Frogs' legs leap to the menu as the oyster bids farewell and is off for its holiday. Frogs' legs come to New York every month in the year, but May is opening season for the small grass frogs of northern lakes over which gourmets smack lips. Frog leg epicures vote for the light-weights that average fifteen to twenty legs to a pound. One such frog provides exactly two mouthfuls, and should be eaten with the fingers for the greatest pleasure.
Pile the platters high with the crisp brown joints. Bring them sizzling to the table, sputtering with heat. This month every restaurant of culinary pretentions stars the zig-zig drumsticks. It was the late Ben Riley, owner of the million-dollar Arrowhead Inn, shrine of frogs' legs, who introduced this delicacy to the American menu in 1897. In Mr. Riley's forty-six years as a public host, over half-a-billion frogs' legs were served from his platters.
Mr. Riley once gave us a first-hand skillet demonstration on frying the “leapers.” We started with thirty of the small legs, enough for two portions. These were washed in running water, then dried by exposure to air. Salt and pepper were dusted on—quite a lot of pepper; frogs' legs can take high seasoning. Next, the legs were rolled in finely-powdered cracker crumbs. One-quarter pound of the best butter was spooned to a thin pan, set over a high flame, and the butter heated until it boiled and darkened. Then fifteen of the legs were laid in and left for one-and-a-half minutes, or until just golden brown. Mr. Riley used a pancake turner to flip the sputtering joints, then cooked them on the other side until slightly curled—the flesh soft, not crisp. That was his way. Some like them crisp. In that case, pour off the butter when the legs curl and “shake them out.” That takes about one minute, and the legs emerge crackling crisp and heavenly. Don't skimp on the fat. One-fourth pound of butter to each fifteen legs is exactly right. But you can use margarine, or you can wait until the war's done.
Snowflakes to serve with coffee, tea, or wine are selling at B. Altman's, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, flaky bits of nonsense, scented with cinnamon, crispy and tender. They leave the soft dust of sugar on lips and finger tips. Each flake measures four inches across, selling by the dozen for 63 cents.
Watch the snowflake baker mix up the batter—eggs, flour, milk, shortening, spices, and sugar. She dips a spoonful to the little French frying iron, a whirl of fancy curlicues. Iron and batter now are submerged into bubbling hot fat. One instant, and the snowflake takes shape. It rises from the iron to float like a flower. A moment more and it's out to drain, then to cool. Just before boxing, the snowflakes are sugar dusted; then quick, off to town.
“We haven't any bees' knees … or doves' tongues … or butterflies' wings,” says the manager of TelBurn Service of 161 East 53rd, “but looky!” We looky, to see the shop shelves encrusted with some 300 food items, now in rara avis class, waiting the gourmet's greedy garnerings.
This food business started last fall as a personalized mail order service—and that's what it is now. But somehow, the stockroom has been turned into a retail store for those New Yorkers who like to browse over foodstuffs and study the labels.
It's a business that grew out of the scarcities caused by war. Its creator, an old campaigner in the food field, felt he was capable of coping with the shortage situation, and announced a service to search out tag-end stocks of foods no longer made or no longer imported. There is no rhyme, no system to what he has collected. There are only two cover-all phrases that can describe the loot—all items are non-rationed—no points to forfeit, and no “disappoints,” for the items belong in the quality class.
If you have time, pop in to eye or buy. Otherwise, just write for a listing of foods available—or tell the proprietor what it is you want, and let the shop search it down. Seven times in ten they come up with the goods. Mail is rolling in now from all states in the Union.
The shop is proud of its stock of fine olive oils, both from California and imported. A tremendous trifle to the French of the city is the Crème de Cassis, 12 per cent alcohol. Most of the black currants grown in France are used for this cordial, or call it a sirop, or a liqueur. It is made by infusing the berries in brandy or other spirits for several months, and then sweetening and thickening the juice. The alcoholic strength may run as high as 28 per cent, but if more, the flavor is spoiled.
“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.
The French pastry cases at Henri's, 15 East Fifty-second Street, offer row upon row of little inspirations, little melting dreams. There are thirty-two kinds of petit fours baked daily, and twelve of the lot are made with almond paste in the pastry. We sample a coffee eclair small as the little finger, then a golden ball, a stuff all coconut, that feathers away in the mouth.
“Try this, try that,” the proprietor urges. He lifts the silver tongs and drops one, two, three lovely nothings on the tasting plate. What's this? A miniature cherry tartlet. Here's a wee ball of meringue stuffed with something tasting exactly like a chestnut. “Price?” we ask fearfully. “＄1.50 a pound.”
It's there, too, you go to buy the big, soft macaroons about four inches across. These are much softer than you expect a macaroon to be. There is no pull to the teeth, yet they have chewiness. The inside is moist. Handsome cakes they are, of even round shape, goldenrod color outside, pure white within. These macaroons would make a fine base for ice cream or to use for an ice cream sandwich with a hot fudge sauce. Chocolate and almond flavors seem made for each other. And isn't it a relief to find an ice cream base that doesn't fly off the plate at the touch of the fork?
Peter Greig's oyster sauce that came to market last year has been discovered and is applauded by the residents of Chinatown. They use it to substitute for bo-yo, a sauce once imported, a rich purée of oysters seasoned with herbs, too Oriental for utterance. But the new American sauce is almost as good— “clever these Americans,” to quote the Chinese. The dark brown liquid is made from oysters treated in dehydrated fashion, with yeast added, and soy bean, the inevitable. The result is a sauce of concentrated oyster goodness.
It's marvelous over baked fish, the liquid helping to defeat the fish's usual dryness. It does a pleasant something, too, in pointing up flavor. Try a splash in stewed tomatoes. For a spur-of-the-moment oyster soup add one tablespoon of the sauce to a cup of milk heated with a half cup of water—and delicious! The sauce is everywhere about. Recently we spied it all the New York Exchange for Women's Work, 541 Madison Avenue.
The deluxe Dutch process coca, made for many years by Walter Baker and Company for the ice cream trade and the better soda fountains of the country, has gone into retail distribution, appearing for the first time in food specialty shops of the city. R. H. Macy, Broadway and 34th, for one, has the product, priced at 22 cents for a half-pound.
This domestic-made cocoa offers all the fine points of the Holland imported of pre-war years, but is lower in price. Selection of a quality bean is just as important as the processing procedure. The processing includes a treatment by mineral salts which only the better grades of cocoa beans can take and come through carrying full flavor. For this blend, costly, rare beans have been chosen from equatorial areas of South America, and from the tropical islands of the Caribbean.
The new cocoa is announced as a beverage for connoisseurs. Into its creation has gone all the 178 years of experience and skill of this venerable house. So sure is the maker of your liking the drink, that each tin bears the offer to refund the cost if, after one taste, you are dissatisfied with the purchase. But only the taste-blind will fail to appreciate the rich delight of the brew, its mellow cocoa aroma, its appetizing color.
Bridseye quick-frozen Boston baked beans are made with California's pea beans, with salt pork for rich zest, dark molasses for tang. Brown sugar is there to stamp the beans authentic early American. Open a box, take a good look— dark brown little morsels, glistening in syrupy sweetness. Sniff the fragrance of the pork, catch the perfume of the spices.
Chicken à la king, that's still another addition to the Birdseye line. Here is chicken à la king made in the usual manner, using both dark and light meat in a sauce of chicken broth and gravy all smooth and nicely seasoned. Little mushrooms thinly sliced are in the combination; so are bright bits of pimientos and snippets of green pepper. The 11-ounce package provides enough meat and gravy to stretch for a threesome, or a generous dinner for two. Open the package, place the frozen block in a thick-bottomed pan over low heat, and add three-fourths cup of milk to help thin the sauce. When the block melts to a smooth, creamy consistency, and bubbling hot, serve quickly over crisp waffles, or rice, or baking powder biscuits.