1628. To Keep Milk Sweet

1628.    To Keep Milk Sweet. A teaspoonful of fine salt or horse-radish in a pan of milk will keep it sweet for several days. Milk can be kept a year or more as sweet as when taken from the cow by the following method: Procure bottles, which must be perfectly clean, sweet, and dry; draw the milk from the cow into the bottles, and as they are filled, immediately cork them well, and fasten the cork with pack-thread or wire. Then spread a little straw in the bottom of a boiler, on which place the bottles, with straw between them, until the boiler contains a sufficient quantity. Fill it up with cold water, and as soon as it begins to boil, draw the fire and let the whole cool gradually. When quite cold, take out the bottles and pack them in sawdust in hampers, and stow them away in the coolest part of the house.

1629. Preservation of Eggs

1629.    Preservation of Eggs. When newly laid, eggs are almost perfectly full, but the shell is porous, and the watery portion of its contents begins to evaporate through its pores the moment it is exposed to the air, so that the eggs become lighter every day. To preserve the interior of the egg in its natural state, it is necessary to seal up the pores of the shell air-tight. This may be done by dipping them in melted suet, olive oil, milk of lime, solution of gum-arabic, or covering them with any air-proof varnish. They are then packed in bran, oats, meal, salt, ashes, or charcoal powder.

1630. To Preserve Eggs

1630.    To Preserve Eggs. Vegetable oils, more especially linseed, simply rubbed on to the egg, hinders any alteration for a sufficiently long period, and presents a very simple and efficacious method. "We believe that two coatings of collodion should preserve eggs better than any other method that has yet been suggested. Or perhaps a single coating of paraffine might be equally effective.

1631. To Distinguish Good Eggs

1631.     To Distinguish Good Eggs. To ascertain whether an egg is good or bad, hold it up to the light. A good egg is translucent, but a bad one is perfectly opaque; the difference is as easily perceived as that between a blue egg and a white one.

1632. To Preserve by Alcohol

1632. To Preserve by Alcohol. Strong alcoholic liquors are used to prevent decomposition in both vegetable and animal bodies. They penetrate the substances, combine with its juices, and as the organic tissues have less attraction for the spirituous mixture, it escapes ; and the tissues themselves shrink and harden in the same way as when salted. Alcohol also obstructs change by seizing upon the oxygen in the atmosphere, in virtue of its superior attraction for that gas, thus preventing it from acting upon the substance to be preserved.

1633. German Soup Tablets

1633. German Soup Tablets. Reinsch gives the following receipt for making the soup tablets so much in use in the German army during the late war: Take 11 parts by weight of good suet, melt it an iron pan, and make it very hot, so as to become brown; add, while keeping the fat stirred, 18 parts rye meal, and continue heating and stirring so as to make the mass brown; add then 4 parts dried salt and 2 parts coarsely pulverized caraway seed. The mixture is then poured into tin pans somewhat like those used for making chocolate into cakes. The cakes have the appearance of chocolate, and are chiefly intended for the use of soldiers while in the field. A quantity of about 1 ounce of this preparation is sufficient to yield, when boiled with some water, a ration of good soup, and, in case of need, the cakes, being agreeable to the taste, may be eaten raw.