Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 60, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 March 1918 — Page 3

Uncle Sain’s Food Lessons

(Special Information Service U. S. De* oartment of Agriculture.) MAKE A LITTLE MEAT GO A LONG WAY. Don’t think that you must eat a lot of meat to be strong. Meat Is good to help build up the body, but so are many other foods. in tnese oisnes part or your Building material comes from the more expensive meat and part from the cheaper peas, beans, hominy, and barley. The little meat with the vegetables and cereals will give your body what it needs. Savory Stews and Meat Pies. Do you know how good they are? They may be so varied that you can have a different one every day in the week, and all of them delicious. It needs only a small piece of meat to give flavor to a hearty dish. Try them. They can be a whole meal and a nutritious one. These recipes serve five people. Here is an English stew that is especially good: Hot Pot of Mutton and Barley. One pound mutton. One and a half cupfuls pearled barley. One tablespoonful salt. Four potatoes. Four onions. Celery tops or other seasoning herbs. Cut the mutton in small pieces, and brown with the onion in fat cut from meat. This will help make the meat tender and improves the flavor. Pour this into a covered saucepan. Add two quarts water and the barley. Simmer for one and a half hours. Then add the potatoes cut in quarters, seasoning herbs, and seasoning, and cook onehalf hour longer. Beef Stew. One pound beef. Four potatoes cut in quarters. Quarter peck peas or one can. One cupful carrots cut up small. One teaspoonful salt. Cut the meat in small pieces and brown in the fat from the meat. Simmer in two quarts of water for one hour. Add the peas and carrots and cook for one-half houf, then add the potatoes. If canned peas are used, add them ten minutes before serving. Serve when potatoes are done. Different Stews. Here is the way you can change the stews to make them different- and to 'suit the season: 1. The meat. This may be any kind and ihore or less than a pound may be used. Use the cheap cuts, the flank, rump, neck, or brisket. The long, slow cooking makes them tender. Game and poultry are good. 2. Potatoes add barley may be used or barley alone, or rice hominy, or macaroni. 3. Vegetables. Carrots, turnips, onions, peas, beans, cabbage, tomatoes are good, canned or fresh. Use one or more of these, as you wish. 4. Parsley, celery tops, onion tops, seasoning herbs, or chopped sweet peppers add to the flavor. 5. Many left-overs may be used —not only meat and vegetables, but rice or hominy. How to Cook the Stews. All kinds of stews are cooked in just about the same way. Here are directions which will serve for making almost any kind. Cut the meat in small pieces and brown with the onion in the fat cut from the meat. Add the salt and pepper, seasoning vegetables (onion, celery tops, etc.), two quarts of, water, and the rice, or other cereal, if it is to be used. Cook for an hour, then add the vegetables except potatoes. Cook the stew for half an hour, add the potatoes cut in quarters, cook for another half an hour, and serve. The tireless cooker may well be used, the meat and the vegetables being put in at the same time. Left-overs or canned vegetables need oply to be heated through. Add them 15 minutes before serving. Dried peas or beans should be soaked overnight and cooked for three hours before adding to the stew; or, better, cook them overnight in a fireless cooker. Meat Pies. Another good way to use a little meat. Have you ever used rice, cornmeal mush, or hominy for a crust? This is less work than a pastry crust and saves wheat Four cupfuls cooked cornmeal, rice, or hominy. One onion, two cupfuls tomato, eighth teaspoonful pepper. One tablespoonful fat One pound raw meat or left-over meat cut up small. One-half teaspoonful salt. Melt the fat, add the sliced onion, and if raw meat is used, add it and at,lr until the red color disappears. Add the tomato and seasoning. If cooked meat is used, add it with the tomato and seasoning, after the onion, Js browned, and heat through. Grease a baking dish, put in a layer of the cereal, add the meat and gravy, and cover with the cereal dotted with fat Bake for half an hour. Shepherd’s Pie. This is the name of a meat pie with • mw shed-potato crust browned in the oven.

Try these recipes and cut down your seat bills.

DO YOU KNOW CORNMEAL?

USING CORNMEAL means service to your country and nourishing food for you. Try corn bread and see how good kt can be. There are many kinds. You will wonder why you didn’t use it every day before the war. It is very nourishing, too. A cupful of cprameal gives even more fuel to your body than a cupful of wheat flour.

Here is a quick kind of corn bread. Our grandmothers used to bake it on a board before the open fire. You can bake It in your oven. Corn Dodger. Two cupfuls cornmeal, one teaspoonful salt, two teaspoonfuls fat, one and three-fourths cupful boiling water. Pour the boiling water over the other materials. Beat well. When cool, form into thin cakes and bake 30 minutes in a hot oven. Make 14 biscuits. These crisp little biscuits are good with butter or gravy. Eat them with your meat and vegetables. Cprn Bread. Corn bread is a good article —is especially good made with sour milk and soda; but sweet milk and baking powder are satisfactory. Eggs Improve the flavor and add to the food value, but may be omitted if too expensive. No. 1. Two cupfuls cornmeal, two cupfuls sweet milk (whole or skim), four teaspoonfuls baking powder, one tablespoonful sugar, two tablespoonfuls fat, one teaspoonful salt, one egg (may be omitted). No. 2. Two cupfuls cornmeal, two cupfuls sour milk, one teaspoonful soda, one tablespoonful sugar, two tablespoonfuls fat, one teaspoonful salt, one egg (may be omitted). Mix ingredients. Add milk, wellbeaten egg, and melted fat. Beit well. Bake In shallow pan for about 30 minutes. Spoon Bread. An Old Southern Recipe.—Here is an old-fashioned soft spoon bread the Southerners like. With milk or sirup it makes a satisfying meal. Tv>o cupfuls water, one cupful milk (whole or skim), one cupful cornmeal, one tablespoonful fat, twd eggs, two teaspoonfuls salt. Mix water and cornmeal and brirfg to the boiling point and cook five minutes. Beat eggs well and add with other materials to the mush. Beat well and bake in a well-greased pan for 25 minutes in a hot oven. Serve from the same dish with a spoon. Enough for six. Cornmeal and Milk. Do you use cornmeal mush for a breakfast food? It is both cheap and good. Cooked in skimmed milk Instead of water it is extra fine, and the food value of the dish is nearly doubled. Here is a delicious cornmeal and milk dessert. Indian Pudding. Four cupfuls milk (whole or skim), one-fourth cupful cornmeal, threefourths teaspoonful salt, one teaspoonful ginger, one-third cupful molasses. Cook milk and meal in a double boiler 20 minutes; add molasses, salt, abd ginger. Pour into buttered pudding dish and bake two hours in a slow oven, or use your fireless cooker. Serve with milk. This makes a good and nourishing dessert. Serve six. Cornmeal and Meat. Cornmeal is good combined with meats. Such a dish is a meal in Itself. Try this one. Tamale Pie. Two cupfuls cornmeal, six cupfuls water, one tablespoonful fat, one onion, two cupfuls tomatoes, one pound hamburger steak. Make a mush by stirring the cornmeal and one and one-half teaspoonfuls salt into boiling water. Cook 45 minutes. Brown onion in fat, add hamburger and stir until red color disappears. Add salt, pepper, and tomato. A sweet pepper is an addition. Grease baking dish, put in layer of cornmeal mush, add seasoned meat, and cover with mush.* Bake one-half hour. Serve six. Corn Helps Us Feed the World. The more we use the more food can be sent abroad. You need not tire of It, as there are at least 50 ways to use cornmeal to make good dishes for dinner, supper, lunch, or breakfast. Here are some suggestions: Hot Breads. Boston brown bread, hoecake, muffins, biscuits, griddle cakes. Waffles. Desserts. Cornmeal molasses cake, apple corn bread, dumplings. Gingerbread, fruit gems. Hearty Dishes. Cornmeal croquettes, cornmeal fishballs. Meat and cornmeal dumplings. Italian polenta. Tamales. The recipes are in Farmers’ Bulletin 565, “Corn Meal as a Food and Ways of Using It,” free from the department of agriculture. Cornmeal has become Our Allyl

United States Seashore Cities.

Seashore cities —small and sleepy villages in winter, great, bustling cities In summer —are now so numerous that they can hardly be counted. They dot the coast from Maine to Florida; the gulf coast has any number of pretty ( salubrious bathing spots, and the Pacific coast, from Gray’s Harbor to San Diego, abounds In ocean resorts. The gulf coast and the lower Pacific coast have the advantage, however, of all-the-year-round bathing; the Atlantic' coast season is about three months only.

THE EVENING REPUBLICAN, RENSSELAER, INi>.

By BARTON BLAKE.

AR means wrecking—chemical and physical and moral wrecking. And it is the wreckage of men that is most distressing to those who see the war at close range. Houses can'’be rebuilt. The farms of the Oise hnd the Aisne can be cleared. The factories at Chaunes can be restored, or else razed and erected all over again and made modem. But what about wrecked men?

In France I have heard an ironist say : “Yes, he was a hero for ten days and now he is a d.ecorated ruin; a cripple for life.” Yet even “mutiles” can be patched up. They can be provided with a .“jambe Americaine” and. an arm fixed with all sorts of joints and springs that make it practical. Last week, in the train to N n, I sat next to one such mended hero; he showed me his arm with real pride, and explained that for the present he had work in the municipal markets of Paris; but that he hoped to get transferred to something more esthetic; he would prefer to be a sort of subcurator in a picture gallery. “See, Monsieur, I can hold a fork like this —or I can grasp a glass; the thumb Is exaggeratedly long; I have to get a special glove. . . .” Yes, the mutiles’ features can be molded into something like a human semblance, where it’s the face that has suffered. But that is hardly enough. It Is not enough to make the hero for ten days, the cripple for a lifetime, look like a man. He must be restored to real living—to a part in the world of Industry. That is for the sake of Belgium, or France, or Britain, or whatever his country may be; it is also for the man’s own sake. I have just had a talk with Miss Grace Harper, chief of the bureau of the re-education of mutiles at American Red Cross headquarters in Paris. She has shown me estimates that for every mtllion men placed in the field France counts on having to care for 50,000 mutiles —5,000 of them a month. And this figure does not take account of the war-blinded and war-deafened and war-crazed. ““Please do not quote these figures as our own,” says the cautious chief. “They are the best estimates we have been able to secure, but they are estimates. “France is working miracles in making over maimed men,” Miss Harper goes on, “but even at the close of-1917 the work of reconstruction has not yet caught up with the destructive forces. Under the French system the wounded soldier passes from a ‘Post de Secours’ to a base hospital, and thence to one of the eleven existing ‘Centres de Physlotheraple.” At that center he receives surgical treatment, or physiotherapy, or both, physiotherapy meaning electrical or mechanical massage; Here he receives also an artificial limb, and his industrial training is begun—to fit him for a new place in the social organism. “The French centers of physiotherapy are capable of receiving less than 25 per cent of the mutiles. Happily the schools of re-education are able to take care of some of those mutiles who must, perforce, forego the physiotherapeutics. “I am talking to you in terms like these because the problem is such a big one, and because our own country, too, must realize something of the problem we are all up against, and the support that must be given to the American Red Cross if are either to be of much help to France or to ourselves in this business of making men out of war’s wastage. But I want you to realize that the Red Cross did not come to France just to study. “I, for one, have been in Paris since March, 1917, and have visited practically every large center of re-educational work in France, and some of the small ones; not all, by any means, for nominally there are 103 of them. The Red Cross continues to study the new developments, the new demands in the field of re-education, for when the Ameri-, can army has its full share of casualties the Red Cross, whose first task is to back up that army, must benefit by French and British experience. But our real program for helping in France has now advanced beyond the stage'of study. “A superficial examination of our field shows this: The training already provided in France is Industrial training, or the preparation of discharged soldiers for such jobs as stenography.

"BACK TO THE LAND” IN WAR SWEPT FRANCE

bookkeeping, school teaching, etc. —sit-down work. And yet it is a fact that from 65 to 75 per cent of the French mutiles nowadays were, before the war, farmers or farm laborers. Not all of these men should undertake, or are physically and mentally fitted to undertake, industrial or city jobs. Moreover, everyone knows that the first great world peace problem will Jie the challenge of a food shortage. Obviously, as many mutiles as possible —France’s today, America’s tomorrow —must go back to the land. So it is the plan of the American Red Cross to help France in placing some of them there and, later on, to help America in the same way.” I ventured to point out to Miss Harper that reports show there are 31 agricultural centers in operation In France, but Miss Harper was inclined to shake her head. She would not quarrel with my figures, but with the impression they created. “No doubt,” she said, “but you must remember that, judged by American standards, France is not yet in the forefront of scientific agriculture. French economists, whose minds are now more than ever busy with the facts of food production, are exclaiming at the sad truth that Germany, with a less and inferior farming area, should, before the war, have exceeded France in agricultural production. “These thirty-one agricultural centers of re-edu-cation you speak of hale opened their doors for mutiles, but they lack necessary equipment, and the canny inutile looks in and, too often, passes on. Small wonder, especially if you reflect upon his eagerness to get home, to be free of discipline that is irksome because it is (after three years and a half of war) still discipline. "France is teaching her mutiles small trades, cobbling, basket-making, tinsmithing, machine work, etc., but what the Red Cross wants above all to do is to co-operate in the agricultural movement. We who are world-famous for our agricultural machinery must provide motor tractors and other mechanical equipment for the schools of re-education. Also, we must give expert instruction in the raising of live stock, poultry, rabbits, bees. We must go in for training in horticulture. When the spring of 1918 has come, we should be in a position to show you our agriculture center in full blast, filling a part, at least, of the great need I have mentioned. And that farm of about 500 acres will be situated in one of the richest farming areas of France, very close to one of the great psychotherapeutic centers. That is all I can very well tell you now. “Of course, that one farm will'not solve the whole problem of the war mutlle. At least, it will at all times take cure es 200 mutiles. It will have been leased for three years. Dairies, sheds, cowbarns. sheepcotes, pig-sties, a forge, machine shop, carpentry shop—all these things figure in our calculations. By spring, work of construction and repair will have been accomplished, quarters for men put up and some of the work will have been contributed by the mutiles themselves. It is not only more economical it is better so. And they will get two francs a day wage—these mutiles; five francs a day when they are themselves instructors.”

Miss Harper is a former student at the University of Chicago, who has been associated with the Children’s Aid society and with a night club for boys and girls in Boston; who has taught bookbinding in Haverhill, Mass.; who has served with the Massachusetts Infant asylum—and who first came to deal with cripples in helping Dr. Richard Cabot organize the King’s Chapel bureau for the handicapped at the Massachusetts General hospital. There at Boston she set a group of cripples to work making children’s clothes; their product was sold from coast to coast and at good prices. The work paid the workers commercially, as well as helping to restore their status as independent, self-respecting and respected citizens. i The chief of the bureau of re-education is a woman, and a feminine woman. I think it would seem to the antebellum American mildly diverting if he could cast his eye over the list of equipment for the Red Cross farm of re-education which, at this point of our talk, Miss Grace Harper permitted me to see: tractors! plows! harrows! extirpators and Canadians (whatever “Canadians” are,, —she told me—but I don’t remember); drills, manure distributors, horse hose, mowing machinery—and I don’t know how many machine* more —g horses, 15 cows, 1 bull, 100 sheep, 20 pigs, 15 chicken pens (comprising 1 rooster and 6 hen* each), 6 incubators (210 eggs each), etc. “Under war conditions,” Miss Harper resumed, “some mutiles are promptly in a position to earn good wages in munition works at wages which they will find it hard to equal once normal conditions are restored by the return to peace. We must, therefore, walk rather carefully, if we are interested in the return to peace conditions, and in what happens to the mutiles in the readjustment. What interests us is that 65 per cent of farm laborers included in the list of mutiles—and we must reach them, or at least some of them, promptly. We must get these men started on the road that leads to the land while they are still under psycotherapeutlc or surgical care. For that reason, if for no other, the Red Cross must combine its agricultural re-education with its surgical enterprises. This training for the future must begin during convalescence —that is, before discharge from the army Is granted. “Do not think that the American Red Cross, in its plan for specializing upon agricultural re-edu-cation, disparages or undervalues the fine work of the re-educational institutions which have preceded it in the field. But it cannot overlook the fact that France is an agricultural nation and that, after the war, almost all the world will, for a time, be somewhere near the edge of hunger. Did yon see this last evening’s Evenement?” concluded Miss Harper, handing me a dipping. I had not, but I read it. “The commission charged to study for the radical party congress the economic reorganization of France has adopted the following conclusions,” the article begins. “It is by agriculture that France can, and must renew itself, for this is the base and source of life. “Too much encouragement cannot be given to agricultural production. . . . Henceforth the utmost possible quantity of labor should be provided to agriculture by the mobilization on the land of the older military classes and of agricultural specialists. . . “The state should encourage the construction and use of agricultural machinery—especially tractors. . . Scientific agricultural stations should be created, in the principal regions of France, linking the one to the other by means of a central station at Paris.” ■ “That is a politician’s document, and you have not read ail of it,” concluded Miss Harper, as she took back the newspaper clipping; “but the principle is. there, and it is justly enough expressed. Here is another newspaper article. Edmond Thery, writing in Le Matin of Paris, concludes an article on *Our Agricultural Production’ with the words: “ “The indispensable agricultural policy for us to pursue from now on has been perfectly defined by the order of the day unanimously voted by the chamber of deputies at its sitting of October 11, and it can be summed up in two clauses: mobilization of agricultural labor, mobilization of chemical fertilizers.’-” " ' . “So you see,” concludes the chief of the bureau for the re-education of mutiles, “that the American Red Cross, in seeking to give France more skilled agriculturists, through its scientific and mechanical instruction of 'inutile farmers and farm laborers, is only undertaking to express practically what French deputies and French economists declare to be a vital necessity for France, and therefore for France’s warmest friend in all the world.*