For Beginners and the Best Cooks 9

SALT
Free running salt for table use is fine and has a very minute percentage
of starchy material added.

Iodized salt, with minute percentage of iodine, approved by medical
-authority and by law as a preventive of goitre.

SPICES AND FLAVORINGS
All flavor and pungency of spice depends upon freshness. Ground spices
are better bought in small tight packages that preserve the aroma. Buy
‘little and often—and always keep closely covered. Pure extracts which
give true flavors, are stronger and so cheaper in the end.

FRUITS

Aeies Oe great Canadian fruit. The most desirable varieties may
not be the same in different sections, but throughout the greater part of
Canada, such all-round good apples for eating and cooking are available as
the Northern Spy, Wealthy, Baldwin; with Greenings as another good
cooking apple and Snows, McIntosh Reds and Delicious, as fine table fruit.
The varieties that are grown closest to your own market will probably be
the most economical to buy.

Apples are sold in every way from the single pound to the barrel. They |
undoubtedly offer the cheapest fruit for the Canadian household—and one
which is as healthful as it is attractive. If you use few apples, buy in
small quantities. If you use many and have suitable dry cool storage place
for them, it will pay to buy in basket, box, or barrel quantity.

Avoid crowding and pressure for the fruit. They should be sorted
regularly, and softer or bruised apples put aside for immediate use.

It requires half a dozen average-size cooking apples to make a nine-inch
pie or three cups apple sauce.

Bananas— Yellow bananas, red bananas, each kind has its own charac-
teristic flavour, that of the red banana being more luscious to many people,

The more common yellow banana is sold in some places by the dozen.
in some by weight.

The banana is at its best for eating when its skin is plentifully mottled
with small brown spots; the flavour is mellower, and the fruit more digestible.
In buying for immediate use, select fruit that is well speckled; to keep
several days, choose the firmer yellower bananas.

Store in a place that is merely cool—not in a refrigerator. If the fruit
is to be chilled, let it be done just before serving.

Berries—The most desirable varieties of the different berries vary with
different localities.

The fruit will be less crushed in pint boxes, but may be slightly more
expensive than in larger measures.