Neither a feast nor a famine, that's the dinner bell tidings for the new year. There will be less of some things, much more of others. More bread—bread tops the list. More cereals: soybeans, dried beans, peanut butter, Irish and sweet potatoes, and as much margarine as in 1943.
This year you will get about the same amount of eggs, and as much fresh citrus and canned fruit juices, canned vegetables, meat, fish, and chicken as you had last year. Here's the pinch—no extra fluid milk and less of dairy products, fewer broilers and fryers. Fresh fruit will be skimpy until the new crop. And next year at holiday time there won't be so many turkeys.
New foods will be coming. Peanut flour, soy flour, soy grits are now in national distribution. More feather-weight foods will appear in civilian markets. Dehydrated sweet potatoes, sugar-crammed, vitamin-rich, are intended to help fill up the sweet tooth when used in candies, pies, cookies, cakes, and ice creams. Gimbel Brothers, at Broadway and 33rd, sell such a product, called “Vita-Yam,” the 14-ounce box 38 cents. All that dehydration does is to take out the moisture, leaving sugars, minerals, and vitamins intact. Next, it is said, the humble sweet potato is coming to America's breakfast table as a crisp cereal carrying its own sugar—you add only the cream.
Expect a bevy of hot-off-the-ice, ready-made foods to take the place of heat- and-eat canned stuffs now absent from the pantry shelves.
Drum major of the quick-frozen parade is the corned beef hash. Several brands are in the market, but two we have tried and applaud are Cap brand and Birdseye. In these hashes, the proportion of meat and potatoes is about half and half. The meat is carefully shredded, then combined with the finely chopped potatoes, which are cooked firm. Cap brand hash is carried by La Pampa, the new Argentine meat shop, 368 West 57th Street. The Birdseye is distributed nationally to Birdseye dealers.
To prepare properly a block of quick-frozen hash, place it as it comes from the package in a hot frying pan with the fat. Cook at low heat, breaking the hash down with a fork as it thaws. Let it brown slowly—twenty minutes is about the right time for a pound. When it is brown and slightly crisp on the bottom, fold over omelette fashion, and lift to a platter. Serve with poached eggs, and garnish the dish with parsley and quarters of tomato.
Foreign delicacies are all too often lost in the shuffle of the nutritional cards these wartime years. So it is with pleasure we note the return of the Scotch blood puddings, the mealy puddings, the mutton pies at Rahmeyer Table Delicacies, 1022 Third Avenue. The same shop has new crop Scotch oatmeal, the fine or the coarse, also Irish oatmeal, all for 18 cents a pound.
We recommend for special gratitude oysters Casino, as they are prepared on order by the Rosedale Fish and Oyster Market, 1132 Lexington Avenue. It is the Cape Cod oyster that is featured there, a deep sea oyster, firmly meated.
These flavorful bivalves are opened with care, in order not to spill their colorless elixir, and are left as they are on their own lower shell. Over the cool, grey velvet goes a thick sprinkling of minced chives, the proper seasoning; then a little square of bacon is laid across. The cook's job is to run the oysters under the broiler until the grey edges curl and the bacon bits are browned. Use at least two of these for a serving, along with a lemon section for the to-be-or-not-to-be drop of lemon juice.
The Rosedale market also sells shrimps boiled and shelled, a blessing to the woman with a cookless kitchen. There you go for deviled crabs at 50 or 60 cents each, according to size. The big lumps of crab meat are mixed with a sauce made with milk and butter and eggs, and are garnished with cracker meal and paprika. Before the deviled crabs are placed in the hot oven, add to the top of each a bit of butter, if you have it, and sprinkle with parsley, finely minced.
Present butter supplies just won't stretch to meet every holiday occasion. Take a tip from the Danes and try a quarter-pound of an unrationed fat, the Krydderfedt, made of tried-out fat of poultry, beef, and pork. It's a good spread for dark bread or the ubiquitous rye krisp. We approve it especially for a sandwich made with salami or corned beef or the Danish rolled veal. The chef of Old Denmark, 135 East 57th Street, cuts the fats into small bits, puts them into a heavy kettle along with diced onion, then over low heat for two to three hours. Next the fat is strained, then set to harden. Meanwhile, the crisped skin of the poultry and the golden bits of onion are ground and returned to the fat, to make a savory stuff that has all the appearance of a golden nut butter.
Spread it over a slice of pumpernickel, sprinkle with a liberal addition of salt and freshly ground pepper. For a treat of the first order top the fat with paper-thin slices of Danish salami. In Denmark this fat is used the year around as a spread for the meat sandwich. A little spreads about a mile, and so it should—for the cost is 80 cents a pound.
You have heard about Bakon yeast, now in the market for eight years—but have you tried it? No? Then the time had better be now while meat is short and bacon takes the red stamps. This product is a seasoning, a powder, not a yeast cake; it carries a bacon flavor. Shake it out of its sifter-top carton over scrambled eggs, and you have the pleasure of bacon in bacon's absence.
This is brewer's yeast smoked scientifically over hickory fires to give a broiled bacon taste. But you get more than flavor, for this yeast is valued by the nutrition experts for its high content of vitamin B, and hence is used in volume in rations for the armed forces. Dried yeast can be made a valuable addition to current diets short in good quality protein and thiamin. In the past, the chief objection to dried brewer's yeast as a food has been its bitterness. Now, by special processing, the bitterness is removed.
The yeast powder can be blended with butter, worked into cheese as a spread for bread or canapès. It gives bacon zest to split pea or bean soup. Or use it in vegetable casseroles, when meat isn't handy. The seasoner is sold by the stores of the Gristede chain, by Gimbel Brothers and R. H. Macy's grocery department. The 1 ¼-ounce shaker retails at 25 cents; the 2-pound can at ＄3.
That master maker of the ready-mades, P. Duff and Sons, has added a new muffin mix to its hurry-cook line. Five minutes is the preparation time from box to batter bowl to muffin tins. There's nothing to add to the contents of the fourteen-ounce box but one-and-a-half cups water. Everything a muffin needs is right there, enriched flour, soy flour, shortening, sweetening, dried skim milk, eggs, and baking powder. Fold in the liquid one-half cup at a time. Don't beat, go easy on the stirring—that's the technique for a muffin, light textured, tender, cobbly on top. You desire a muffin fine-grained, smooth-surfaced, peaked, smaller in volume? Then beat for all you are worth. A box makes fourteen big muffins, eighteen of average size, or twenty-four midgets.
The mix is most versatile. Turn the muffins into coffee cakes: before sending the pans to the oven, sprinkle the batter with a mixture of six tablespoons brown sugar blended with two tablespoons flour, one teaspoon cinnamon, one teaspoon butter.
We use the mix to make a dough to cover a meat pie, a fruit cobbler. It does nicely for making an old-fashioned short-cake. Add one-half cup orange juice as a part of the liquid, then the grated orange rind—and the result is orange muffins.
Add as you will: one cup grated cheese, cooked chopped ham, chopped crisp bacon, a handful of raisins or currants, chopped nut meats, or bran. For the tea time tempter? Throw in a fistful of chopped dates or prunes. Stir in chocolate chips—little nuggets of goodness to surprise tooth and tongue. Ask for the mix at the corner store. We saw it first at the Peter Reeves Markets
Glamorized, tenderized, pitted prunes you can buy unrationed, packed like bonbons in pound paper cartons, the price 40 cents at B. Altman & Company, Fifth Avenue at 34th, New York City. These prunes are processed by a special method which removes the prussic acid, enabling the fruit to retain its fresh quality indefinitely. The processing leaves the outer skin without a break, and the nutritive elements intact. No cooking is required, and if you do cook the prunes, no sugar is needed. Santa Clara Valley sun-dried prunes are used for the pack. These, you should know, are raised in the un-irrigated hill areas where it's claimed the prunes have a higher sugar content than anywhere else. The fruit may be used in any way as any prune, in salads, breads, or pastries. But it's likely you will enjoy them as we do for finger-eating from the box. Ask for Ritchie's California prunes; the cost is 40 cents for the pound paper carton.
The first shipment of Spanish turrone in almost four years has been received by the importers, Joseph Victori and Company, 164 Pearl Street, New York City. Two varieties are available, the jijona and the alicante, both made with toasted almonds, honey, egg white, and corn syrup. The difference is in the get-together of the ingredients. In the jijona, the nuts are crushed, then blended into the mixture which is baked into blocks. The almonds in the alicante are merely halved, which gives a confection harder and less oily than the jijona. Hard as a rock, almost. The price of one or the other is ＄1.55 for the 14-ounce block. It is the Victori shop, remember, which carries the virgin olive oil of Spain at ＄6.50 a gallon, with no more than a gallon allowed to a customer. The half gallon is ＄3.40; the quart, ＄1.85.