They added to their cooking utensils a few flat saucepans in which water would boil quickly and they made many experiments in cooking vegetables.  Beans they gave up trying to cook after several experiments, because they took so long—­from one to three hours—­for both the dried and the fresh kinds, that the girls felt that they could not afford so much alcohol.  They eliminated turnips, too, after they had prodded a frequent fork into some obstinate roots for about three quarters of an hour.  Beets were nearly as discouraging, but not quite, when they were young and tender, and the same was true of cabbage.

“It’s only the infants that we can use in this affair,” declared Dorothy after she had replenished the saucepan from another in which she had been heating water for the purpose, over a second alcohol stove that her mother had lent them.  Spinach, onions and parsnips were done in half an hour and potatoes in twenty-five minutes.

They finally gave up trying to cook vegetables whole over this stove, for they concluded that not only was it necessary to have extremely young vegetables but the size of the cooking utensils must of necessity be too small to have the proceedings a success.  They learned one way, however, of getting ahead of the tiny saucepan and the small stove.  That was by cutting the corn from the cob and by peeling the potatoes and slicing them very thin before they dropped them into boiling water.  Then they were manageable.

“Miss Dawson, the domestic science teacher, says that the water you cook any starchy foods in must always be boiling like mad,” Ethel Blue explained to her aunt one day when she came out to see how matters were going.  “If it isn’t the starch is mushy.  That’s why you mustn’t be impatient to put on rice and potatoes and cereals until the water is just bouncing.”

“Almost all vegetables have some starch,” explained Mrs. Morton.  “Water really boiling is your greatest friend.  When you girls are old enough to drink tea you must remember that boiling water for tea is something more than putting on water in a saucepan or taking it out of a kettle on the stove.”

“Isn’t boiling water boiling water?” asked Roger, who was listening.

“There’s boiling water and boiling water,” smiled his mother.  “Water for tea should be freshly drawn so that there are bubbles of air in it and it should be put over the fire at once.  When you are waiting for it to boil you should scald your teapot so that its coldness may not chill the hot water when you come to the actual making of the tea.”

“Do I seem to remember a rule about using one teaspoonful of tea for each person and one for the pot?” asked Tom.

“That is the rule for the cheaper grades of tea, but the better grades are so strong that half a teaspoonful for each drinker is enough.”

“Then it’s just as cheap to get tea at a dollar a pound as the fifty cent quality.”