Corn's ripe! And 30,000,000 American mouths moisten with anticipation. Even New Yorkers can have sweet corn this month fresh as today and wearing its night dew. Patch to pot, corn comes to town daily, dawn-picked, to be delivered between 9 and 11 o'clock in the morning to a list of fifty places in New York, Brooklyn, and Newark.
A sweet corn less than five hours from the stalk is the idea of the Haymon Marketing Service, 204 Franklin Street, a fresh produce buying agency for restaurants and stores. It was fourteen years ago that the service manager first suggested dawn-picked corn to his clients. The majority were dubious, believing “sweet corn is just sweet corn to the average New Yorker.” A few grocers, however, carried “picked today” corn, and it paid them handsomely. Field-fresh corn caught on like a flash.
In early morning when the sheets of night mist are rising from the Hudson and the red dabs of dawn are streaking the East, marketman Haymond high- tails it through the countryside to the North. Six o'clock, and his truck turns into the farmyard lane. The bag holders, the pickers have finished with breakfast and are ready to work.
Here they come, a bag man, a picker—two work a row. There is a hush in the field. Workers must work quickly. No time for talk. The truck must be filled and off to the city. Snap go the ears, a hushed rustle, a tearing sound soft as the rip of silk as husks are peeled down so a picker can look. Workers have strict orders. This must be premium corn, the pick of the patch, corn exactly right. Reject the immature kernel. Reject corn overripe. Choose the corpulent ear, well filled, plump in the hand. The silk will be brown; it breaks easily. But the husk will be green an still moist. The kernels must be plump.
Eight o'clock and the corn truck is crossing George Washington Bridge. Hello! Hello! More trucks are waiting. Now the load is divided for delivery in the city. First stops are the stores where corn is delivered before 9 o'clock. Last stops are at restaurants where corn must be on hand just in time to get it out of the shuck and clean of the silk when the first lunchers arrive.
Corn really sweet and worth its butter must be picked and eaten at once. That's no notion; there is scientific reason. Flavor in corn is due to sugar content. While the ears are on the stalk the enzymatic activity constantly converts sugar into starch. At the same time new sugar comes into the ears from the leaves. Pull the ear and the transformation of sugar into starch continues merrily. But now no compensating sugar is supplied. So it is that the longer corn stands after picking, the starchier, the tougher it gets, the more doughy.
Corn hungry? Here are a few of the stores with field-to-table sweet corn, Lou's Market, 45 Catherine Street, Susan Prince, 808 Lexington Avenue, an all the retail stores of the Consumers' Co-operatives. Or eat it steaming hot from the pot as served in these dining rooms: Schrafft's Restaurants; The White Turkey Town Houses, 220 Madison Avenue and 1 University Place; The Skipper Restaurant, 17 East 48th Street, and The Skipper Restaurant II, 160 East 48th Street; Mammy's Pantry, 122 Montague Street, Brooklyn; Abraham & Straus Restaurant, Brooklyn; and Bamberger's in Newark. The Skipper Restaurants, Mammy's Pantry, and Bamberger's also sell the corn to the carry-home trade.
A new wall-boarding material is announced for the cake engineers by Ham-macher-Schlemmer's Connoisseur's Corner, 145 East 57th Street. It's the Swedish-style peppar kakor, or ginger wafer, a new sugar saver for building walls for refrigerator cakes, come the sultry days.
These cookies are styled for the job, being extra thin, extra dry, quick to drink in the cream. Six or eight wafers may be layered for individual serving. Stack them one on the other with a small amount of whipped cream in between. Thin war cream will whip with the ai of any one of several new stiffening agents. Sweeten the cream slightly. Press the wafer sandwich firmly together. Blanket top and sides with more cream, and garnish with chopped nuts an finely cut cherries—if you have cherries —or crumble a few of the unused cookies, and dust the crumbs over the roll. Now place the dessert in the coldest part of the refrigerator to ripen for three to five hours.
For group serving, layer the wafers into log formation, resting them on their sides, allowing six for a portion. When serving the log, slice diagonally, an place on chilled plates.
Those Strasbourg geese are buried in darkness, now that the last of the famous pâte de fois gras made of their fattened livers moves from the shop shelves. But domestic-made pâtés move in to fill the widening gaps. A new one from the kitchen of Old Denmark, 135 East 57th Street, selling in bulk and unrationed, is made with 60 per cent chicken liver, 20 per cent goose liver, and 20 per cent calves' liver, the price ＄1.20 a pound.
Something else from this shop that travels to the White House is the smoked salmon, fresh Nova Scotia salmon delicately smoked, not a trace of salt to the flavor. The smoking is done under the direction of the shop manager, and so proud he is of this product that he'll slice you a bite if you so much as ask the price. The price, by the way, is a little less than average for such a fine luxury—＄1.80 a pound. But you won't need a pound. Half that will spread toast fingers for a cocktail party of twelve. The thin bland slices may be used as ham was once, to roll up cooke spears of asparagus, these to serve under a Hollandaise blanket.
That royal pudding of the Danes, the red berry pudding called Rodgrod og Flode, is made again by Old Denmark kitchen. It is made as usual of strawberries, raspberries, lingonberries, currants, cooked slowly for two-and-a-half hours with sugar until they come to a pudding-like consistency. The fruit is strained to remove all seeds, then chille to a tingle, and served with plain cream. Single portions are 30 cents, but one portion serves two.
Perennial salad favorites return for the warm weather—summer salad an leaf-thin cucumber slices. Summer salad is a blend of cream cheese, pot cheese, and sweet cream combined with finely cut radishes and scallions, all beaten together to a velvety texture in an electric mixer. The mixing goes on for almost two hours. The price is 80 cents a pint at Old Denmark's salad bar. Back again, also, is the cucumber salad, just cucumbers sliced paper thin and then soaked for two days in lemon juice with a dash of herbal vinegar. The cucumber slices are a translucent vehicle to carry the taste of the simple but exquisite dressing.
Largest and best of the Atlantic Coast mussels are dredged along the Maine Coast. These Lucullan beauties are meticulously cleaned, their edges ruffled by steaming, then are packed in their own broth. Gristede's Bon Voyage Shop, 12 Vanderbilt Avenue, sells the Maine mussels, 49 cents and one point for the 11-ounce jar. A quick salad: drained mussels on crisp lettuce in Russian dressing, sprinkled with minced parsley.
Juice of the passion fruit waits the tall drinks of summer at Bloomingdale Brothers, 59th Street and Lexington. Centuries old, a native of Brazil, now grown in Southern California, the passion fruit is the size of a plum, purple in color, with a tough hull; but inside, the small black seeds are surrounded by an aromatic yellow pulp and a rainbow of flavors. Here is something of the peach, the apricot, the pineapple, the guava, the banana. Underlying the sweetness is the slight acidity of the lime.
The word passion as applied to this fruit has a religious significance, an was used by the early Spanish missionaries to South America in describing the purple and white flower which is supposed to resemble the instruments of Christ's crucifixion. The corona represents the crown of thorns; the long white fringe of the flower, the halo; the stamens and pistils represent the nails of the cross; the sepals and petals, the faithful apostles.
The juice will give exotic flavor to any soft drink, or to one more spirited. It lends enchantment to punch. It may be used as a sauce over ice cream or pudding. It makes a different syrup to drizzle over the Sunday morning waffles.
The venerable and dignified firm of H. Hicks & Son, 660 Fifth Avenue, have crossed the border into Mexico for ideas to bedeck their basket department. Such an outburst of color and infinite basket variety! And not all are baskets. Enormous sombreros are filled with salted toasted Mexican squash seeds, with the Mexican coffee essence black, thick, and strong. There are other delicacies, both Mexican and domestic, tie up in Mexico's national colors—red, white and green. A little love of a covered basket of Mexican palm is filled with nuts and summer candies. There are door knob baskets stuffed with fresh fruits. A tall woven basket in red, green, blue, yellow—a waste basket perhaps—comes filled with sweet oranges. Straw buttons dangle from gay packets, these to be clustered like a bouquet of flowers for your coat lapel.
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.