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Soups and Vegetables (GUMBO FILLET Joint and dredge)

GUMBO FILLET. - Joint and dredge well with flour a full grown chicken; put in a pot with sufficient lard to fry it, adding a sliced onion. Be careful not to burn it. When fried, add two quarts of boiling water, a slice of ham trimmed free from the coarse fat, salt, black and red pepper, a few cloves and grains of allspice if liked; stew until soup is rich with pieces of chicken; turn into tureen and add one tablespoon of fillet if fresh, two if not fresh; stir well to avoid lumping, and do not cover after adding fillet; add as many oysters as you please; they must previously be cooked, but not more than five minutes. The soup is best made by adding liquor of one quart of oysters to two quarts boiling water. Fillet is pulverized sassafras leaves dried and sifted; can be made at home readily. - Mrs. S., La. TO CAN CORN.-Put the corn raw into tin cans, then fill with cold water even with the top of the corn; solder up the can, pricking a small hole in the cover. Solder that also. Boil the cans and contents in boiling water two and a half hours; then with a hot iron open the small hole and let the gas blow out, after which solder up and boil again two and a half hours and set away for use. Peas, string beans and Lima beans can be put up in the same way.

SWEET POTATOES. - Boil or stew large potatoes until nearly done; take out, peel and slice, not quite half an inch thick. Put in baking pan with very little water; sprinkle thickly with white sugar and spread each slice with butter; brown in oven. Carolina style and a favorite dish all over the South.-Mrs. Eckford, Atlanta, Ga.

The following arrangement of "Bills of Fare" for every day in the year was arranged for the latitude of Washington-as nearly a medium as could be found-by a lady, Southern born and bred, who now resides in that city. Housekeepers, North and South, can easily adapt it to their own peculiar wants, and will, we believe, find it suggestive and helpful. The recipes referred to are all contained in this book, and may be quickly. found by reference to the alphabetical index. The bills of fare are not, of course, arbitrary, but are intended to suggest such a variety as will meet the wants of the whole family. The arrangement was made for a year beginning with Thursday. When the current year begins earlier, the last day or days of December may be used to precede those here given for January, and the dates changed on the margin with a soft pencil, so that they may be readily erased and changed again for subsequent years. A daily reference to these pages will, we feel sure, save the housewife much puzzling over the question, "What shall we have for dinner?” For the sake of brevity, coffee, tea, chocolate, lemonade in hot weather, and milk in cold weather, have not been mentioned in the bills of fare. They are of course appropriate to any meal, and are to be used according to taste. Soup, as a regular dinner course, is always in order, following oysters raw when the latter are in season. Soups vary in name far more than in quality. Much of the slop served as soup a la this, that and the other, would not, except for the name, be recognized as something to be taken into the human stomach. This, however, may be a matter of small importance when a bountiful dinner of good things is to follow, but in cases where healthy stomachs are demanding supplies, a really good soup, with or without name, is heartily relished, and is very wholesome as preparing the way for more solid food. In any family where soup is relished a sufficient supply may be made daily, or as often as desired, with but little trouble and trifling addition to the regular expenses. Fresh fish, as a separate course, comes next in order. Large fish of some sort are usually considered most elegant, either baked or boiled, for dinner, and they are really very nice when they can be procured freshly killed and dripping with their native waters.

Bread is always an accompaniment of every course at dinner, bread and butter being more properly a part of dessert. Cheese is to most persons a pleasant titbit at dessert, and pickles, of one or another variety, appropriate to the dishes served, are seen on the table at nearly every meal. On Sunday, in most families, the dinner is delayed until two or three o'clock and the supper omitted entirely, and in winter when the days are short, especially in the more northern States, two meals a day is the rule (379). for every day. In large cities, too, where business hours are fewer, and the men of the household lunch down town on account of the distance residences are from business, the dinner is delayed until later in the day, and the bill of fare varied accordingly.

Fruits, in their natural state, are too much neglected at the tables of people in moderate circumstances. Pies, puddings and other compounds, made partly of fruit, are generally less wholesome and really less palatatable than the fruit itself in a natural state or with some simple dressing. In most localities berries in their season are not costly. Strawberries, fresh, ripe and luscious, for breakfast, dinner and supper, can not be substituted by any thing more agreeable and refreshing, and as the season for this fruit is always short it is scarcely possible to weary of them. Scarcely less delicious are the raspberries, blackberries and huckleberries which follow soon. Then come ripe watermelons, cantelopes, nutmeg and musk melons and grapes, peaches and pears. Those who raise their own melons will need no instruction on the subject of serving and eating them. After the fruit is well grown, a good shot-gun and a keen eye on the "patch" is all that is necessary to secure a ripe crop. But to the dainty housekeeper who must buy her melon after a week or two of shipping, reshipping, transporting and handling, until it has cost nearly its weight in gold, the best instructions are: Get your melon as fresh as possible; let it remain on ice several hours or all night; if it cuts crisp, and has ripe seeds and tastes well flavored, cut the ends off and set up on a dish; divide both halves through the middle and serve in long slices or cut in rings; pass a waiter to receive the rinds. But if the meat of the melon appears wilted or withered, or is not perfectly ripe, pass it to the four-footed beasts, where it should have gone in the first place. Those who can afford the more costly tropical fruit, such as bananas and pine apples, should slice them as thin as possible, place in the prettiest and shallowest glass fruit-stands, and cover well with sugar for some time before serving.

Suggestions for the tasteful decoration of the table will be found under "The Dining Room."