Learn to make simple puddings and other desserts for the noonday meal. If you follow these suggestions you will reap a rich reward in a healthy, clear-headed family. You must think for yourself, too. Keep up, as much as possible, with the outside world. Take a part of a day at least once a week to meet other people, and manage to get in a visit to town now and then. Read some bright new books. Do not devote all your spare moments to fancy work or the trimming of underclothing for yourself and your children; you would be wasting your energies and making extra work for ironing day. Keep yourself, as much as is in your power, a bright, happy, thinking woman, and you will be an inspiration and tower of strength to your family and neighborhood. This, perhaps, seems a little like a sermon, but I mean every word of it.
All meats should be kept until free from animal heat before being put into brine. This will take at least forty-eight hours. Have the meat cut into suitable pieces and sprinkled lightly with fine salt and saltpetre in the proportion of one tablespoonful of saltpetre to four of salt. Lay the meat on a board that is slightly inclined, so that the surface blood which is drawn from the meat can run off. At the end of forty-eight or more hours put it in the brine.
All meats should be completely covered with brine. If there be any tendency to float, lay pieces of board on the meat and put weights on these. Large stones will answer.
12 gallons of water. 3 gallons of salt. 3/4 pound of saltpetre. 3 pounds of brown sugar. 2 ounces of potash or washing soda.
Put all the ingredients in a large kettle and set on the fire. Stir frequently, and skim until clear; then pour into a large tub, being careful not to turn in the sediment. Any kind of meat may be put into this pickle when cold. Beef should remain in the pickle from one to four or five weeks, as one may desire it slightly or thoroughly salted.
6 gallons of water. 9 quarts of salt. 2 quarts of brown sugar. 3/4 of a pound of saltpetre. 2 ounces of washing soda.
Prepare this pickle the same as directed for meat pickle. It will require ten or twelve days’ time to pickle the tongues. If the flavor of juniper berries be liked, simmer half a pound in one quart of water for one hour; then strain the liquid into the brine.