“Pick-up” is a mayonnaise sauce, creamy and rich, of unexpected flavor, made to join with crisp sticks of vegetables in amusing variety for the cocktail buffet. Arrange vegetable match-sticks of carrots, celery, anise, cucumbers—remember the radish, the scallion—to encircle a tray around a centerpiece bowl of this well-chilled sauce. Dip the sticks in, then quick to the mouth. Now the slow, pleasant crunch. Alone, the mayonnaise doesn't taste so much, but along with the chilled sweet juices of a vegetable, it acquires irresistible piquancy, it stimulates appetite. The secret of its subtlety we can only guess. Fresh vegetables, perhaps, have been reduced to liquid in a Waring Blendor and mixed with the mayonnaise, with the whole nicely spiced.
Pick-up is the idea of Mrs. C. Heinemann of Mammy's Pantry, 122 Montague Street, Brooklyn. She used it originally with a garden stick appetizer on the restaurant's dinner menu. First taste, and guests were uncertain; second dip, and they were off to the last drop, each taste enhanced by repetition. With a carrot stick for a wiper, they would swish clean the cup holder, and end with a lip smack. After a three months' menu trial, Pick-up now sells retail, the 6-ounce jar 65 cents. Stored in the refrigerator, the sauce will keep all but forever.
Who cries famine? Grocery shelves are as crowded with fancy fixin's as a year ago. Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th, have an inexhaustible store of luxury foods, mostly unrationed. One item left over from pre-war years is the boiled-in-butter mushrooms. Fresh, ripe mushrooms with just-opened veils have been filled with quality butter, broiled, then canned. Their goodness lies in the selection of the fungi at the perfect-ripe stage, and the exact timing under the flame. Turn the caps from the tin, heat thoroughly, but with no further broiling, no additional butter. The 5-ounce pack retails for 71 cents, enough to serve three.
Another delicate treat of this connoisseur's corner is the flaked chicken haddie, packed by W. H. Tidmarsh, Charlottetown, Canada. This is the flesh of small haddock, weighing under two pounds, lightly smoked, cooked and flaked, and packed in parchment-lined 14-ounce cans, selling for 46 cents (no points). One tin will serve six when creamed or en casserole.
Vanquished France? A hundred times no, if you visit Madame Romaine's match-box shop at 137½ East 56th Street. There you find a bit of Lyon quite untouched by the war. There is Madame Romaine bending over the strawberry tarts, or layering the “thousand leaves,” or frosting the petite glace. Proudly, calmly, she goes about her pastry making as in the long ago, when she helped her father in his restaurant on the outskirts of Lyon.
Madame Romaine lifts each big berry tenderly from the bowl to place it in the tart just so, tip end up. A strawberry is not to be submitted to desecration by fire. As it is ripened, so it must be eaten, clean, cool, scarlet, comfortably couched on a cushion of crushed petits fours crumbs mixed with jelly and flavored with rum. Custard? “Non, non, jamais, my father would have—what you call, `explode'— if I had used the custard.”
There they stand, maybe three dozen today, little and tender, four big strawberries, the pastry a pale amber—one touch, you feel, might send the whole structure crumbling into a million flakes.
Only the top of the box berries are used to top off the tarts, the smaller berries go for the strawberry jam. Only a few jars are made daily, ＄1 for a jar which holds scarcely a half cup. It's just berries and sugar cooked to such richness that it might have been invented by Circe.
Visit her shop. The window holds potted plants, French nougat, post-card views of France. Here are samples of her craft, the flute bread, the brioche, the croissants, made up fresh as this morning.
Go to buy her pastries or preserves— nine times in ten you will stay to fork up an omelette. In this smallest restaurant of the city, there are but three tables. But there's a choice of fifty omelettes, for Madame Romaine is an all-time champion of this fancy branch of egg cookery. All the culinary genius of the French is manifest in her omelette artistry. You note it in that certain frugality which doesn't impair flavor, that simplicity which approaches grandeur. It is an omelette light without frothiness, tender without lacking texture, a wet omelette in the manner of the French.
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