What is the purpose of cracking the acetanilide with a few ml of cold solvent?

Question

What is the purpose of cracking the acetanilide with a few ml of cold solvent? What do you think will happen if the washing solvent was not cold?

Answer 1

Acetanilide has a solubility of 0.1 g/100 mL water at 22 °C.  (even less at almost 0 °C).

If you used cold water as the solvent, the impurities (like acetic acid) would be dissolved, but not the product.  Other solvents would have a similar ability.