To us the taste of quinine water and the Bombay ditto is simply revolting, a deliberate blasphemy against the innards. Even the gin doesn't help. But twenty million tradition-ridden Englishmen can't be wrong—or can they? Or maybe liking gin and tonic depends on your blood type. One thing certain, it's a sound piece of merchandise or the Morgan Company wouldn't be bothered to bottle it. This firm has been serving Father Knickerbocker's sons with carbonated beverages for eighty-eight years since Broadway was a meadow and Fifth Avenue a lane.
The first imported Swedish item to arrive since the war ended in Europe is Lakerol pastelle. These throat-soothers containing gum arabic, sugar, licorice, menthol and eucalyptus are packed in small tin boxes, about 75 pieces, 35 cents selling at Nyborg and Nelson, 841 Third Avenue. Swedish hard bread, herring, cheeses, and caviar are expected at least by the first of the year.
Sugar tablets and cubes will be available and in volume soon for civilian tables. Enormous quantities of tablets have been going to the Russian foot soldiers through lend-lease and to the American GI's. Purchases have been cut almost in half with the war's ending and sugar cubes are returning; first allotments are scheduled for hotels and restaurants.
Brindza, a Hungarian-type pot cheese made of sheep's milk, comes to New York in forty-pound pails from Paul Sturman's cheese factory in Platea, Pennsylvania. No finer brindza can be found outside of Hungary. You don't believe it? Have a taste. It sells in the shop of that taciturn, gray-haired, China-blue-eyed Hungarian, M. Kaufer, 1548 Second Avenue, who buys it from the Czechoslovakian cheese-maker, the ruddy-cheeked Sturman, to sell by hundreds of pounds to the city's Czechs, Austrians and Hungarians.
The cooks of many fine kitchens go to Kaufer's tiny shop to buy brindza to make the liptauer—a dish, we must warn you, that goes hard on the butter. Take a half pound of the brindza and press through a fine sieve. Wash, skin, bone and finely chop one salted anchovy and add to the cheese. Cream one-half pound of butter or margarine and add one tablespoon ground caraway seeds, one tablespoon chopped capers, one tablespoon chopped chives. Combine butter mixture with cheese and when all is thoroughly blended, mound on a serving dish, smooth with a spoon, sprinkle with paprika, and garnish with parsley and radish roses. An eye-arresting centerpiece for the hors d'oeuvre table. Splendid eating on the Hungarian rye bread.
M. Kaufer is an importer of spices with more than fifty kinds crowding the shelves of his shop. He boasts a plentiful stock of pepper, four kinds: black, white, red, and cracked. He has poppy seed, both the blue and the white, this recently arrived. Curry-makers visit the shop to purchase genuine Indian curry powder. Here are fine stocks of nutmeg and mace, linden flowers, sassafras, marjoram, thyme. The paprika is of three types, sweet, sharp and very sharp.
Cake-bakers go to Kaufer's to buy vanilla beans and the Indian cardamom. They go for the tonka bean to use in honey cakes.
Hungarian-born Mr. Kaufer came to this country twenty-five years ago to start his importing business. His spices and odd wares are housed today as in the beginning in a little two-story frame building that looks like a snapshot from an old New York album, a store to root around in. You are apt to discover almost anything from Hungarian butter molds to Czechoslovakian cigarette holders to perfume from Paris.
Pop goes the popover. It stands high, light and handsome, when made with the new ready mix, one of the Joy line, created by Charlotte Cramer, a Manhattan housewife who has gone “Mrs. Big” in the ready-mix food field. To the powder add eggs and milk, beat well and bake, and that's all there is to it. Those popovers pop up and enormously, and stay up every time. Two kinds for your choice—a wheat-flour type and one made with corn meal. the A & P Stores carry the mixes, 19 cents for the ten and one-half-ounce packages, enough to make a dozen great, golden bubbles. Tender, crisp outside, sweetly moist within.
Outstanding among the overseas gift kit packers is Fraser, Morris & Company, 322 East 44th Street. In the firm's three-story building two hundred workers package and mail some six thousand overseas food boxes weekly and have held to this record since the war's beginning. A research analyst has a full-time job there tabulating the food tips from the thousands of request letters received by the house from men and women in the various overseas areas. She lists favored foods, notes which travel best, which have a tendency to crumble, to spoil. These notes serve as a guide in planning the new box assortments.
Four gift boxes have been created for Christmas with holiday-treat foods as well as other practical gift items. Fruit cake, candy, nuts, and dried fruit confections dominate the choices. Snack items are there, rolled fillets or anchovies, boneless turkey and chicken, chopped olives—that for a sampling.
There are two boxes in the line, each weighing eleven pounds, made up for the civilians in the countries of Europe. One priced at ＄6.50 contains the following assortment of edibles, all of which are scarce or impossible to obtain overseas. See what you have: Four ounces pure olive oil, fourteen-ounce tin had-dock, eight ounces Baker's de luxe cocoa, one pound White Rose coffee, twelve ounces pure honey, one pound White Rose rice, one-fourth pound tea, seven-ounce bar milk chocolate, one jar Wilson's B-V beef extract, one and one-fourth-ounce tin black pepper, six-ounce package Van Camp's precooked beans, one package Dehy beef broth, two-ounce jar Dehy lemon crystals (will make one and one-half pints), two packages bouillon cubes, one package Dehy vegetable soup, eight-ounce package Kraft's powdered milk, three bars unscented soap, one and one-half-ounce tin ground allspice. The price of the box includes packaging, postage and shipping.
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