Rensselaer Union, Volume 5, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1873 — FARM AND HOUSEHOLD. [ARTICLE]

FARM AND HOUSEHOLD.

l —To Polish Tins.—First rub your tins with a damp cloth; then take dry flour and rub it bn with your hands; afterward take an old newspaper anil rub the flour off, and the tins will shine as well as if half an hour had been spent rubbing them with brick dust or powder, which spoils the hands. —Recipe for Pickling Cherries.—3 lbs of sugar to one quart of vinegar; (if your vinegar is very strong reduce it with water); spices-to taste; this for seven lbs. of ftuit; jvhttfi the syrup is-hot put in the cherries/cook them- well but not until the skip Shrivels; watch them, and have them as when first picked from the tree; we put.ours into cans and seal them up hot.— Western Bural. —To Pickle Sweet Apples.—To one peck -of apples make a syrup of Your pounds of sugar and one quart of vinegar. Boil the apples in the syrup until tender, and then take them out and save the syrup for another sauce. Put the apples in a jar, boll five pounds of sugar and one quart of vinegar with sonle cinnamon and cloves twenty-five minutes, and pour it hot over the apples. This pickle is delicious. —Exterminating Ants.—ln reply to the query of C. Babcock in the Tribune as to the best mode of exterminating black ants (or any other ants), I can strongly recommend the application of powdered cyanide of potassium in and around the ant bed. An application of about a quarter of an ounce is generally sufficient; but if necessary, a second will surely give them their quietus. It is,however, important to bear in mind that this salt is a deadly poison—extreme care is required in its application.— Cor. N. Y. Tribune.

—Transparent Pudding.—Warm half a .pound of fresh butter, but do not allow it to melt. Mix with it half a pound of powdered loaf sugar, and stir them together till they .are ..perfectly light. Add a small nutmeg, grated, or half a large one. Beat eight eggs.as light as possible, and stir them gradually into the butter and sugar. Finish fine with sufficient ext rairi- <>£-jose.s tii give it a fme flavor. /Stir . the whole very hard, butter a deep dish, put in the mixture, and bake it half an hour. Serve it up cold. You may bake this pudding in puff paste. —ln a healthy condition, the skin is kept supple by an oily secretion, which -answers the same purpose as -oiling leather. IJurtng wa’fin Tveather ~th is secretion; in common with all secretions of the skin, is more abundant than in cold. When it is insufficient, the skiu becomes dry and harsh; and in those parts of the body where the skin is thick and subject to much motion, as on the hands, it readily i racks or fissures, The amount of this secretion is,, so much reduced in cold weatlier that tiie frequent washing of the hands with soap causes them to chap readily.(arid TiitslffiTmofe certainly If tire so.ap is not thoroughly washed off. The alkali in soitD is usually in excess, and this combines witli the oily secretion, and so deprives tiie skin of its natural lubricator. To prevent the hancls from chapping, then, be careful to wash all soap from them in clean water. This will ordinarily suffice; if not, it will be necessary to make good the removed oil by glycerine, honey, mutton tallow, etc. —Edmund Osborne, of Greentown, Ind., writes to the Northwestern Farmer: “ A few years ago, rather by accident than otherwise, a part of my hogs got into the orchard, and as I found they were doing good work in picking up the windfall apples, I allowed them to remain there. During the season all those that were, not in the orchar(UhaTthe_cholera,,and more ox. less of them had died, while those in the orchard—something like one-third of the whole lot—were thrifty and healthy all the season, none of them dying with any disease, and that, too, with nothing but a fence between the two lots ®f hogs.”— There is no doubt (says the National Live Stock Journal} that in its season fruit is Conducive to the health of all animals, especially to such gross feeders as swine. So far as it promotes general health, it assists the system in throwing off disease; but it can scarcely be regarded as a preventive, or a specific cure for any particular complaint.