Succotash.
Lima beans and corn mixed. They should be boiled until they are thoroughly done.
Corn and Tomatoes
make a good combination for canning. The corn, however, should be thoroughly cooked, and mixed with the tomatoes, after the latter have been scalded merely.
Preserves.
To make clear, good preserves requires: 1st. No economy of trouble; 2d. That the fruit be perfectly fresh, alive from the tree or bush, or, as a friend says, “tasting of the sun.”
The French make the clearest, best preserves, because they spare no pains. They first prepare their sirup or clarified sugar; then, after neatly and carefully paring or dressing their fruit, cook a few pieces at a time, or only as many as they can oversee, carefully lifting each piece out of the sirup the moment it is done. How they preserve strawberries in bottle (each little bottle of which sells for seventy-five cents), retaining the full flavor and almost the firmness of the fresh strawberries, is something for me to investigate.
I consider the peach marmalade the most valuable preserve, as it is useful in preparing desserts. It is a good sauce for almost any kind of pudding, especially corn-starch and rice puddings. Preserves are generally made too sweet. Before hermetically sealed cans or jars were in general use, it required a large quantity of sugar to keep the preserves from fermenting. Now, in using cans, one can suit the taste as to the sweetness of the preserve. I prefer tin cans to glass bottles, as sometimes the bottled jelly or preserves will ferment, requiring a second cooking. Tin cans have never failed me. Others prefer bottles, having no trouble, they say, in tightening them perfectly. The citron preserve, flavored with root ginger and lemon, is a success. It has the flavor of the ginger preserve from the West Indies, which is so fashionable, expensive, and serviceable as an accompaniment for ice-cream, etc.; it is also inexpensive.
Apples preserved with a flavor of lemon and ginger are particularly nice also; of course, they are not as firm as citron, and do not imitate so well the ginger preserve. The outside of the water-melon (skinned) makes a clear, pretty preserve, flavored in the same manner. The next in favor is the greengage preserve, which is as clear and beautiful as it is delicate in flavor. Peaches, unless made into marmalade, are better when canned with very little sugar than when preserved. Canned peaches, half-frozen when served, make a delicious dessert with cake.
First, then, for preserves the sirup must be made. I give the old rule; yet, as before remarked, if canned, they may be made less sweet. I generally use half a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit.