Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 May 1875 — AGRICULTURAL AND DOMESTIC. [ARTICLE]

AGRICULTURAL AND DOMESTIC.

—To make crumb fritters, put crumbs of bread ,into sour milk; when quite soft mash with a spoon, and for a quart add „ one beaten egg, one teaspoonful of salt, and flour to make a stiff batter. Fry on a griddle. —To make excellent raised doughnuts, take a pint of milk, two eggs, one cup of yeast; mix with flour to make stiff batter. Let it raise several hours. Then stir in two cups of sugar, thrce-fourihs of a cup of butter, two-thirds of a teaspoonful of soda, spice and salt to taste; mold it and let it rise again. —A writer in the Poultry World observed his fowls addicteji to the habit of pulling feathers very carefully, and noticed on the ends of the freshly-plucked feathers that the quill was covered with an oily substance. It occurred 10 him that the oil was what the fowls were after, and acting on that idea tried an experiment of feeding small scraps of tallow to them, and found it worked admirably, the commotion in the yard ceasing at once, and the fowls becoming peaceable and <juiet. He found that an occasional feeding of kitchen grease or any fatty matter prevented the inclina- , tion by supplying the appetite before it gets into a morbid condition. —The California farmer says: A favorite and rather a new kind of mash for horses is coming into use, composed of two quarts of oats, one of bran and half a pint of flaxseed. The oats are first placed in the stable bucket, over which is placed the linseed; add boiling water, then the bran, covering the mixture with an old rug and allowing it to thus rest for five hours, then stir the mass well up. The bran absorbs while retaining the vapor, and the linseed binds the oats and bran together; a greater quantity of flax seed would make the preparation too oily and less relished. One feed per day is sufficient; it is easily digestible and is specially adapted to young animals, adding to their volume rather than to their height—giving substance to the frame. .. = —To make an air castle, take a piece of wire and make a hoop, eight or ten inches in diameter; wind it with cloth; take old factory cloth, bleached white, tear out fourteen or fifteen strips onehalf or three-fourths of an inch wide and two feet long; fringe both edges, leav-| ing about three or four threads in the I middle; sew these pieces to the hoop, even all around; twist them true,like an auger pod; tie them together so the hoop will hang level; this will make it coneshaped; make more fringe the same way; hang four scallops, three strips deep, aiid six tassels: one up in the center of the castle, one on the cross in the center of the Koop, and four between the scallops outside of the hoop; tie in a red and blue ribbon alternately around the hoop and on the tassels; double fringe for the tassels. Then you havethe red. white and blue. Suspend to the ceiling, over the center-table.