The I Hate to Cook Book (44 page)

31. You can clean darkened aluminum pans easily by boiling in them two teaspoons of cream of tartar mixed in a quart of water. Ten minutes will do it.

32. If a lamp cord is much too long, you can shorten it by wrapping it tightly around a broom handle and leaving it that way overnight. It will stay spiraled and short.

33. If you use an outdoor clothesline, you can sprinkle your clothes easily, before ironing them, by using the fine spray on your garden hose.

34. If you are using pared apples in a salad or fresh-fruit dessert, soak them for ten minutes in moderately salted water after you peel and cut them. They won’t turn brown.

35. Don’t try to wash a scorched pan immediately. Soak it overnight in some slightly diluted household bleach.

36. If you want to lose weight, paste a picture of a pretty, slender girl on your refrigerator door. This will discourage you from opening it too often.

37. Greatgrandma did this, and it’s still good: Keep a few marbles or pebbles in the bottom of your double boiler. They’ll bang away when the water gets low and attract your attention.

38. When you are tying packages to send away, wet the cord first, and it will dry taut.

39. You save yourself a lot of trouble in washing windows
when you use vertical strokes on the inside panes, and horizontal on the outside, or vice versa. That way you won’t keep running in and out to get the places you missed.

40. A good spoonful of powdered or liquid detergent in the bath water prevents a ring from forming. You might keep a plastic container of it handy on the tub rim.

41. When you are creaming butter and sugar together, it’s a good idea to rinse the bowl with boiling water first. They’ll cream faster.

42. If it’s important to you to get walnut meats out whole, soak the nuts overnight in salt water before you crack them.

43. If your candles are too small for the candleholders and wobble, you can remedy it with modeling clay. Or dip the candle ends in hot water, then press them down firmly.

44. It is handy to keep a soft powder puff in the flour bin, for dusting cake pans.

45. If your veils or lace collars get that tired look, you can crisp them by ironing them between two sheets of waxed paper.

46. When you oil your sewing machine, remember to sew through a blotter several times before you sew through your material. The blotter will soak up the excess oil.

47. When you have several sizes of beds in the house, it’s wise to settle on one particular type of sheet for each: stripes for Junior, pastels for Sis, plain white for Ma and Pa. That way there is no mussing up the linen shelf to find the right one.

48. As nearly everyone knows, nail-polish remover gets adhesive-tape marks off with speed and ease.

49. Your bed linen smells good if you keep your supply of toilet soap stuck here and there in the linen closet. This has an additional advantage: You never seem to run out of
soap, because another bar is always lurking somewhere if you hunt long enough.

50. If you have polished floors in the family, as well as small children or elderly people, it is a good idea to paste strips of adhesive tape on the bottoms of shoes. It saves bruises and even broken hips.

51. It saves you considerable walking if you’ll spend a dollar and get at least two more measuring cups and two more sets of measuring spoons. Then keep a cup in the flour bin and one in the sugar bin. Keep a set of spoons in the baking-powder can, or in the coffee can, or wherever you use them the most.

52. If someone in the family is sick in bed and can’t sit up, he can drink more easily from a teapot spout.

53. You can make a changing picture gallery for a child’s room by stretching a length of stout twine across a wall and affixing prints or magazine cutouts with paper clips. It’s a good way to encourage an early interest in good pictures.

54. It’s helpful to maintain a lost-and-found department at home. Reserve a shelf or a deep drawer where you put all out-of-place objects, from catchers’ mitts to cigar lighters. Saves aimless looking for everyone, and keeps the clutter in one place.

55. When you take a gift to a baby shower, it’s a nice idea to wrap it in a diaper and fasten it with a couple of pastel diaper pins.

56. You can remove rust stains from a sink or tub by rubbing them with a little kerosene.

57. Should something catch fire in your oven, sprinkle it lavishly with salt or baking soda. It stops the flame and smoke immediately.

58. If you are pounding a noisy typewriter when someone is
trying to sleep in the next room, you’d better put a folded bath towel under it. It makes it quieter.

59. When you’re starting for town and notice that your hem has come undone, you can fix it temporarily with cellophane tape. Easier than pins.

60. Put a stripe of luminous paint around your flashlight handle, and you’ll be able to see it easily in the dark—which is when you usually need it.

61. If you twist your coat hangers up sharply at both ends, they won’t shed your slips, nightgowns, and sun dresses.

62. Your sewing needles slide easily and never rust if you keep them stuck in a bar of soap in your sewing box.

63. When you cook eggs in the shell, put a big teaspoon of salt in the water. Then the shells won’t crack.

64. And speaking of salt, never double it when you double a recipe. Use only half again as much, then taste.

65. Keep your spices in alphabetical order on the shelf, and always put them back again in the same place.

66. If a blanket or a quilt is too short, sew a couple of feet of matching sateen to the bottom of it, for tuck-in purposes.

67. A ten-cent embroidery hoop is handy for removing stains by the boiling-hot-water method. It will hold the material taut while you pour on the water.

68. When dark wood furniture is scratched, a cut walnut meat, rubbed on the scratch, will restore the color very nicely.

69. You can remove candle wax from wood very easily with lighter fluid on a soft cloth.

70. If you like only a taste of garlic in a stew, put the garlic clove in a tea ball. Then you can easily find it and remove it.

71. You can use colorless nail polish for emergency glue.

72. Add a tablespoon of cooking oil, or margarine, to the
water you cook spaghetti or noodles in, and it won’t be so eager to boil over.

73. If the whipping cream looks as though it’s not going to whip, add three or four drops of lemon juice or a bit of plain gelatin powder to it, and it probably will.

74. Shoe bags are handy for many things besides shoes. You can hang one on the back of the cellar door for furniture polish, dustcloths, et cetera. And you can hang one over the back seat of the car for a family trip, to hold toys, Kleenex, maps, dark glasses, et cetera.

75. You can always find your car quickly—on the street or in a huge parking lot—if you’ll keep a bright pennant tied to the radio aerial. Before you leave the car, run the aerial up to its full height.

OR HOW TO TALK A GOOD FIGHT

N
ow once in a while you’ll find yourself in a position where you have to talk about cooking. This is usually a sitting-down position with other ladies hemming you in so you can’t get away.

Actually, your cooking is a personal thing, like your sex life, and it shouldn’t be the subject of general conversation. But women who love to cook often love to talk about it, too, and if you’re going to make any sort of showing at all, there are several points to keep in mind.

For instance, words.

Never say “fry” if you don’t mean “deep-fat fry.” You can say

“pan fry”

“pan broil”

“sauté”

“brown in butter”

“sizzle in butter”

or you may go all the way and say “cook it
à la pôele
,” which is a French phrase meaning “stew in butter at such a low temperature that the object is cooked before it starts to brown.” But “fry” means the way you would cook doughnuts, if you ever did, which you don’t, because you can buy perfectly lovely doughnuts all made.

(The boys behind the counter at Joe’s Diner aren’t aware of these distinctions, of course, and if you ask them to sauté you an egg, or cook one
à la pôele
, there’s no telling what sort of an
oeuf
you’d get. But you are not down at Joe’s Diner.)

Similarly, if you can possibly avoid it, don’t say “onions.” Say “shallots,” even though you wouldn’t know one if you saw one. This gives standing to a recipe that otherwise wouldn’t have much. (The same thing is true of “hamburger” versus “ground round” or “ground sirloin.” Never say “hamburger,” even if you mean “hamburger.”) You’re on safe territory if anyone calls you on the shallot business, too, because shallot also means a small green onion, as well as some distant and exotic relative of the onion family, so don’t worry a bit.

Another one is “cooking sherry.” Just say “sherry.” Actually, cooking sherry is quite satisfactory for your modest purposes in most hot cooked entrées. It is cheaper to use, too, because you don’t nip as you cook, and, moreover, it saves you on salt. But I’m warning you, the cooking buffs will raise their eyebrows. And while we’re at it, you might glance over the following greatly abbreviated list:

This brings us to another related department, and it is a good thing it does. You’ve no idea how hard it is to organize a cookbook, with all the different things in it. Next time, I’m going to write a hair-pants Western with just a horse and a hero.

However, the department we now find ourselves in is
FANCY GARNISHES
, and those mad festive touches that are yours alone. These are the things you see in cookbooks and magazines that have you thinking, “Now that’s a cute idea; I ought to
do
that,” but you never remember to.

Well, here they are again. I must emphasize, though, that things that seem mad and festive to us who hate to cook are probably pretty ho-hum to the people who love to. You see, when you hate to cook, you are singularly unobservant where cooking and food are concerned. You’re also easily impressed; and if you ever do anything so foreign to your nature as floating a lemon slice on black bean soup, you talk about it for weeks afterward.

Well, a lemon slice isn’t the only thing you can float on soup.

There’s popcorn. Plain movie popcorn or cheese popcorn. It looks pretty and it’s easier than croutons.

Then there are chopped walnuts, pecans, or toasted almonds, any one of which is good on cream of chicken or celery soup.

There’s also chopped raw celery or green pepper or green
onion tops for any sort of soup that needs some additional crispness.

Then there are fancy garnishes in general.

For instance, with any sort of melon you can serve a bowl of chopped crystallized ginger or powdered ginger.

You can garnish nearly any meat, hot or cold, with chutneyed peach halves. You brush the fresh or canned peach halves with melted butter, put them in a 350˚ oven for ten minutes, then fill the halves with chutney and heat them
another
five minutes.

And to garnish fish, you can dip small bunches of white seedless grapes first in lemon juice or egg white and then in granulated sugar, dry them on a rack, and scatter them around the platter.

Then, if you’ve bought some frozen chicken pies, you can stud their tops thickly with almonds (blanched but not toasted, because that’ll happen while the pies bake) before you put the pies in the oven.

Should you ever be so foolish as to make cream-cheese balls for a canapé, you may stick thin pretzel sticks into them instead of toothpicks. That way the whole thing gets eaten, and you don’t have your ash trays overflowing with toothpicks. (This works just as well, of course, with cubed processed loaf cheese.)

Speaking of canapés, a stack of small Mexican tin plates is a good thing to have around. These aren’t for the guests’ sake, exactly, but for yours. When someone is juggling a drink and a cigarette and a dip-loaded chip, it can be hard on the sofa. The tin plates won’t break, as your bread-and-butter ones will, and they look a little special and festive.

This is as good a place as any to digress briefly into the mad festive aspects of the
container
department, or what you serve things
in
. For instance, the clever hostess often serves her cookies in a brandy snifter! This would seem to leave her the cooky jar
to serve her brandy in, but then a lively party is probably what she’s after.