The New Year Herring Salad will be made as usual during holiday week in the Rahmeyer kitchen, 1022 Third Avenue. A divinely scented stuff, this holiday specialty of the poles, the Dutch, and the Germans. Scandinavians too enjoy a holiday herring salad but the north people make their salad all white. Southern countries prefer the red kind, that is, with the addition of beets. Red style is made in the Rahmeyer kitchen, the ingredients are herring chicken, and veal, a very little pork, apples, beets, capers, pickles, mushrooms, and onions, this dressed with vinegar and oil and a variety of seasonings. Hard-cooked egg slices are used for the garnishment. The price is ＄1.20 a pound and the shop would appreciate it mightily if all orders were given in advance as they make the salad fresh daily and like to make just enough. It's a salad for the buffet table when drinks go round.
The fat Canadian eels will be barging in for the holidays. Look for eels in the fish stores the week before Christmas. Canadian Christmas eels are trapped along the st. Lawrence and the Richelieu Rivers in the Province of Quebec and dumped into especially built barges with underwater comfortably berthed during their fifteen-day journey on to New York.
Eels are the great Christmas dish with the Italians. The French and Scandinavians too know the tender sweetness of ell's flesh. But American women usually muff their chance for enjoying a new dish by calling eels “snakes” and looking superior and shivery if one so much as mentions “those slithery things” Shucks, lady, the fishman kills the eel, skins the eel. You don't need to look! When you get it home it is nice pinkish meat. Here's what to do: Buy one medium-sized eel, ask the fisherman to skin it and cut it into two-inch lengths. Sprinkle with a damp cloth. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, place one-fourth cup of cooking oil in a baking dish, add one clove garlic cut into three pieces, add a pinch of thyme. Place eel in oil, squeeze over juice of half a lemon and bake in a moderate oven (375° F.) for twenty-five minutes. Serve garnished with lemon slices and finely cut parsley. Many things to do with an eel, but this for a beginning. And donuts to dollars you will fall in love with those wigglers
“God rest you, merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay—” Bring on the pheasant giblet pate, smooth rich spreading for the little toast squares. This hors d'oeuvre luxury is made by Samuel Martin of Seattle and sold in New York City by William Poll, 1120 Lexington Avenue.
“Oh, tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy—” Italian-style antipasto appears packed in glass cigarette trays, the five and a half ounce container selling for 67 cents. The pack is styled identically as the antipasto once imported from Italy and the contents too are typical of the prewar imported brands. Mixed vegetable in this medley, stuffed olives, capers, mushrooms, all dressed in piquant sauce blended with tomato puree and spices. Biarritz the brand; Gimbel Brothers, 33rd Street and Sixth Avenue, the store dispensing this holiday feast item.
The mincemeat is a recondite matter, inspired with brandy and rum. We mean the mincemeat made in Dean's kitchen, 6 East 57th Street. There has been no skimping on the beef, this finely chopped along with tart apples, and suet which has been minced up fine as flour. Into the chopped stuff go three kinds of raisins, brown sugar and cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon. Now the whole works is turned into big crocks along with a fruit-juice combination of grape, lemon, and orange. Now a big stir, give it a deep drink of brandy and a wee drink of rum, and let the crock rest a few days, them into the pies.
“The grocers! Oh, the grocers!” Take the great basket, that bulging-bellied basket, and let's follow, as Scrooge did, the ghost of Christmas present to the poulterers, to the fruiterers, to the bakers, all radiant in their Christmas glory. Join the jostling, elbowing, merry-eyed mob of Christmas, hurrying to buy the holiday feast foods.
There is a peculiar flavor to the air. Is it “the blended scents of tea and coffee so grateful to the nose” or is it “the raisins so plentiful and rare,the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers”?
No, it's the smell of the Temple orange, the newest addition to the Christmas fruit list. It's the perfume of the tangerine, of the California navel orange waiting the toe of a sock, of the Florida orange here to keep one in top spirits despite over-caloried menus, of the little kumquat ready to add its golden beauty to the table centerpiece. The scent of the citrus is so strong you feel the touch of it as velvet. It hangs like an indefinable sugary sweetness in the air.
There are genial grapefruits big and handsome, heavy with juice, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home for the Merry Christmas breakfast. Slice red and green maraschino cherries, alternate the slices and form as a jeweled ring around the grapefruit tucking them in between the top edge of the rind and the loosened segments. There are pears—the Bosc, the Comice, the Anjou—just as Scooge saw them in blooming pyramids. There are “bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeeper's benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed”
Santa is baking. It's the Swedish Kondis kitchen at 204 East Street where we go for the coffee cake, studded with raisins made golden with saffron, price 40cents for a size to serve six. Another yeast-raised cake to our liking has a flat center, a braid around the edge, done as a fancy border. This is cinnamon scented, sprinkled with cardamom; it is speckled with raisins, with citron and nuts. These breads are long-keeping in the Swedish tradition aimed to last the holidays through, ready for service when the doorbell rings. Cakes made like breads are preferred in the north countries over the richest fruit cakes, a better teammate for coffee.
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