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.
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.
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.
Special coffees then were brought from the East Indies, covered with the laboratory-made culture, and held to ripen under conditions exactly as in the holds of those old sailing vessels. The coffee's smoothness, the scientists discovered, is due to the removal of excessive free acids, said to cause sleeplessness. The new “cultured” coffee is ripened by a purely natural process, with no chemicals used. It is nature's own culture, developed like yeast; and as the culture “works,” it absorbs the gallotannic acids but has no appreciable effect on any other element of the bean. The caffeine is still there.
Pink beans, Lima beans, navy beans, any one of the three are yours for a bean dinner, and in twenty minutes flat from box to table. No soaking required—a quick rinse, that's all, then pour on the cold water, bring to a boil, cover, and let simmer for fifteen minutes until the beans are tender. Season and use as they are, in baked dishes, bean soups, bean loaves. Kubie's Health Shop, 136 East 57th Street, has the Limas, 20 cents for six ounces; pink beans and navies are 15 cents a half pound.
Pint berry baskets with hand-painted covers, filled with a half pound of maple butternut cream candies, are yours for ＄1.25, postpaid direct from the kitchen of Mrs. J. B. Van Wavern, The Grassy Spur Inn, Green River, Vermont. These candies are made of the best maple syrup, with heavy cream straight from the top of the milk given by the Van Wavern cows. And that's all, except butternuts and plenty of beating. Heed the warning, don't eat more than three pieces in a row or you will make yourself sick—such utter richness!
Billy boy no longer can judge his lassie's cooking by the pie test. Now, in cherry time, the smart Nellie will hurry to the grocer's frosted food case for a package of quick-frozen pie dough to bake a cherry pie for her Bill. And a tender crust turns out every time. Two types of frozen pie dough are on the market this spring. The one labeled “Ella Mason's Frosted Crust” carries a sixteen-ounce chunk of dough to be defrosted, rolled on a floured board, and treated as any pie crust. The sixteen ounces will bake two nine-inch pie shells, with enough trimming left over to make four medium tarts. Or the trimmings may be used as a topping for the meat pie.
A second product—and unique—is Gretchen Grant's “Pre-Paired” top-and-bottom pie crust which comes quick-frozen, ready rolled, ready cut into two crusts to fit a nine-inch pie pan. It's a cook's delight—no bother with the pastry board, the flour sifter, the rolling pin; no left-over scraps. Defrost the dough rings, unfold the bottom layer from its cellophane wrapper, and turn it neatly into the pan; press gently to fit, pour in the filling, lay on the perforated top, then fold over the top of the overlapping bottom crust edge. Seal with the tines of a fork and shove quickly into the oven.
These pastries are made exceedingly short. Even the worst cook couldn't make them go tough. Better pie crusts, we say, than the average woman can make, but not equal to the pastries turned out by the expert. This type of product is coming to stay, and will be improved as the makers learn new tricks in the freezing. The lump dough sells at L. Bamberger's in Newark, the price 35 cents for sixteen ounces. “Pre-Paired” pie crust sells at B. Altman & Company, 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, the price 39 cents.
August's issue (it must have been the heat) quoted an incorrect price in this column. The naturally carbonated mineral waters, Geyser, Hathorn and Coesa, bottled by the State of New York at Saratoga Spa, Saratoga Springs, sell six bottles for ＄1, rather than ＄2. A case of twenty-four bottles is priced at ＄4. Sales tax, of course, in New York City, with slightly higher prices in the South and the West.