The Columbus Journal

If such articles as are indispensable in cooking the simplest meals are not kept neatly, it will not be long before the food prepared in them will tell the story. But those housekeepers who are content if they order the meals, and feel no obligation to lend a helping hand in the preparation, and make no examination of the condition of their kitchen closets after the work of the day is finished, will not understand where the evil originates. How indignant they would be should one suggest the possibility that the vessels in which their food was prepared might be in a very untidy state, or were needing some little oversight and attention from the mistress of the house.

How often one hears "What can be the reason that the bottom crust of my bread tastes like rancid butter?" Examine for yourself, and you will see that the bread-pans are buttered every time they are used, but never washed after use; can you wonder that the accumulation of greasy particles, added day after day, never removed or cleaned off, will, in time, grow rancid. Why should not the bottom crust taste of it? It is well if the taste does not pervade the loaf all through.

Just so with pie-plates. If the stone china is used, the glazing seldom cracks, and if they are carefully washed and aired each time they are used, and once a week boiled in a little lye-water, they can be kept sweet till destroyed by accident or carelessness. But if set aside without careful washing and drying, nothing can be more disagreeable.

How often, think you, is the molding-board hung up unwashed after molding bread or rolling pastry, and the dough that adheres to it left to dry, or sour and mold on it, and then the next batch is kneaded on this same unwashed board?

"Impossible! I saw it hanging up in the store closet over the flour barrel as I passed by, only this morning, and it was clean."

Please turn it over, madam, underside up, before you speak with too much certainty. And how about the bread-bowl, the rolling-pin, the flour-sieve? See if the last is not thrown into the flour-barrel with bits of dough, from cook's hands, sticking to it. If so, when the barrel of flour is about half used you may find that the remainder of the flour has become suddenly sour. "A little leaven leavens the whole lump," remember.

Then look at your saucepans, vegetable boilers, gridirons, meat pans, etc.

"What ails this steak? It tastes as if the meat was tainted."

Look to the gridiron or frying-pan. The butter and fat that accumulate, day after day, week after week, without being thoroughly cleaned off, will soon injure the flavor of anything cooked on or in them. See the bars of the gridiron and the sides of the frying-pans and sauce pans, all sealed, incrusted, and rough with the accumulations, never thoroughly cleaned off, until the bars and sides are nearly double the original thickness.

All iron ware needs thorough cleaning every time it is used, and none more than a gridiron. The bars should be kept perfectly clean and smooth, and buttered every time they are used, if one desires a steak cooked to perfection.

These are but a few utensils belonging to the kitchen over which the mistress should never relax her watch. But enough! We now close this confidential talk. Will it do any good, and convince our young friends that they must watch over their kitchen utensils, and thus teach their servants that it will not be an easy thing to deceive or hide carelessness?--Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, in Domestic Monthly.