There's no overlooking the animal banks. Clay animals stand eight inches tall, tied securely to candy boxes an bars. Baskets from Toluca, straw work from Oaxaca, the glass of Monterrey, the lacquered gourd bowls—do they please you? What little treasure will you carry home?
At Hicks', too, are silvery sardines packed in spiced wine sauce just as herring is pickled, the 3 1/3-pound screw top crocks ＄2.85, unrationed.
Chicken wings for company, a single jar, 56 ounces of wings and butts in broth, is a luncheon meat dish for ten, price around ＄1, at Hammacher-Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street. Wings can make a brave showing arranged over a casserole of rice. Have the rice well- seasoned with that queer but tantalizing half-acid flavor of finely cut parsley. Butts may be cut into fine slivers an strewn around the wings. These wings are big wings, so tenderly cooked that each shred of meat comes off easily, even from the wing tips. Butts are tender, too, and can be sliced neat as a pin. The chicken is packed in a golden broth so rich it jellies in the jar when chilled. This can be used to season the rice or to make into gravy. The wings are something else again, heated in the gravy and served over waffles.
A chest of young preserved ginger from China, about 300 pounds, came through before Pearl Harbor, and now is being sold by the Chinese Treasure Centre, at 543 Madison Avenue. A shipment of jasmine tea came along with the ginger, and these are the only two comestibles among the shop's vast array of Chinese antiques, ivories, jades, and textiles. Best quality is the ginger, with only the young rhizomes in this, and mild and flavorful, packaged in half-pound boxes, price ＄1.50, or 1 pound ＄2.50, postpaid.
The bulk of all candied and preserved ginger rhizomes was importe from Canton and Hong Kong until the war got in the way. But ginger grows prolifically in the West Indies, where it was introduced so early that exportation to Europe began in the Sixteenth Century. But preference goes to the ginger of China, more succulent, the connoisseurs insist, than the Western variety.
A half pound of ginger goes a long way thinly sliced to serve as a sweet bite after the dinner, or cut finely to mix into puddings, to use in ice cream, in sauces and frostings. Scatter small bits through a fruit salad to give surprise heat for the tongue and pleasing flavor.
The tea fan is just as particular about the tea garden from which a tea comes, as the wine fancier is of the vineyard where the grapes for his Sauternes are grown. Some prefer tea from the gardens of Darjeeling, others favor the teas grown in the lowlands of India. The Chinese shop tea is one for the particular, a tea grown high on Bohead Mountain, Fukien, China, a region where green teas have long been famous. The snow and the fogs of the mountain give to the tea leaves their haunting, delicate flavor. The tea, after firing, is spread in containers in alternating layers with the scented flowers of the jasmine—three parts by weight of flowers to a hundred parts by weight of tea. Flowers and tea are then heated together, well mixed and packaged. In serving the tea, spoon out a flower, two flowers, to float in each cup. The dried blossoms unfold to pale beauty in the hot brew. A half pound of tea is ＄2.50, postpaid.
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