Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1874 — FARM AND HOUSEHOLD. [ARTICLE]

FARM AND HOUSEHOLD.

—Recipe for Cream Puffs. —Two cups flour, onc-hulf cup butter, three-fourths pint hot water. Boil the butter and water together, and stir in the flour slowly while boiling. Let it cook a few minutes; add five well-beaten eggs; drop the mixture on tins and bake in a quick oven. For the custard: One pint of milk, one-half cup flour, one pound sugar, two eggs. Let it cool, and after the puffs are cold cut them open and put in the custard, which can be flavored with vanilla or lemon to suit the taste. !

—Preserving Cut Flowers.—Cut flowers in vases will keep much longer if the vases are filled witli white sand and with water enough barely to cover it, or rather to keep it thoroughly wet. Water by itself rots the stems, so that they lose the power of drawing up moisture; hut this does not occur so readily where they are thrust into wet sand. The sand should be washed by having water poured on it and drained off before use; otherwise the salt which all sea-sand contains will prove injurious. As wet sand is an unhandy thing to put into vases, it is well to have it washed and dry beforehand. — Health Journal. —Floriculture.—All lovers of flowers must remember that one blossom allowed to mature or “go to seed” injures the plant more than a dozen new buds. Cut your flowers then, all of them, before they begin to fade. Adorn your room with them; put them on your tables; send bouquets to your friends who have no flowers; or exchange favors with those who have. You will surely find that the more you cut off the more you will have. All roses after they have ceagcd to bloom should be cut back that the strength of the root may go forming new shoots for next year. On bushes not a seed should be allowed to mature. — Scribner's.

—Floral Pyramids.—lt is so easy to have beautiful objects about us that it is a pity to be without one. Take a soup plate or a pickle dish, anil fill it with sand. Moisten the sand with water, and heap it to a cone, and then thrust into the wet sand flowers and foliage enough to.CQver the Whole surface, and you will have, if you arrange it well, the most beautiful floral ornament that can he imagined. This is an excellent way for arranging short-stemmed flowers, or those whose petals are too soft to be tied -without injury among stifler ones.—Or place in the center of your soup-plate a teacup, a child’s "mug or a wine-glass, in which insert a made bouquet, and then, filling the plate about it with sand, proceed as before. This will give a better cone than the first method.- -Science es Health.

—Canned Peach running.—Soak one pint of picked and washed tapioca in three pints of boiling water, letting it stand three hours, then place in a glass fruit-can a layer of sliced peaches, with sugar enough to sweeten them, then a layer of the soaked tapioca, adding alternate layers until the can or cans are filled. Then set in a kettle in two-thirds the depth of water, heat to the boiling point, and then boil half an hour; take out and seal precisely as you would any canned fruit. These will he very convenient in case of any accident happening to your dessert, or of any unexpected arrival of company too late to cook a dessert, or in case any refreshments arc wanted at an unusual hour, ami nothing is cooked. Serve cold, or put into warm water and heat to the boiling point.

—Ashes as Food for Cattle. —The Live Stock Journal has a correspondent who found his cattle given to tlie habit of eating wood, chewing hones, etc. They became thin in flesh, refused to-eat liay, and (presented a sickly appearance. He had no impression that their food lacked the constituents for making hone; aiidirisneighbors used bone-meal, without noticing any good results whatever. At last lie put about four bushels of leached ashes in liis barnyard and threw out to them about a shovelful each day. They all ate with evident relish After turning them out to pasture, he put one peck ot dry ashes per week on the ground in the pasture. They ate it all, and gnawed oft tlie grass where it had been lying. The cattle, began to improve, gaining flesh and looking better than they had done for several years. Ho says this morbid appearance was unnoticed years ago, from the fact that the ground was new and ashy from the burning of the woods and land clearings. Since this discovery lie gives one quart of ashes mixed with one quart of salt to twelve head of cattle about oncesa week.