Guava is one of the tropical fruits which is coming into general use now, as supplies of the pureed and dehydrated fruit not needed by the military are being released to the bakers and makers of candy and jelly. The shipments are coming from Cuba, the annual crop there amounting to around thirty million pounds, all harvested from the wild bushes. Two Cuban guava plants were built during the war to supply the dehydrated jelly for use in military rations, guava being one of our richest sources of vitamin C. Production last year totaled one thousand tons of this base.
One of the year's new guava candy lines is an assortment of jellies, flavored in lime, lemon, orange, grape—these chocolate covered. The candy is vitamin fortified. The pound box sells for ＄1.25 at Kubie's Health Shop, 136 East 57th Street.
Eugene Lilly, the trout man of High Valley Farm, Colorado Springs, returns his smoked trout pate to the luxury markets. It's a smoothie all right, and rich, blended with butter, eggs, and milk. And smoky! like all get out! the three-and-three-quarter-ounce tin sells for ＄1 at the delicacy department of Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th, enough to spread a baker's dozen of little toast fingers.
The mistress of Puddingstone House in Walker Valley, N. Y., makes a Sweet Hickory chutney for stores in New York. Never was a chutney more lovingly concocted than this seven-fruit kind, made twenty-four glasses, no more, at a time. It is made by a hand-down recipe carried to America by the Steel family, which settled in Pennsylvnia in the Seventeenth Century. All fruits are hand-cut to uniform size, then cooked for six hours. A constant watch must be kept over the simmering kettle, to stir, stir, each little while, to keep the chutney from sticking. The fruits included are mangoes, pears, apples, peaches, quinces, raisins and any other small fruits as they come to their season. Curry powder is in the chutney, this soaked in lemon juice for two hours before using—and the secret, says the maker, of the chutney's rare flavor. Charles & Company, 340 Madison Avenue, carries the product, the fourteen-ounce jar ＄1.04.
Ready for a change in daily bread? Visit Zampieri Brothers, the French bakers at 17 Cornelia Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. Bread on the shelves, bread in cases, bread in the window. It's French bread, so very white inside, so golden the brittle crust. Here's flute bread, the long stick loaves of the Basqueland, long as your arm, thick as your arm, and baked both of white flour and whole wheat. There are miniature flutes, the little fellows just right to split lengthwise—the whole loaf, yes—then spread with butter and generous slices of garlicky salami, or sardines will do, dripping with olive oil—a full-size meal for an Italian workman, for anyone hungry. If you measure your satisfaction by the delight of the palate rather than the fullness of the stomach, cut the loaf into slices one and one-half inches thick; toast very lightly, butter generously when there's butter to spare, and duck the hot bites into little bowls of golden honey. Eat slowly between sips from a tall glass of milk.
Italian loaves are in the case, great billowy affairs, fat as soft cushions, with a brown finish slick like varnish. One loaf is enough to feed a company of giants. There is the canoe-shaped Vienna loaf of whole wheat; there are crisp butter sticks by the tens of dozens, from four inches long up to the eight-inch length, selling at 35 cents a pound. Sawed-off shorties called cocktail bread sticks are 40 cents a pound. Drop them into deep bowls of vegetable soup to soak up the liquid. One needn't spend a fourtune to eat of the fat of the land.
Or go to Angela Genovese's little grocery store at 517 Second Avenue, where Italian bread piles the windows, both the white and the whole wheat, in rings, in letter S shapes, in big round loaves with the cross whacked into their tops. Long loaves of bread wear diamond patterns arranged geometrically down their length. And something really novel is bread in the shape of a harp. Here's a place sweet smelling, the ovens giving off hot bread incense from early morning until long after dark. Fresh bread is the one smell on earth there is never enough of.
That “Old Java” flavor of the sailing ship days is the promise of a new kind of coffee called “Forbes Culture Ripened,” selling at Gimbel Brothers, Sixth Avenue and 33rd Street, 37 cents a pound. And what in the tunket is a sailing ship flavor? Today it is known that those fine coffee cargoes carried in olden times from the East Indies, Java, Sumatra, underwent a gradual ripening, an “aging in wood,” during the long weeks of passing through the tropical seas. Heat and moisture in close-packed holds developed a culture on the coffee berry peculiar to the East Indies, never found elsewhere. This culture, given the proper conditions to develop, caused the coffee to ripen, to mellow. The result, a flavor unique and much prized by the connoisseurs.
Then came the steel freighters, steam-powered and speedy, came the canal-shortened routes, and gone was that “Old Java” flavor. Top-grade coffees continued to come from the same plantations, but gone was the suave mellowness, the culture no longer developed. Experts of the James H. Forbes Tea and Coffee Company, a firm eighty years in the business, undertook to search down the secret of the lost flavor. What had caused the culture to form? By long experimenting they were able to produce a similar culture by artificial means.
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