1940s Archive

Food Flashes

Originally Published October 1945

A California food processor with a luxurious turn of mind is using the oil of the avocado to produce a French dressing on sale in the fine food stores of the larger cities. The maker is The Ard Company, 206 North Belmont Street, Glendale, California. The avocado oil, light-bodied, golden, is cold-pressed as is the finest oil of the olive. This is blended with a wine vinegar, aged in the wood and sweetened with honey, mildly seasoned with freshly ground spices—a dressing tasting homemade. The avocado oil has no taste of the fruit, it is nut-sweet in flavor, an oil as easily digested as butter and even more costly. The eight-ounce jar of the avocado dressing is 39 cents, the sixteen-ounce jar 59 cents.

Tapioca, an early casualty of the Japanese war, returns to the grocers' shelves as an all-American product. It appears in the form of a boxed Minute Dessert made by the General Foods Corporation from an American grain, sorghum, this to replace Minute Tapioca which disappeared from the stores over two years ago.

Previously Java was our principal source of supply of tapioca starch taken from the root of the cassava. The new dessert is made from a sorghum starch but produces a pudding almost identical to the prewar kind. This new tapioca turns out thick and creamy, really delicious, and can be used in numerous pudding variations and as a thickening agent for pies. But don't try using it to thicken a souffle, or as a binder for meat loaf. Sorghum starch has certain differences from the starch of cassava and these differences must be considered in its cooking treatment. The home economists of the General Foods Corporation have worked out new recipes using the dessert, to replace the classic favorites which starred Minute Tapioca. A recipe folder accompanies each box and for happy results observe the rules to the letter.

General Foods is the first among the tapioca pudding makers to introduce the sorghum starch as a finished product. Their Minute Dessert sells in the Gristede chain and in the self-service markets of A & P stores. There is scattered distribution in stores throughout New England and in the South and Midwest; the price ranges from 12 to 13 cents an eight-ounce box.

Preston C. Cummings of the Black Sign Maple Syrup Company, Barre, Vermont, came to town a few weeks ago and brought us samplings of the new season's products. No syrup for sale but he has fair stocks of sugar offered in one-, two- and five-pound lots, $1.10, $3.00 and $4.50 postpaid, east of the Mississippi. Maple cream, too, and at the same price. This stuff, smooth as natural silk, is but maple syrup cooked to a specific temperature, cooled, then mechanically paddled until the sweetness turns to a buff-colored cream, impalpably fine grained.

Preston Cummings brought us his newest gift candy, packed in a box twelve inches long, seven inches wide, containing 72 pieces made of 100 per cent pure grade maple sugar. Alphabet pieces run the middle of the pack to spell out a personalized greeting or a friend's name. The price of $2.50 includes any greeting up to 15 letters. Above that number the cost is 5 cents for each one extra.

Preston Cummings, alias John Shelby, buys his syrup from local farmers, about 5,000 gallons a year, which he turns into candy, sugar and cream.

Crème de Coffee is a new demi-tasse confection made with pure coffee, sugar, butter and dairy-rich cream, each little golden-brown morsel individually wrapped, packed one hundred or more to the half-pound tin, 90 cents, selling at Stumpp and Walter's Epicure's Food Mart, 132 Church Street. A delectable candy for the overseas gift box. A key is attached to use for opening; lift off the lid, rich flavor waits. A hard candy slow melting. It takes ten minutes for a piece to dissolve on the tongue, thus one hundred niblets provide sixteen hours of sweet pleasure.

Hungry for tuna but no red points to spare? Then try the sea bas, solid packed in lump pieces, a fish darker than tuna, not as firm textured, with a different sort of oiliness but mildly flavored. It will serve you well as a tuna fish substitute in salads, casseroles, sandwiches—the seven-ounce tin 47 cents, Au Gourmet brand, a Stumpp and Walter item. There, too, we discovered the Lalita Mix, an interesting product combining grated coconut with sugar and a bit of rice flour. This can be used for a coconut cream pie or a pudding, without additional sugar.

Coffee briquettes are home from the wars, now appearing on grocery store shelves. What in tunket? Finely ground coffee compressed into bricks, each about the size of a yeast cake, one block containing the right amount of coffee to make three cups of strong brew. The freshly ground coffee is compressed at a temperature of 45 degrees Fahrenheit in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide to prevent oxidation, then wrapped in moisture-proof cellophane to hold in the flavor. No need to spoon-measure. All you need to remember is to use three cups of water to each little square. Open the cellophane wrapper and crumble the block into the coffee-maker and proceed as usual. Briquettes sell ten bricks to a package—thirty cups; 30 cents at the Dover Food Shop, 683 Lexington Avenue.

Those who like to keep their coffee stored in the refrigerator will find this new packaging method a tremendous space-saver. Briquettes take 42 per cent less shelf room than coffee packed loose, an item to remember for overseas shipment.

The makers of bricks without straw offer Bombay water as a substitute for quinine water, beloved by the English for the gin and tonic. There is no quinine in the new product, it has no medicinal value, but it has the right taste, through a combination of the essential oils of herbs and of barks. The water was originally produced by Jack Morgan, owner of the famous Cock ‘n’ Bull Restaurant of Los Angeles, in cooperation with a chemist friend. When Jack Morgan left for the Army, the formula and rights for making the water were released to the Morgan Beverage Company of Brooklyn for the entire Eastern territory. The water is used at the town's leading oases, at the Stork Club, “21,” the Ambassador, the Biltmore, the Waldorf. It is on sale in certain stores of the Gristede chain, also at Macy's; around 23 cents for a twelve-ounce bottle.

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