Tidings from Baby New Year—those postwar dream foods we have been hearing so much about are getting out of their dream state and will be coming in earnest.
Miracle of the moment—the big talk of the food field—is a new method in quick-drying developed by that wizard of the laboratory, Clarence Birdseye, who first gave the world packaged foods, quick-frozen. The new waterless items called the anhydrous, to distinguish them from their predecessors in the dried line, are semicooked, need no soaking, and from shelf to plate require but four to ten minutes in preparation. The finished aroma, and nutritive qualities of vegetables and fruits which are cooked fresh-picked from garden and orchard.
Three of these anhydrous vegetables, broccoli, carrots, and mashed potatoes, (also apple tarts made with anhydrous apples), were served recently at a press luncheon in the Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf Astoria, all without mention regarding their novelty. The two hundred food experts present had no idea they were eating a “miracle” until the announcement was made directly following the meal.
A platform demonstration was staged to show the ease and speed with which the vegetables could be prepared in the home kitchen. For example, with broccoli and carrots, the dried bits were placed in saucepans with water to cover, a little salt added, lids on the pans, then over high heat to bring the foods to a boil. After five minutes' boiling, the vegetables were done.
The potatoes were prepared without cooking. Anhydrous riced potatoes were placed in the top of a double boiler, over hot water, then boiling water stirred in and the spuds beat fluffy in four minutes flat. Potatoes will be dried in diced, sliced, or julienne form to be served in all the usual ways except as whole-baked.
Six years ago when Mr. Birdseye decided to do something to improve the present methods of drying, he started questioning the home cooks to find out what they wanted. The cooks told him plenty. They wanted dried foods to reconstitute in forms they were used to serving; that is diced, sliced, julienne, or whole flowerettes of cauliflower or broccoli. They wanted ease in preparation; no complicated directions, and short, short cooking. Point most important, the food must arrive at the table looking fresh-cooked, tasting and smelling that way. Also women invariably requested that the dried products carry all the nutritive values of the fresh, that they be inexpensive.
Mr. Birdseye decided that speed in the drying might prove as efficient as speed had in the freezing and that's how it worked out. Rapid-dried foods keep their cell structure, both physically and chemically. The new drying process he developed uses the three known forms of heat transfer; that is, radiation, conduction, convection. The average drying time for almost any fruit or vegetable by this process averages ninety minutes as compared to an eighteen-hour period by all other methods. The foods are semicooked, yet there is no overheating in the extraction of the water.
Production of these foods will begin in early 1946 when they will be marketed nationally by American Home Foods,Inc., a firm now manufacturing and distributing Clapps' Baby Foods and Baby Cereal, G. Washington Instant Coffee and Instant Broths, and Duff's baking mixes. The containers will be about the size of a cigarette package, the contents sufficient for three to five servings. The foods to be included in the new line are not yet announced. But to date Mr. Birdseye has successfully processed carrots, beets, parsnips, cabbage, peas, string beans, asparagus, and a half dozen other vegetables, as well as many small fruits.
You haven't time for morning orange juice? Tote it in your pocket to enjoy at your leisure. A new process has been developed for reducing the juices of citrus into hard candy form, the candy containing the tree-ripe flavor, the natural sweetness, vitamins, minerals, and other elements originally present in the fresh fruit. Nothing is added, except a trace of hydrogenated fat to enhance the tastiness. These small candy squares are individually wrapped, laid three in a row on a cardboard backing, then overwrapped to look like a short stick of gum. Both orange and grapefruit “Bruceets” are selling at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, at Hearn's Fifth Avenue at 14th Street, at B. Altman's at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, TelBurn of New York, 161 East 53rd Street, also Abraham and Straus, 420 Fulton Street, Brooklyn; price around $1.54 for a box of 72 pieces.
Carrots are being treated in the same manner, to give a candy of rich caramel-like flavor, chockfull of this vegetable's potential vitamin A. Prunes, too, have been reduced to eat as hard candy. “Bruceets” are the brain child of Bruce's Juices, Inc., of Tampa, Florida, processors for twenty years of fine juices from fruits and vegetables. Ideal these nutritive tidbits for tucking into the food kits traveling abroad.
Skim milk products are due for a boon. First along is a new ready-mix powder with a skim milk base for making a frozen dessert. Until the war brought the need to utilize every bit of the nation's available food, some fifty billion pounds of skim milk, a by-product of the butter factories, were discarded annually, or fed to livestock. The government asked that this tremendous waste be turned into powder for Lend-Lease and the Army. Plants were built and soon a vast quantity of skim dehydrated milk was being shipped to all parts of the world. Now manufacturers are looking for new ways to use this nutritious powder, high in protein, vitamins, minerals. Skim milk, you know, is identical to whole milk except the fat's gone.
“Tissert” is the name of this skim milk dessert, putting in a New Year appearance. The mix requires only the addition of water, milk, or cream, them a good beating and it's ready to freeze. Contained in the powder is a magic ingredient for speeding up the freezing period to a mere forty-five minutes. A four-ounce package (price around 19 cents) yields one quart of smooth creamy deliciousness. And never a crystal—that quick-freezing ingredient, a secret of the maker, Homix Products, Inc., guarantees against this. The product is planned for national distribution in the very near future. Selling now in New York City at the Bloomingdale grocery, Lexington Avenue at 59th Street, the stores of the Gristede chain, and at Abraham & Straus, 420 Fulton Street, Brooklyn.
Around we go looting the food world of its pleasures. This time it was a slice of smoked Nova Scotia salmon we sampled at Old Denmark, 135 East 57th Street. It's different, it's sweet and delicious! The difference is this: The shop buys the best of the Nova Scotia salmon, then ships to a Danish smoker in California for a slow 21-day treatment called the “Waywood.” Once the salmon has come to that exact point of succulence of which nothing is whicher, it is shipped back to the shop to sell for $2.50 a pound. Thinly sliced, a pound cuts twenty-five to thirty pieces. That's no great price—and it's the same price since long before war. And the price isn't going soaring. Danish-style, slow-smoked, rosy-fleshed salmon is the Old Denmark leader—and leaders are not allowed to suffer inflation.
Cracked wheat as it's served in Syrian and Armenian restaurants has been restyled and box-packed for quick cooking to please the American palate. George Haig, Armenian by birth, captain in the United States Army and returned recently from overseas, is processing and marketing the wheat out of New Haven, Connecticut.
The wheat is washed, then precooked and dried; next the outer husk is removed and the kernel cracked, but the germ left intact. Ten to twelve minutes' boiling time and the wheat cooks tender to use as a breakfast cereal to eat with sugar and cream. It is adaptable as a meat extender in patties and loaves. We recommend it especially as a stuffing for fowl. Cooked, the grain is slightly similar in taste and appearance to expensive wild rice and what's more, can be used in all the same ways.
“Haig's Wheet” is at TelBurn of New York, 161 East 53rd Street, 50 cents a pound package. It sells, too, in numerous independent grocery stores in and around New Haven.
First cheese to arrive from the Continent is the sapsago of Switzerland, made of skim milk and herbs, a pale green substance, cone-shaped, hard as a rock, a cheese for the grater, for flavoring egg dishes, bowls of soup, macaroni, spaghetti. It's good over the plain boiled potato. Wherever a dusting of cheese is indicated in a recipe, sapsago can do the job and in a way different. The Swiss love the green cheese finely grated, then blended with butter to spread on thin slices of dark bread. A variation oddly pleasant is to spread bread with butter and grated sapsago, then lay on thin slices of sausage or ham, and broil until sizzling. Sapsago is around town: Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, has it, also Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street.
The mandarin orange returns, packed in light syrup, here from Brazil selling at Bloomingdale's, Lexington at 59th Street, the thirteen and one-half-ounce tin, 46 cents. Know what it is? The mandarin orange is the tangerine at its top best. The sections are uniform in size and in shape, free of membrane and seeds. These tiny orange segments plump with juice goodness have a “come hither” way when served as a top-off for pudding. And good on ice cream, a dainty filling for the fragile tart shell. A section or two adds a gala touch to the salad. Pose a section atop a baked split sweet potato—a taste to remember!
The pheasants, the mallard duck, the bobwhite quail, the deer, are on the game counters for those who stalk game the easy way without the aching feet and the weary muscles. E. Joseph's in Washington Market is the favorite loitering spot for men who feel the urge to shoulder a gun and be off through the deep woods alert for fox squirrels to bury under crust in a pot pie.
There is no imported game this year in the E. Joseph lockers—no grouse came from Scotland's fields, blooming of heather, no ptarmigan from the north countries of Europe but there is domestic ptarmigan, this estate-grown. Pheasant are there, averaging five to seven pounds for a brace priced at $12.50. Mallard ducks, estate-raised, average six pounds a brace, $8.50 the price. The bobwhite quail of dappled gray vest, of white striped face, brown of body and wings, runs $7.50 two birds, each averaging three-fourths of a pound.
Gentle little Carolina doves, eight ounces each, are considered the great delicacy. Deer is there and so are Ed Butters' farm-grown buffalo—steaks, roasts, chops, tongues, liver, and the prize cut of them all—the hump for a roast.
Game orders are taken to ship by express in dry ice (no extra charge for the ice) and to any state in the Union. One assortment is a brace and a half of pheasants, two cocks and one hen, priced at $18.50.
It is good to see the green pistachio again. The Vendome, 415 Madison Avenue, has these nuts, coming from Sicily. The nuts are freshly salted at the shop to sell at $3.25 for a pound.
Turn back to yesterday. Visit the shop of Scotchman John Buchanan, the fruit and delicacy merchant in Grand Central Terminal. Explore for the treasure tucked under counters, laid away on jumbled shelves. Here is a stock of old-fashioned tidbits, the hobby of the shop owner. Some think him clean daft the way he searches the markets for such old-time nonsense as the fat white peppermints and pink wintergreens like those grandma kept in her sewing basket. In the Buchanan shop are velvet molasses candies and Down East maple cuts. Remember these old-timers? There's the slippery elm, once chewed by the great spitball pitchers and every small boy who could curve a baseball. The bark is tied up in neat little bundles, 15 cents for three-fifths of an ounce. It's good for the throat; we learn singers and public speakers are the chief buyers. Today ball players chew gum or maybe tobacco.
Something else you'll find at Buchanan's is the gum of the spruce, the very gum Robert Frost describes as “lumps of scented stuff like uncut jewels, dull and rough.” It comes to market golden brown but turns pink between the teeth. A bag of five small pieces costs 5 cents, or $1 for a box of twenty bags.
Figs are here from the Smyrna area packed by Cresca, Hygeia brand, back for the first time since the war. These are the pick-of-the-crop figs, sun-dried, unsulphured. That white crystal-like deposit is the beneficent natural sugar of the tree-ripened fruit. B. Altman's, Fifth Avenue at 34th Street, offer this delicacy, the one-pound package 76 cents.
Victoria 1877 thick sauce is being revived and has returned to the local markets where it was a popular seller a quarter of a century ago. The sauce is packed under the old-time label showing a picture of Queen Victoria and her maids-in-waiting. This sauce, long proclaimed by both the professional and the amateur gourmets as one of the world's finest, is made in careful duplication of the original.
The label informs that the sauce contains tomatoes, soy vegetable extractions, prunes, vinegar, water, salt, onions, garlic, and spices. No doubt it does, but we think the base is that seasoning called Pique with prunes and tomatoes added in pureed form. Use the stuff just as it pours from the bottle with cold cuts, chops, or roast beef; with poultry or fish. It's sharply tanged and of rich brown color—a morning, noon, and night sauce. How in the morning? Try a dash on the salt pork or the fried scrapple. Don't laugh. Pennsylvanians like ketchup on a fried egg and scrapple combination. So why not the thick sauce?
To bag an English Yorkshire duck took us on a hunting expedition to the T. Greatorex market, 220 Harrison Avenue, Harrison, New Jersey, home of the English pork shortage. But the ducks are on hand, these made of pork butts and shoulder finely ground with the liver and seasoned with salt, pepper, allspice, and sage. Finely ground bread crumbs serve as the binder. The mix is rolled into balls and these lined up in rows, one close to the other, forty-eight to a baking pan, then into the oven. After the cooking a bone stock broth is poured over and the jelly let set. The “ducks” are 5 cents each and a versatile food. Serve them hot, or slice for the cold plate. Another day the meat may be chopped and combined with boiled potato and onion to make a quick hash. It's fine blended with mayonnaise for sandwich filling, or used as an appetizer spread for the cocktail cracker.
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.