When poultry is brought into the kitchen for use, it should be kept as cool as possible. The best position in which to place it is with the breast downward on a shelf or marble slab. The crop should be taken out. Choose fowls with a thin, transparent skin, white and delicate. Time required to boil poultry: a chicken will take about 20 minutes, a fowl about 40 minutes, a small turkey 1 1/2 hours, a large turkey 2 hours or more.

Preparation of Hashes, Gravies, and Sauces. - There is nothing worse for the health or for the palate than a poor hash, while a good hash is not only a favorite dish in most families, but an essential article of economy and convenience. For this reason a separate article is devoted to this subject. The following are the ways in which hashes are spoiled. The first is by cooking them. Meat, when once cooked, should only be heated. If it is again stewed or fried, it tends to make it hard or tough, and diminishes its flavor. The second is by frying the butter or gravy in which they are prepared. It has been shown that this is very injurious to the healthfulness of food. Butter and oils may be melted without changing their nature, but when cooked, they become much more indigestible and injurious to weak stomachs. The third mode of injuring hashes is by putting in flour in such ways that it is not properly cooked. Flour dredged on to hashes while they are cooking imparts the raw taste of dough. The fourth mode is by putting in so much water as to make them vapid, or else so much grease as to make them gross. The fifth is by seasoning them with so little care, that they either have very little savory taste, or else are so hot with pepper and spice as to be unhealthy.

If the housekeeper will observe these cautions, or see that her cook does so, she may always have good and healthful hashes.

Boiled Fowl

Take a young fowl and fill the inside with oysters; place in a jar and plunge into a kettle of water; boil 1 1/2 hours; there will be a quantity of gravy in the jar from the juice of the fowl, and the oysters; make this into a white sauce, with the addition of egg, cream, or a little flour and butter; add oysters, or serve up plain with the fowl. This is very nice with the addition of a little parsley to the sauce.

How To Roast Wild Fowl

Put an onion, salt, and hot water into a pan, and baste for 10 or 15 minutes; change the pan, put in a slice of salt pork, and baste with butter and pork drippings very often, just before serving dredge lightly with flour and baste. Ducks take from 25 to 35 minutes to roast, and woodcocks and snipes 15 to 25. Do not draw or take off the heads of either. Garnish with fried or toasted bread, lemon, parsley, and currant jelly.

How To Boil A Turkey

Make a stuffing for the craw of chopped bread and butter, cream, oysters, and the yolks of eggs; sew it in, and dredge flour over the turkey, and put it to boil in cold water, with a spoonful of salt in it, and enough water to cover it well; let it simmer for 2 1/2 hours, or if small, less time; skim it while boiling. It looks nicer if wrapped in a cloth dredged with flour; serve it with drawn butter, in which put some oysters.