A major matter is the green tomato pickles on the counter of the grocery department of Bloomingdale Brothers, Lexington Avenue and 59th Street. These are whole tomatoes put up kosher style in vinegar made fragrant with dill, garlic, and spices."
Shop for your Valentine, mail-order style, check book in hand. There's still time to send a nutty assortment of pralines made by an old Southern recipe—glazed pecans, spiced pecans, assorted nuts, and salted pecans. The box is over 2 pounds in weight, price ＄4.85, which includes the shipping cost anywhere in the United States. The maker is Clara Barton Green, 38 Lenox Road, Summit, N. J.
Fresh dates and date delicacies can be mail-ordered direct from the Valerie Jean Date Shop, at Thermal, Calif. Deglet Noors are 3 pounds for ＄2.50; five pounds ＄3.85, which includes mailing costs. Gift cards are enclosed.
Charlotte Charles of Evanston, Illinois, continues to make her Sherried pralines. These are big, fat pecan halves covered with a penuchi-like candy, well perfumed with Sherry. Waxed paper cartons carry the nuts, glamour packaged in gold-paper covered boxes, the price ＄1.25 a half-pound at Wanamaker's, Broadway and Eighth Street.
A smoke taste everyone loves is in the very fiber of that hickory-planked bacon we ordered straight from Farm Home Foods, Watertown, Wis. You catch the scent of smoke as the bacon sizzles in the pan. The smoke taste is still there when you fork the dry, crispy slices to the plate.
Examine a piece as it's laid in the pan. Notice the background of snowy whiteness threaded by layers of red-brown lean. Notice the golden mellowness of the outer surface—proof that here is bacon, country smokehouse smoked.
The slices come packed on a smoked hickory board to protect the aroma and goodness. The price for 1 ¼ pounds is ＄1 and six points.
Along with the bacon we ordered a slow-smoked, full-flavored summer sausage which sells at a dollar, weighs somewhat over a pound, and takes eight brown points from the book. And s-l-o-w smoked. Each sausage is hung and allowed to take its own time drinking in the perfume of the smoldering hickory. No harsh, hasty synthetic flavoring to this. The sausage needs no cooking; it comes ready to serve, every morsel smoke permeated, and soft enough for spreading.
Yes, we have Russian caviar, but the pressed, not the fresh, ＄3.25 a quarter-pound at Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street. Pressed caviar is made by washing the roe in vinegar and afterwards pickling in brine. Great care is taken that the eggs do not become over-salty or shrunken by excessive abstraction of moisture. After the brining, the eggs are drained, then put into bags to be flattened by screw presses. This fruit of the fish is to be eaten as any caviar on hot toast, seasoned with pepper and a bit of minced onion. Be lavish with the lemon juice.
This season the fruit centerpiece gives the floral arrangement a run for its money. And the fruit's a winner every time as far as the money is concerned. A fruit bough centerpiece gets passed as dessert, and fruits left over can be used another day. But flowers feast the eyes, you say. So does fruit when skillfully handled, as by Mr. John Filser, the artistic grocerman at 960 Madison Avenue. His tray themes are a study in colors—emerald shadings against tintings of orange, red against gold.
This fruit centerpiece service costs not a penny above the price of the fruit in the bin. You take along your own tray, basket, bowl, or plate. Make a choice of fruits to suit taste and purse. A master hand builds the pyramid. Once this grocerman, back in the days of cozy security, when big parties flourished, charged a handsome fee to travel for miles to design fruit bowls for dinners. Now his customers come to him and bring their own plates and wait while he works. A free lesson in fruit designs, should you care to watch and listen.
Delivery of the finished bowls is made only within a twenty-block radius of the store; otherwise be your own step-and-fetch-it by taxicab, subway, or bus.
Remember away back about 1941 when you could buy toasted, salted Brazil nut chips and “eat yourself sick?" Mrs. Jerome M. Ziegler, the maker, reports she has located enough of a supply to provide the chips in limited amounts for another month or longer. But they're made only on order—telephone Regent 7-0293. Pick up your purchase at the kitchen door, 61 East Sixty-fourth Street. The nuts are thinly sliced, the shavings roasted in butter and salt, and worth their salt, even at the price of ＄3 a pound. The spiced and candied nuts of this Ziegler kitchen are something else again, but equally de luxe, the assortment including walnuts, hazel nuts, and pecans.
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