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.
The Kondis boasts an amazing assemblage of gingerbread creatures—long-whiskered cats, birds, wolves, and reindeer by the dozens. There you will find the world's most endearing of hearts, the gingerbread kind! Big and little hearts are trimmed in loops and swirls of icing as if deep-ridged by snow. The price for a heart, three inches tall, is 5 cents and so on by measure, up to ＄1.
“Deck the halls with boughs of holly—Fa, la, la, la, la, la, “T'is the season to be jolly—” So you are having a holiday tea? Then order the midget turnovers filled with mincemeat, baited with brandy. These plump dumpling-like morsels, the size of half dollars, each one but two bites, are made by Mammy's Pantry, 122 Montague Street, Brooklyn, made from now into March. Mincemeat is shipped in from kitchen in Louisville, Kentucky, a barrel at a time; some two a thousand pounds in a winter. About a thousand pounds go into pies, the remainder is dipped, spoonful by spoonful, to the wee pastry rings. These are folded, their edges fork-crimped, the tops pricked so that the steam can escape. The dumplings come from the oven the brown of autumn oak leaves.
Under an experimental tongue, they give a flavor which has indeed a heaven-sent affinity for the brandy in which the fruit of the filling is steeped. These fruity little tarts are good, not only for tea but as a dinner dessert when singing with heat. Ten minutes in a hot oven just before serving turns the trick.
“He came into the world in the middle of a thicket”—the fawn Bambi. “His little red coat bore fine white spots and in his vague baby face there was still a deep sleepy expression.”
Christmas-tree Bambi is cut out of gingerbread. His coat baked a red brown and the fine white spots are frosting, added by an artist's hand. The baby face has the innocent wide-eyed look of a Bambi fresh from the forest.
The fawn grows older. He lifts his hoofs elegantly. He learns to leap and jump and all in gingerbread. The artist has caught the “young prince” in one of those wild happy dashes through the blossoming meadow.
Of course friend hare is there with his “long spoon-like ears hanging down limply as though they had suddenly grown weak.” Gingerbread hare has good-natured features and one big round eye that sees everything.
This trio are but three of a vast company of gingerbread people from story-book land on sale for the holidays at the Farm and Garden Shop, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Other figures are friendly donkey who wears a wreath of frosting flowers; stubborn donkey is there bracing his feet in revolt. White pony has a flowing mane and a short bobbed tail. Christmas angel trails white wings feathered in frosting. Cocky snowman, laughing clown. Santa Claus in a red coat trimmed in white fur—you will love every last one. The prices range from 15 to 35 cents.
One glance at the gingerbread people and you know a woman with an understanding of children has given her heart and hand to such small affairs. Daughter Susan was two when Mother Irene felt inspired to decorate the Christmas tree with Mother Goose characters fashioned from gingerbread. That was the beginning, there never came an ending. Ever after there were gingerbread trims for Susan's tree which changed in character as the child grew older. Neighbors came begging “Make a set for our tree.” Gingerbread fun grew into gingerbread business. Last Christmas ten thousand of these figures hung on Christmas trees around town, every one handmade in the kitchen of the Long Island baker.
Nancy S. Barns is making her fine fruit cake again in the big kitchen of her historic house of that three-century-old town of East Hampton, Long Island. It was her Grandmother Hawkins' fruit cake, the recipe brought over from England with the Oakleys when they settled at Center Moriches 250 years ago.
It is a cake heavy with fruit, hand-cut fruit, hand-culled. Citron, raisins, and currants jockey for position in the fruity mixture. There is candied peel, both the lemon and the orange, and just enough flour to keep all the good things together. Preparation of the fruit is the job that takes time. Mrs. Barns picks over the fruits piece by piece to be sure they are free of stems, of hard spots. Larger fruits are cut into uniform bits. Now a little of the flour is mixed with the fruit to separate the pieces. It's very well mixed to prevent its sticking in the wrinkles of the raisins to remain throughout the baking. The spices are sifted with the flour not once but many times to insure a perfect blending. The mixture is baked in loaf pans lined with greased paper for the high percentage of fruit and sugar make it a cake easy to scorch. Now the long, slow baking while the raisins and that multitude of currants plump up soft and tender. The cake carries a substantial flavor and does what every woman so admires—it slices gauze-thin. This Long Island fruit cake sells direct from the kitchen, ＄1.75 a pound plus postage, please, for weight two pounds and over.
It's a thing. We mean the smoked eel that is turning up in pinkish thin slices on cocktail bread fingers—the price ＄1.15 a pound, and a pound feeds a multitude. Nyborg and Nelson, 841 Third Avenue, carry smoked eel the year round.
The Major Grey chutneys are returning from India, but with shipments intermittent, not more than one third enough of these fine chutneys is here to meet the demand. Javin brand is back, this claiming its unique proprietary flavor, the result of combining cane sugar with a type of mango grown in the Arabian Sea, with grated ginger from Cochin, a southern Indian port, and of course there is the important ritual of its unique spicing. The spicing formula copies the early Hindu method for preserving mangoes through the rainy season. This chutney is no longer marketed in the tall-necked bottle (the packers' stocks are depleted and no more available now) so Javin chutney goes to market in plain mason jars.
There is a second Major Grey imported by Jehangir Khambata, this seen in the usual tall exotic bottle of which Mr. Khambata has a supply to last through the summer. The mango and ginger root in this combination are cut in large toothsome pieces to bed in the hot spicy sauce. In the Javin brand chutney the fruits are cut finer; which you prefer is a matter of taste. The Major Grey name, we are told, is controlled by three Bombay manufacturers of chutney and a group of mango growers whose right to the trade-mark comes through long usage and by strict adherence to the particular method of its making.
This chutney varies slightly according to where it is sold, as national tastes vary. The United Kingdom, for example, likes the sauce rather thin. The Dutch like it sharper than the British, that is with a little more red pepper and a bit more ginger. In South Africa a sweeter chutney is preferred almost sugary and it's this sweeter type which sells best in the United States. Both the Javin and Khambata chutneys are handled by Hammaches Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street, Martin's Fruit Shop, 1042 Madison Avenue, Enoch's Delicatessen, 872 Madison Avenue, and Ellen Grey, 800 Madison Avenue.
The gift artists, those three Marks sisters, have a proud new home at 9 West 57th Street, to show off their wares. The new shop is a series of shops within a shop. From the street you enter the large Alice-blue room of gracious proportions where the antiques are assembled. Here a vast array of rare English china. Upstairs a larger space for the larger antiques, a quiet room where the customer can sit and consider.
Center room downstairs is a miscellany of gifts. Up the broad steps at the rear are shops in miniature painted pink to simulate the little French shops of Paris. Here you find the baby corner, the sick-a-bed nook, the bath accessories, the candy shop. And here we stop—that's why we came. These are candies exclusive, made just for the Marks. Favorite piece of the lot is the honey almond crisp, a combination of ground almonds, in brittle crunchy squares chocolate covered, then rolled in the finely ground nuts; price for a pound, ＄2.75. The marshmallow fingers are long slivers of marshmallow, chocolate dipped, to cover bottom and sides, the mallow left showing on top—a pound is ＄2.00. Pecan patty at ＄2.50 a pound is a butter-melting caramel in a chocolate petticoat, the top covered with quarters of freshly roasted pecans. The caramel kinds number four—pistachio, vanilla, chocolate, raspberry. Marks' candies sell individually or in assortments, as you wish, the prices for a two-and-one-quarter-pound combination ＄5.50 and ＄6.50. Why the price difference? Fewer chocolates are included in the less expensive selection.
The small crystal urn filled with Jordan almonds is the featured candy gift; or have the urn filled with jam. The price is ＄5.50, boxed and splurged out in ribbons, bedecked with flowers.
There are innumerable tidbits for the cocktail hour. Blanched almonds one of the most elegant of the items, packed in one-half-pound jars ＄1.25. Here is salted cocktail corn, fried in vegetable oil, a year-around seller.
The first frozen orange juice we have noticed packaged, brick style, is handled by Macy's, a California juice of the tree-ripened Valencias. It's a juice hand-squeezed, free of oil from the peel. When ready to use remove the carton from the freezing unit and place in the lower portion of the refrigerator to remain overnight to thaw out for breakfast. Don't worry about leakage, the bag is leak-proof. The price is 29 cents for sixteen ounces.
It's mincemeat equal to that delectable one John Ridd brought to the high-born Lorna Doone in the year of the great snow. “Golden pippins, finely shred” John unctuously described the mince-meat, “with the undercut of the sirloin and spices and fruits accordingly, far beyond my knowledge.” Little House mincemeat is coming to town from Newtown, Connecticut, to Bellows' Gourmets' Bazaar—made with fresh tongues instead of the usual beef made from the original recipe used in the White House when John Quincy Adams was the president. Whatever Mrs. Adams, the brilliant hostess, served, history tells us, was top-drawer stuff. The mincemeat formula came to the present maker, polished to perfection by several generations of good cooks through whose hands the recipe has passed. It is a recipe that reads like a poem—but we promised not to tell, except to say it is made with beef tongues, with tart apples, with suet minced fine as flour. Into it goes raisins, the sticky kind and hand-seeded. There is brown sugar and candy peel, put we promised, no telling. Great crocks of this mixture are wetted down with sherry and a big drink of brandy, Nothing lily-livered about this Christmas pie filler. The mincemeat will be selling in two-pound jars, the price ＄1.75 or thereabouts.
Even the cows are celebrating for Christmas. Sheffield Farms report their dairy herds are giving eggnog by the quart, mixed to charge the merry bowl. Apparently the cows have added to their feed “sugar and spice and everything nice,” including a touch of rum flavoring. This eggnog which you can order through the milkman (or having no milkman, a local branch of the company) combines rich cream with eggs, sugar, nutmeg, and the flavor of Jamaica rum. A smoothly blended pleasant drink as it is without spirits to use just as it comes from the bottle. No beating to do, no additions to measure in, nothing to do unless you wish to add a “stick of dynamite” from your liquor shelf. This ready-made eggnog must be ordered three days in advance and is available throughout the holiday season, December twenty-third to January first, inclusive.
Here's the almond roco again, handled by Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street. Try a piece. Let the rich milk chocolate melt on the tongue, crunch into the buttery goodness of its nut-filled center. Good? Yes, and distinctive! This confection was originated in 1923 made by Brown and Haley of Tacoma, Washington, of the very best ingredients, fresh creamery butter, milk chocolate, cane sugar, delicately toasted almonds. Each piece, a fat roll about one and one-half inches long, is foil wrapped to rest in a frilled paper holder. Something to delight the discriminating candy lover—approximately twenty-eight pieces to a pound, price ＄1.75.
Christmas moves in, and as if determined to fill all hearts with joy the bells ring louder, the trees look taller, the holly is greener, the berries are more glowing, the puddings are fatter, near bursting with plums.
The Bellows plum pudding is one of the finest in the city. It has a dry brittle texture, proof of its suet content. It is well packed with fruits, currants, and raisins, lemon and orange peels, almond and spices. Fresh milk and eggs are used in the batter. The liquid includes orange and lemon juice with rum and brandy for spirit. A pretty pudding with its flat top just the right size to hold a big sprig of holly. It's a pudding with a glazed look from its days of restful repose in its bowl with the cloth-covered top. Two pounds ＄3.00, three-pound sizes ＄4.50, at Bellows' Gourmets' Bazaar, 67 East 52nd Street.
Now pumpkin pie can be made from a handful of powder. Dry-Pack offers a new pumpkin pie mix, the news of the winter among dehydrated foods, four ounces of powder already spiced and partially sweetened, the price 10 cents, enough for a pie nine inches broad. You add one-third cup of sugar and three-fourths cup of boiling water and blend to a smooth batter, set the mixture aside, and busy yourself with the pastry. That done, turn your attention to the filling again, adding one egg, this slightly beaten, next pour in two cups of milk, bit by bit, beating constantly. When thoroughly mixed pour into pastry-lined pie tin and bake for ten minutes in a hot oven; then reduce heat to moderate, continuing the baking for forty-five minutes. The pie filling bakes smooth and moist. It doesn't shrink or go watery. It has a spice-brown color; the spice accent on the cinnamon. R. H. Macy & Co. have the new mix at their concentrated foods counter. It's a product in wide distribution in leading stores of other cities.