Items of Advice

If you keep an account of your stores, and the dates when they are
bought, you can know exactly how fast they are used, and when they are
wasted, or stolen.

Stale bread is improved by steaming it half an hour or more.

Grate up dry cheese, and cheese crusts, moisten it with wine or brandy,
and keep it in a jar for use. It is better than at first.

Boil old earthenware soaked with grease in hot lye, and it will cleanse
it.

Wheat should always be washed before grinding.

When you clean house, begin with the highest rooms first, so that clean
rooms be not soiled when done.

Repair house linen, turn sheets, and wash bedclothes in summer.

Clean house in the fall instead of spring, and you get rid of all the
filth made by flies. But when you burn bituminous coal, spring is the
proper time for house cleaning.

Keep coarse mats on the kitchen table for keeping it clean.

Use a coarse apron and gloves for cleaning grates. Have coal cinders
sifted, and save the coarse part to burn again.

Buy your wood in August and September, when it usually is cheapest and
plenty.

Have the backs of your chimneys kept clean by sweeping.

Never try a new dish for company.

To purify water, put common charcoal pounded in a common flower-pot,
and fine sand over it, and let the water trickle through. Or, take an
old sieve, and fill it with sand and pounded charcoal, and strain the
water, and then cool it with ice.

Keep a receipt book for yourself, and write in it the improvements of
your own experience.

Keep bits of potter’s clay in the house, to use for a paste to extract
grease from carpets, floors, and broadcloths.

Dry bran around grapes and other fruit preserves it.

All fat should be tried up once a week, for cooking, or soap grease.
Good fat saves butter.

When a stove-pipe or other iron is cracked, make a cement with ashes,
salt, and water, and it will stop the opening.

_Faded colors_ often are improved by strong salt and water.

_Sal volatile_, or spirits of hartshorn, will restore colors taken out
by acids.

_Eggs_ are preserved longer by packing them close, standing on their
small ends. Another way is to pack them in fine salt, small end down.
Another way is to pack them, small end down, and then pour on them a
mixture of four quarts of cold water, four quarts of unslacked lime,
two ounces of salt, and two ounces of cream-tartar. This will serve for
nine dozen eggs. Try all these ways.

_Rancid butter_ is said, by good judges, to be restored thus:--Put
fifteen drops of chloride of lime to a pint of water, and work the
butter in it till every particle has come in contact with the water.
Then work it over in fair cold water.

_Indelible Ink_ is thus prepared:--Buy three drachms of nitrate of
silver, and put it in a vial with two spoonfuls of water. Let it stand
a few days, then color it with a little ink, and add a tablespoonful
of brandy. The preparation is made of strong pearlash water, stiffened
with gum-arabic, and colored with red wafers.

_Buy cheap red wafers_, and scatter them about, and cockroaches will
eat them and be destroyed. The roots of _black hellebore_ scattered in
their haunts is an infallible remedy.

_Cold cream_ for sore lips, is made by mixing two ounces of oil of
almonds, one ounce of spermaceti, one drachm of white wax, and melting
them together, adding rose water to perfume them.

_Jelly-bags_ should be made of flannel, and _pudding cloths_ of thick
linen, with strings sewed on to them.

_Rose leaves_ should be gathered and preserved by crowding them into a
jar with brandy, to use for cooking.

_Potato starch_ is made by grating peeled potatoes, and rubbing them in
water. Then pour off the water, after stirring it, and dry what sinks
to the bottom.

_Orange_ and _lemon peel_ can be saved thus:--Dry it in an oven, pound
it, and then bottle it close.

_Orange_ or _lemon water_ is prepared thus:--Pound the fresh skins in a
mortar, pour in boiling water, cover close, and when cold bottle close.
Or use wine or brandy.

_Cologne water_ is made thus:--Buy at the apothecary’s one drachm each
of oil of lavender, oil of lemon, oil of rosemary, and oil of cinnamon.
Add two drachms of oil of bergamot. Mix in a vial, and add a pint of
alcohol.

When _Pearlash_ or _Saleratus_ becomes damp, dissolve it in as much
water as will just entirely dissolve it, and no more. A tablespoonful
of this equals a teaspoonful of the solid. Keep it corked in a junk
bottle.

The following is a very useful receipt for children who go to school
where blackboards are used.