Deer are herding into the E. Joseph cold rooms in Washington Market. Deer, this winter's unrationed red meat, has a demand tenfold over that of previous winters. These deer come for the most part from private game preserves.
One of the most popular of game treats in a man's opinion is roast saddle of venison, the roast weighing three pounds and up, turned out well larded with salt pork, strapped around with bacon, ready for the roasting pan.
There is elk meat off and on, this a lighter meat than venison, juicy, tender, and fine-grained. It's a meat with little natural fat; so see that it is well larded with salt pork before the cooking.
No reindeer this winter from Alaska, but native buffalo has returned.
Game bird counters are barren. Only occasional small shipments of birds come from London when shipping space is available for such non-essential items.
A treat of treats is the Canadian wild goose, big as a turkey almost, weighing sixteen to twenty pounds each, selling at 80 cents a pound at the E. Joseph market. It's a bird with only a vaguely gamy flavor, with less fat than the domestic duck, of lighter frame and better meated.
There are little suckling pigs, pink and dainty—and some not so dainty—weighing up to twenty pounds. The price for infants under fifteen pounds is 70 cents a pound; pigs weighing more are 65 cents; and only three points a pound for whole pigs.
Good rabbit hunting at E. Joseph's. Jacks, cottontails, and Canadian snow hares in the bag.
Pretzels have been streamlined from big twisters to little twisters, from long sticks to short sticks, from thick sticks to twigs, and now the twigs are cut into shorts, giving pretzels the exact size of old-fashioned shoe buttons.
Handy they are to eat, toasted dark brown and crisp. And according to the pretzel tradition, they wear a sprinkling of coarse salt. These crispy, salty buttons, called “Pretzel Bitz,” are in several stores, for one, B. Altman & Company, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.
Roses remain red. Violets stay blue. Sugar is still sweet, and so are you, even if dear Valentine's gone to the wars. But hush! No tender sentiments, mind you, no lace-edged hearts for soldier Joe. It is edible sweetness in a mannish box that will make you his queen of hearts, his sugar pie. B. Altman's, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, have the very Valentine —a box of Mackintosh toffee—masculine as pipe and tweeds. This is the English toffee of John Mackintosh and Sons, Ltd., famous the world over. But it's a toffee made in America—made in Ireland, too, in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, all by one formula coming from the mother factory at Halifax, England. It is made in the countries where sold rather than being imported, because toffee is its best only when fresh. The candy “grains” with age, and the smooth, rich flavor, which is at once toffee's characteristic and charm, is lost.
The C. N. Miller Co. of Boston, which holds the exclusive rights in the United States to make and sell this candy, is equipped by the English firm with toffee-making machinery exactly like that used in the Halifax plant. The toffee produced is as smooth as silk to the tongue, with nothing of the harsh, grainy structure of cheaper toffees and caramels. The flavors are assorted, delicate without being strong. Each piece is individually wrapped, the 1-pound box selling for 60 cents. There are more expensive assortments, too, if you wish.
Pear vinegar is the new condiment of the month introduced from the West by Hammacher Schlemmer's Connoisseur Shop, 145 East 57th Street, New York City. It's a vinegar brewed of the regal Bartlett Pears grown on the edge of the Joshua-tree-covered sands of the Mohave desert, a vinegar first applauded in the dining room of a dude ranch hostelry. Guests would taste of the mellow stuff and ask to buy a bottle to lug along. So persistently did they ask, that nine years ago, that the maker began bottling the brew,—some to sell by mail order, some to supply the fine food shops of the West Coast. Now pear vinegar bows into the East, the one-fifth bottle selling for 98 cents.
No cull pears are used for this condiment. Each fruit must be a perfect specimen and used at its full flavor peak. Something of the pears' rich flavor, the lush ripe aroma, and the fruit sugar pectin is retained through the aged-in-the-wood process, slow-mellowed in nature's own way for fully two years. Here is a vinegar that, like a fine wine, invites the palate with bouquet. Dressings made with this pale, sunny liquid are of transcendental merit. Use pear vinegar in a mayonnaise, irreproachable for a fresh lobster salad.
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.