There is nothing better than a good English farmhouse pork pie—and that's what the Greatorex sons, who have a proper pride in their calling, make “just like father made it.” Little pies once were a year-around proposition with big pies on hand at the holiday season. Now none at all. You must wait for these treats until pork supplies increase.
These little pork “pieties,” you may like to know, are made in pastry cases as the Scotch make their mutton pies. The pastry is machine-moulded, then the filling spooned in, this a combination of finely chopped pork butts and shoulder. Salt and pepper the seasoning. Good eating hot, good eating cold. Cut through the pie. The flaky crust merges imperceptibly into the dough, the dough into the meat, like a mingling of geological strata. Personally we like the pie heated, then served with a hot gravy with peas and mashed potatoes. Men like the meat pies in preference to sandwiches, to carry in their lunch boxes on outdoor jaunts: hearty eating, convenient handling.
What you can get now are the succulent hot pigs' feet and hocks which come from the boiling pot at 2:30 every Saturday afternoon—and the customers are waiting. The rest of the week it's feet and hocks cold in their own white jelly. The feet sell at 15 cents a pound, the hocks 32 cents a pound. Pigs' hocks with bread and butter and a cup of tea was Father Greatorex' favorite luncheon all his eighty-four years, eaten in the kitchen back of the shop.
Normally the company makes its own pork sausage, 100 per cent pork, seasoned with pepper, salt, sage, and mace, about nine links to a pound. When the meat is available, there is the English bologna, all pork butts and shoulder, seasoned with pepper, salt, coriander, and mace.
There's the English bacon, dry-crued without smoke, dried with sugar and salt. It fries more crisp than average bacon as it does all its shrinking while it's taking the cure.
One would never look twice at the Greatorex store with its dark brown old-fashioned front unless you had the address in hand and were searching it out. The place opened in 1894, looks today as it did then except for the modern scales and spotless refrigerators. The counter, the meat blocks, the meat hooks, the meat cases, are the very same that father used when he started store-keeping. And the homemade specialties haven't been changed by so much as a peppercorn.
The Harrison women would raise Ned if father's sons started changing things. The “duck,” the pork pies, the bologna, the head cheese, are all foods traditional and typical of old England, merrier than dainty in her manner of feasting.
Readers searching for powdered whole eggs for shipment to England will find the item at John Buchanan's, Grand Central Terminal, in three-ounce and six-ounce jars, 75 cents and $1.50.
Tokay loaf is a fancy bit of eating from a California kitchen. It's a cake unbaked, a happy blending of chopped nuts, fruits, its only moistener Tokay. Here's cake to slice and serve as it is with tea or with wine. With a flutter of whipped cream, it can do duty as the dinner's ending. The thirteen-ounce loaves are sold by Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, price $1.28. A five-pound size is handled by Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street, price $5.25.
It tastes like the fresh pineapple, that unsweetened canned pineapple juice from Puerto Rico, selling now at Macy's Broadway at 34th Street, one pint, two ounces, 23 cents. You might try it some day, Blue Diamond the brand. We don't insist you agree but doesn't it run like sweet ichor through the veins?
A fig treated in a new manner is the “Golden Honey,” the fruit soaked in a honey and corn syrup mixture to give a fig tender, moist, sweet, and of slightly glazed appearance. These too are naturally sun-dried, jumbo in size, one pound 79 cents at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue.
White wine vinegar, that's the news at the Victori Company, 164 Peral Street, down in the city's old section, right on the original site of New Amsterdam. This vinegar, direct out of Catalonia, Spain, so admired for its mellowness, its distinctive flavor, its champagne sparkling way, sells for $1.10 a fifth.
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