May comes flowering and fragrant, her garlands herb-scented. Fill up the May bowl. Pour in the wine, pour one quart red and one quart white, then lightly spice with the forest's sweet woodruff. Tie two ounces of woodruff in a scalded piece of cheesecloth and let commune with the wine one hour and no more lest the woodruff leave a bitterness to dissipate its meadow-flower charm. Add one pint of fresh strawberries cleaned and split, sweeten to taste with orange blossom honey, and serve cold but not iced.
For sweet health's sake, herbs to the wine, sprigs of balm to the claret. Into a bowl place the thinly sliced rind of a lemon, add a small bunch of borage, a small bunch of balm. Cover with sherry; crush herbs and rind with a muddler, pour in a bottle of claret. Sweeten the bowl to your taste, cover, and allow to chill several hours. Strain before serving; add a bottle of seltzer, or champagne, the purse allowing. Pour the drink over shaved ice. A cup light and twinkling in its ways as sunshine merry-making over blue water.
For the herbs of spring visit or write to America's oldest herb pharmacy, Raubenheimer's, opened in 1874, at 1341 Fulton Street in Brooklyn; a branch shop in Manhattan at 46 Dey Street. These stores handle as many as five thousand seeds, barks, roots, and leaves. Each spring we go calling on the herb pharmacist, Dr. Otto Raubenheimer, a man full of years, yet hale and hearty.
“I'm eighty-four years old and spry as a lad,” the doctor tells us. “Nothing like smelling herbs and eating them to make a man fit. Spring fever got you? Now it's a tea you need made of sassafras bark, from the root.” The doctor contends that much of the sassafras on the market is the bark of the tree and this hasn't the same medicinal value as the bark of the root. His sassafras is gathered by an herb collector in Virginia and in early spring before the sap rises, a bark superior, at $1.50 a pound.
Dandelion, the pest of the American lawn, gives its root for spring tonic. That bitter root of queen's-delight has been used in the South as a blood purifier since the colonists of Jamestown discovered the “queen's” medicinal properties.
There is everything in the doctor's herbal collection—frankincense and myrrh, the same preparation the wise men carried for the Babe in the manger. There is the sarsaparilla for compounding root beer, the very herb, 'tis said, that cured the Emperor Charles V of his gout. This cinchona bark up from Peru was used to relieve the stubborn fever of the Dauphin of France.
Wisps of perfume rise from a thousand canisters, from sacks, jars, barrels, drawers. Herbs are here from every corner of the world.
The doctor broke off a fragrant spring of sage and offered it to us. “He who would live for ages must eat sage in May.”
But we had gone for the woodruff, selling 50 cents an ounce. Expensive? But these stocks are out of Europe and almost depleted. By another May the doctor thinks new shipments will be coming. We pay the price willingly, for “Put into wine, woodruff makes a man merry.”
No amiable brown flood of bock beer this year, but pretzels show up and in every which shape, a few remain twisters but there are pretzels in star form, pretzel sticks, thick and thin, pretzel squares, big and little, pretzels in alphabet. A new two-pound patty tin packed by Bachman's of Reading, Pennsylvania, containing five different-shaped pretzels, sells at R. H.Macy's, Broadway at 34th, for $1.49.
Prima donna of the assortment is a light-colored twister, the kind the Pennsylvania Deutsch around Lancaster munch. To the outsider, all pretzels of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country taste much the same. But let a native bite into one, or even look at it for that matter, and he can tell instantly whether it's from Lancaster, Reading, York, or Harrisburg. Bernice Steinfeldt, author of a booklet, The Amish of Lancaster County, has told us the difference in the various Pennsylvania pretzels. She says that Reading pretzels are small and thin; that Lancasterians vow nothing can compare with their thick, medium-sized pretzels, while folks from Harrisburg champion a type thick and big.
The traditionalists consider the new pretzel shapes as sacrilegious. They point out that the word “pretzel” comes from the Latin “pretium,” meaning a reward, and that the priests once gave pretzels to children for learning their prayers. That's why the pretzel was formed to represent folded arms. Glazed hard pretzels, thickly encrusted with coarse salt, were given out at monastery doors to passing pilgrims. The hole in the pretzel served the practical purpose of making it possible to string the bread on the pilgrim's staff. At another period we read that pretzels were worn like bracelets and necklaces on feast days to ward off the influence of wicked spirits.
Still another school of pretzel historians claim the twisted bread originated among the peasants of the Black Forest. During Holy Week these people made and ate a bread called Bretzelin, the double knot representing the rope by which Christ's hands were tied.
Now it's alphabets, stars, and sticks— nothing is sacred!
Chinese green tea, so very scarce since the war, is still available by mail from Simpson and Vail, 89 Front Street, at $1.25 to $1.50 a pound, plus cost of mailing. Most concerns have been out of those teas for two years at least, but this company has had limited stocks right along through the war. They have also a very small supply of the greens of Japan. Green teas on hand are the gunpowder and the young hyson, also pan-fired. Something else offered are China's black teas, $1.25 to $1.50 a pound, these running from the regular China congou to the finest Keemun. Every bit as good, we think, as some teas in the market for which shoppers are paying up to $3.00 a pound. It is our understanding that Simpson and Vail have small lots of numerous choice teas which they are reluctant to mention, trying to hold these for their regular customers.
If you are ordering tea, you might like to try also the Simpson and Vail coffees; excellent blends of Medellin, aged Cucuta, and the Mexican Coatpec. No Brazil coffees are used, a boasting point with this firm. Why so smug? The market, it seems, is deluged with inexpensive Brazils of poor quality and these are being used heavily by many large concerns, because superior coffees are hard to get in any real volume. This house, being small and adept at working numerous channels, has been lucky enough to corner small stocks of top coffees. Anyhow, that's their story, and the coffee does have a rich, mellow flavor. But be your own judge. Order without hesitation, for there is a moneyback guarantee, if the brew doesn't give complete satisfaction.
Rosie makes the cheeses that bring the Jewish customers from all parts of the city to the Kaltman Dairy Store at 125 Delancey Street on New York's East Side. Here are cottage cheeses as they are made on the Continent, where Rosie (Mrs. Harry Kaltman, the boss's wife) learned cheese-making as a girl on her father's dairy farm near Mieletz, Austria. Even on Delancey Street far removed from green meadows, Rosie gives the cheeses a pleasantly pastoral touch.
The cottage cheese is purchased in thirty-pound tins, then Rosie takes over. She divides about one hundred pounds of the cheese five different ways, and each lot is mixed differently. The fresh vegetable cheese—that's the best seller —is a blend of five finely ground vegetables; scallions, carrots, peppers, radishes, celery.
Kummel cheese is scattered thick with the bewhiskered caraway. This cheese, enthroned on dark bread, is the one we like best. Second choice, a cheese mingled with coarsely ground green peppers, this to heap on slices of pumpernickel and enjoy with a beer.
Rosie makes her cheeses in a variety of shapes, heart-style, roly-poly butter balls, fat pats dimpled with her wooden paddle. If Rosie is in what she calls her “decorating mood,” she may top the cheeses with a flower trim. The sweet cheese may wear the Delancey Street rose made of maraschino cherries or of golden pineapple. The vegetable cheese gets a green pepper, radish, carrot bouquet.
Dry-baked farmer's cheese is made is the store's back kitchen, a much sought after item by those who knew this sort of thing on the Continent. Rosie takes the farmer's cheese and dries it under fans, then bakes the long rolls in a slow oven until their tops are raised in a rash of dark blisters. A cheese to serve as a savory, the price 85 cents a pound.
Plantation pecan rolls are six-inch lengths of chewy nougat logs, well mixed with chopped almonds, the whole rolled in almond halves. These logs are sold boxed, convenient for mailing to the young ones at school. They sell at B. Altman's Fifth Avenue at 34th, the White Turkey Restaurant, 220 Madison Avenue, the Woman's Exchange, 541 Madison Avenue, Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, the price around 84 cents for an eight-ounce stick. The product is made in Birmingham, Alabama, by Piper's Candies, made with fresh cream and fancy pecans. Tennessee Mountain honey sweetens the mixture.
“Sustancia de Chilan,” is the peddlers' call as your train puffs into one of Chile's coastal cities. Native women wait, laden with baskets of cornucopias which hold the snow-white cakes. Everyone is buying, you buy too. Why, it's like a marshmallow, but heavenly sweet. Each little cake is a temptation to indulge in one more.
Walk along the streets of Santiago. Every other door is a dulceria with cakes by the dozens. But always the sustancia de Chilan, always the alfajores, this the national sweet, found in every city throughout Chile's long ribbon of land.
Here are cakes without names, tinted pink, tinted yellow, melt-in-your-mouth cakes, jam and meringue cakes, but never too many cakes to keep the Chileans happy. These vivacious, joy-loving people buy cakes in early morning to cat after mass. They eat the little sweets with their luncheon, with afternoon tea. At the bar of Santiago's Crillon Hotel, the Chilean sweets, executed with a French flair, disappear by the tray loads, along with the daiquiris, the martinis, and the good wines of the land.
You must visit Chile to eat lobsters from San Fernandez, to munch that glorified hors d'oeuvre called the framres, but the little cakes are sold in New York at B. Altman's sweet case. Five kinds of the dulces Chilenos in the collection, fresh daily, each specimen patterned exactly to a sweet of the homeland. These confections are the handiwork of Martha Cabrera, a Santiagoan woman who came here in 1930 and in the grim depression years thought of the alfajores.
Martha determind to make the alfajores. She turned her Palisades Park, New Jersey, kitchen into a bakery and began selling her cakes among friends. The grocery buyer of B. Altman's (Fifth Avenue at 34th) met these fragile affairs at a Chilean cocktail party. Something New Yorkers would love, and she knew it at the first bite. Not with the cocktails, of course—too sweet for that purpose to suit the North American's taste—but with ice cream, with fruit, with tea. Roll out the adjectives!
One glance and you know which cakes are the Chilean—no others are like them. Tedious toil goes into their making. The alfajores, for example, require a sweet dough made of egg yolks, butter, flour, and a few tears of the lemon, this rolled thin as a blade, then cut into rings about two inches across. The rings are sandwiched with a caramel-like filling made of sugar and milk, cooked over very low heat, and stirred constantly untill thickened. Now the sweet sandwich is baked slowly, then cooled. Meanwhile sugar and egg whites have been beaten to make a meringue to cover the cakes. So tender, this, that one swift bite sends the whole sweet structure crumbling in the mouth.
A new arrival is the triangle which has a base of the same dough as the alfajores, this covered with apricot marmalade, then baked, after which the whole is mantled in a meringue tinted buttercup yellow.