Roast sour apples and pour boiling water upon them. Let them stand till the water is cold.
Pare and slice thin three or four pleasant sour apples, pour a pint of boiling water on them, and boil them six or eight minutes. Let them stand till they are cold, then pour or strain off the water, and sweeten it a little, unless the invalid prefers it without. It is a refreshing drink.
Wash a few sprigs of sage, burnet, balm, and sorrel, and put them into a jug with half a sliced lemon. Pour in three pints of boiling water, sweeten it, and stop it close.
Take a large crust of bread; brown is to be preferred, but Graham bread will answer. Dry it in the toaster, and at last almost burn both sides; lay it in a saucepan and pour boiling water on it; boil it up a minute or two, and then strain off the coffee; return it to the saucepan with a little milk or cream, and boil it up again. It should be made strong enough to look like real coffee, of which it is a very good imitation when well made.
Toast a crust of white bread very brown without burning it, and put it into cold water. After an hour, the water will be a refreshing drink; and it is sometimes grateful to the stomach when no other can be taken.
Herb drinks should be made with boiling water in an earthen pitcher or tea-pot, and be drank after standing a few minutes without boiling. Long steeping makes them insipid and disagreeable.
All food and drink for the sick should be prepared with careful attention and perfect neatness, and should be served in as inviting a manner as possible. The appetite of an invalid is excited or checked by things that escape the observation of a person in health.
Pour four spoonfuls of boiling water upon one of sweet cream, and add a very little loaf sugar. This receipt was given by an experienced physician, and has been proved, to be entirely suited to the stomach of the youngest infant. But care must be taken to secure _good_ cream; and this can be done only by providing new milk every day, from _one_ cow. Mixed milk cannot be safely used for a little infant.
There is always danger, especially in warm weather, that the stomach, even of a healthy child, will become disordered by being weaned; and it is important to guard against the evil, by careful attention to the diet, for a little while. Boil every morning new milk enough to last twenty-four hours, and stir into it the best of arrow-root wet in cold water, in the proportion of a large teaspoonful to a quart. Add a very little salt, and boil it up again for one minute, then set it in a cold place.