Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 August 1875 — AGRICULTURAL AND DOMESTIC. [ARTICLE]

AGRICULTURAL AND DOMESTIC.

—Sponge Cake.—'Three cups of sugar, four cups of flour, one cup of water and six eggs, one teaspoonful of soda, two of cream of tartar and a little salt. Flavor with lemon. —For bride cake take one and a half cupfuls of sugar, one-half cupful butter, one cupful flour, a little more than one cupful corn-starch, half cupful sour milk, whites of three eggs, one-half teaspoonful soda, one teaspoonful lemon. —To make oat cake take two cups of sour milk, or buttermilk, and stir in three cups of oatmeal, then add one teaspoonful of salt and one of soda dissolved in a little cold water; bake in gem pans or in a sheet. The oven should be hot enough to bake in twenty minutes. —Musk-melon Mangoes.—Fill, after scraping out the seeds, with a stuffing of chopped onion, scraped horse-radish, mustard seed, cloves, pepper-corns and salt. Sew the piece in with a needle and coarse thread, and pour boiling vinegar slightly salted over them in a stone jar. Do this two or three times, then put fresh vinegar over them and cover closely. —Perhaps some of the good housewives would like to know how to preserve plums. Pick your plums when most ripe, weigh them, and to one pound of the fruit put three-fourths of a pound of the best browm or white sugar. Some may think a plum or stone fruit must have as much sugar as others, but it is not so; the stone takes no part in the preserves: i. c., you do not w ant to sweeten them, and they will not take up the sugar. The preserves are much better with three-fourths of a pound of sugar than if you use more. Put on the sugar and plums, and boil until quite soft in a pofcelain or brass kettle, and put in stone jars when hot, set in cellar, and all will be well.

8, —Pickled Red Cabbage.—The purple red cabbage is the finest. Slice them into a sieve and salt each layer, remembering that too much salt will spoil the color. Drain for three days; dry it, add some sliced beet-root and put it in a jar. Pour boiling vinegar over it. Mace, bruised ginger, -whole pepper, horse-radish and cloves boiled with the vinegar will make a great improvement. Tie bladders over the jars. In a few days open and see if the vinegar has shrunk away; if so, fill up with cold vinegar. Some recommend that the vinegar be boiled, blit allowed to cool before pouring over the cabbage. A little bruised cochineal makes this pickle a beautiful color and is harmless. If kept very long, pickled cabbage gets soft, but is very nice, especially if eaten soon after it is made. Another method of making this pickle is to quarter the cabbage, remove all stalks, then slice thin and, after treating as the above, add vinegar, cold, with one ounce of whole black pepper, one-half ounce of ginger, bruised, and a little cayenne pepper, to every quart of vinegar.— Am. Farm Journal. —But very few farmers in our country realize the importance of thoroughly cultivating the soil; yet the subject is one of special interest, and one deserving the attention of every agriculturist. Under the system of farming which is generally practiced in this country the land wears out and the crops diminish in quality and quantity from year to year. Although nature has furnished man with a soil of virgin richness and fertility it cannot continue so while we draw T from it yearly our -vast resources of food and clothing. The soil must be renovated and its fertility renewed, or it will cease to yield its increase for the supply of dur wants. Money and labor must be expended upon it, and in order to develop the resources that nature has imparted to it it must be well tilled. There are farmers with but few acres of land, which they thoroughly cultivate, that make more money than those with large farms cultivated in the usual manner. And what has been done in a few instances may be done in many more. The maxim “What is worth doing at all is worth doing well’’ is worthy the attention of every farmer, as it is far more profitable to thoroughly cultivate a small farm than to go over in a slovenly manner a large one. Success is gained by making capital pay largely.— The Lancaster (Pa.) Farmer.