Page:Australian enquiry book of household and general information.djvu/14

10 touched on this matter elsewhere so will proceed with the one in hand.

A cook requires to know and understand her oven before she ventures on any delicate baking. If she has a stove it is easily regulated, but with the colonial ovens, so much in vogue all over Australia, matters are not so simple, and she will have to watch everything she puts into the oven. In cooking scones, pastry and small cakes, she needs to let the colonial oven be well and evenly heated beforehand. All such things should be baked as quickly as possible, while bread, plum cakes, joints, etc., require to do more steadily.

One of the first things for a young cook to learn is punctuality, and until she grows used to, and understands her fire-place and oven, it is the most difficult. Experience will soon teach her how long a joint will take to cook, fifteen minutes for each pound is a fair time to allow when baking a joint, and if potatoes are baked with it allow them one hour, but they will require turning, and the joint will require basting.

If you want to have your potatoes crisp and very brown, you may have to take some of the fat from the baking-dish about ten or fifteen minutes before they are done, as, if there is much fat they will not become crisp.

A great many, indeed, almost all servants who call themselves plain cooks, put the joint of meat into the baking dish, then proceed to smother it in fat, and so it goes into the oven. This is utterly wrong and is quite as bad as putting steak to be fried into cold fat. It is just as easy to do it the right way as the wrong, and the right in this instance is to put your fat into the dish, let it become hot, and then put your joint into it, the difference being that, with the cold fat, the meat absorbs it, and in the hot it does not.

The best dripping is what the joint has been baked in, therefore, a good plan is to save all the fat skimmed from the soup, and use it to cook the joint in, by that means it will be improved greatly.

To make gravy for the joint, remove the latter from the baking-dish on to a nice hot dish (be sure to have hot plates always for hot meat, and the meat dish heated also to receive the joint), remove the potatoes very carefully so as not to break any of them, then strain the fat into the dripping jar, but leave the brown sediment or gravy. Now dredge a little flour, or, failing a flour dredger, dust a little from your hand, or half-a-teaspoonful or so, into the baking-dish, a little salt and pepper, and with an iron spoon mix and stir it about until blended smoothly with what little liquid is left from the meat, then from the kettle pour in some