ods, Methods of Cooking, Cooking Time Table,
The Art of Carving_, by MARION HARRIS NEIL.

Before commencing to cook, look up the required recipe, read and think
it out. Note down on a slip of paper the materials and quantities
required. Collect all utensils and materials required before
commencing. Success in cookery depends on careful attention to every
detail from start to finish. Quantities, both liquid and dry, should
be exact. Small scales and weights should form part of the kitchen
equipment where possible, and the measuring cups cost so little that
no one need be without them.

Throughout this book the measurements are level

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_How to Choose Foods_

Money can be spent to infinitely better advantage in the store, than
by giving orders at the door, by phone or mail. Every housekeeper
knows how large a proportion of the housekeeping money is swallowed up
by the butcher's bill, so that with the meat item careful selection is
most necessary in order to keep the bills within bounds.

In choosing meat of any kind the eye, the nose and the touch really
are required, although it is not appetizing to see the purchaser use
more than the eye.

Beef

In choosing meat it should be remembered that without being actually
unwholesome, it varies greatly in quality, and often an inferior joint
is to be preferred from a first class beast to a more popular cut from
a second class animal. To be perfect the animal should be five or six
years old, the flesh of a close even grain, bright red in color and
well mixed with creamy white fat, the suet being firm and a clear
white. Heifer meat is smaller in the bone and lighter in color than
ox beef. Cow beef is much the same to look at as ox beef, though being
older it is both coarser in the grain and tougher; bull beef, which
is never seen however, in a first class butcher's may be recognized by
the coarseness and dark color of the flesh, and also by a strong and
almost rank smell.

Mutton

To be in perfection, mutton should be at least four, or better five
or six years old, but sheep of this age are rarely if ever, met with
now-a-days, when they are constantly killed under two years. To know
the age of mutton, examine the breast bones; if these are all of a
white gristly color the animal was four years old or over, while the
younger it is the pinkier are the bones, which, in a sheep of under a
year, are entirely red.

Good mutton should be of a cle