. - Squares of pie crust served with fruit.

Making ice cream. If you have ice on the farm, you will find it is quite easy with a good freezer to make ice cream or sherbet on some hot day. There are a number of freezers for sale that are not expensive, and that will do the freezing in about twenty minutes. Mollie Stark and her brothers make their ice cream without a freezer, using a tin pail with a cover set in a tub. Mollie and her brothers divide the work in this way: the boys bring a piece of ice from the icehouse, put it into a heavy bag, and pound it. Mollie makes a custard by the recipe that follows, and when it is cooled off she puts it into the tin pail, but she does not have the pail more than two thirds full. Can you tell why? The boys mix one part of coarse salt with three parts of ice, and cover the bottom of a wooden box with this. Mollie ties paper tightly over the cover of the pail, sets it in the box, and then packs the ice and salt all around it. The box is four or five inches bigger than the pail. Some of the ice and salt is put on the cover. Paper is laid over the salt and a clean old bed quilt is put over the whole. At the end of about fifteen minutes Mollie opens the pail, stirs the freezing custard with a spoon, and covers it up again as before. This has to be done several times, depending of course upon the amount of ice cream that is being made. This method does not make the ice cream so smooth as the freezer where you turn the crank all the time, but it makes a very agreeable dessert. Here are two rules that Mollie uses. When the price of eggs is high, Mollie makes a mixture like a cornstarch pudding, using less cornstarch to the quart, and flavors it with chocolate or coffee, or stirs in some cut-up fruit half an hour before the ice cream is finished. Mollie sometimes uses orange juice or the sirup from canned peaches or berries in the sherbet.