Lay them an hour or two in cold salt and water; remove the outside leaves and boil them half an hour in milk and water. If they are strong, pour off the water when they are half done, and put fresh boiling water to them. Brocoli is cooked in the same manner, and should be laid on toast exactly like asparagus.
Take fresh purple ones, and pull out the stem; parboil them and cut them in slices about an inch thick. Dip them in a beaten egg, and then in a plate of bread or cracker crumbs, with salt and pepper, and fry them in drippings until they are nicely browned.
Put the ears into boiling water, with salt in it, and boil them half an hour.
Cut the corn off the cob, and boil the cobs half an hour in the water; then take them out, put in the corn and boil it twenty minutes or half an hour. If there is a quart of the corn and water, add a pint of new milk, with salt, pepper, and one or two beaten eggs. Continue the boiling a few minutes, and thicken it a little with flour.
Cut off the corn from the cobs, and, an hour and a half before dinner, put the cobs, with a few shelled beans, into cold water to boil. After one hour take out the cobs, put in the corn and boil it half an hour. There should be no more water than will be necessary to make the succotash of the right thickness; as having too much occasions a loss of the richness imparted by the cobs. When you take it up, add a small piece of butter. This is much better than to boil the corn on the cob and then cut it off.
It is a very good way, when a family are tired of fresh meat in hot weather, to boil a piece of pork in another pot until the grossest fat has boiled out, and then put it with the succotash for the remainder of the time. It gives a very good flavor to the corn, and makes an excellent dinner.
Grate young, sweet corn into a dish, and to a pint add one egg, well beaten, a small teacup of flour, half a gill of cream, and a teaspoonful of salt. Mix it well together. Fry it exactly like oysters, dropping it into the fat by spoonfuls about the size of an oyster.
Pickles should never be kept in potter's ware, as arsenic and other poisonous substances are used in the glazing; and this is sometimes decomposed by vinegar. Whole families have been poisoned in this way; and where fatal effects do not follow, a deleterious influence may be operating upon the health, from this cause, when it is not suspected. Pickles should be made with cider vinegar.