The current piece of gastronomical voodoo is a whole young broiler trussed, tenderly backed, and packed in a tall tin in its own rich essence.
Open the can and place it for a few minutes in a pot of hot water until the gravy comes to pouring consistency. Plunge in the fork, lift the chicken to a baking dish, pour in the sauce, now oven-heat. There is roast chicken for dinner in a leisurely twenty minutes.
Two brothers, Herbert T. and Theodore Ruskin of Flushing, Long Island, put their money together and started this poultry-canning business, naming the line King Henry VIII and using that gourmand as their trade-mark.
Roast chicken, the first item introduced, is selling in Philadelphia, New Haven, Hartford, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu. In New York City the bird is offered at B. Altman's, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street-Gimbel's, Sixth Avenue and 33rd Street, as well as at numerous independent stores, for around $2.14 a tin, holding one pound and ten ounces of chicken with four ounces of gravy. A big meal for two. It can be made to serve three, but three seems a crowd.
Second item out is "chicken in pot," the tall tin holding three cups of pure chicken broth with noodles, combined with large pieces of celery and carrot, plus one pound of chicken, dark and light meet. These big chicken pieces can be fished out to dice for a salad, or to slice cold for the platter; then serve the soup separately. Or if you prefer, the broth may be thickened and the chicken heated in the gravy to pass like a fricas-see along with hot biscuits.
Other items in the royal family will include whole squab, whole duck, roast turkey cut in sections, pheasant, guinea hen in wine sauce, chicken cacciatore, and a liver sauté made up with mushrooms. Chicken roll is still another idea. This will be a whole cooked chicken, boned and rolled in a neat bundle to heat and serve in roll form.
Anyone with a maple sugar yen should try a box of the maple butternut creams selling in the Connoisseur's Corner of Hammacher Schlemmer's, 145 East 57th Street.Little half-pint berry boxes with hand-painted covers carry the pale golden candies carm-jammed with big chunks of the crunchy sweet butternuts, eight ounces priced at $1.25.
Lay a piece on the tongue and it melts into creamy sweetness, for that's all it is. Thick cream from the van Wavern's Jersey herd, maple syrup bought from a near-by sugar-bush farmer, nuts from the van Wavern's butternut trees—cream, syrup, nuts, plus hours of hand-beating. The electric mixer can't handle the job and neither can any one woman all by herself. Mr. van Wavern and the two children take turns helping mother.
The van Waverns have a 250-acre farm at Green River, Vermont, stocked with dairy cows, goats, rabbits, and chickens. The maple butternut cream is mother's pin-money baby that is turning into a sizable kitchen business. Now the entire family lends a hand when the orders are heavy. Brother makes the fancy boxes, sister does the hand-painted decorations, dad helps with the packing, dad milks the cows that give the thick cream that gives the candy its richness.
Petit Danoes, the little Danish ones, is the affectionate name given by the baker at Old Denmark, 135 East 57th Street, to his newest butter cookies, made in miniature pieces. Some are made with ground almonds, some with chocolate, others are rum-flavored; a box of three and one-half dozen sells for $1.15. The nut horns from this baker's board simply melt in the mouth—a box of twenty-four pieces $1.35. The cheese sticks are made with a combination of Cheddar, Stilton, and Roquefort; sharp of cheese, sweet of butter, so rich they should be called cheese sticks a la Rockefeller.
Farmer's wife Mrs. Kent Leavitt of Millbrook, New York, has invented a cheese so fine that Bellows' Gourmets' Bazaar, 67 East 52nd Street, New York City, Takes a hundred pounds at a time as fast as Mrs. Leavitt can get it to town from the farm.
The experts who have tasted the Leavitt product say it is a cheese similar to the creamy delicious Reblochon of the French, made in the Savoy district between October and June.
The Leavitt cheese, like the Reblochon, is related to the Camembert family but less romantic; that is, it doesn't run into tears, but is more gelatinous, yet not so rubbery as the Bel Paese, for example. It is stronger. to the nose than it is to the palate, a cheese quite by itself in its nutty flavor, ideal for serving with clarets and sauternes.
When Kent Leavitt decided to start a dairy business, wife Molly said she would learn the details about handling the milk. Off she went to the Pennsylvania State College and took the dairy short course. That started her reading on the art of cheese making. State cheese expert, John Marquart, gave her good advice and she began trying her hand with a batch now and then.
But dementia! That cheese was a curiously jealous cheese, each pat in the batch tried to be different from its neighbor and in the most astonishing ways. Some were Peter Pan cheeses and didn't mature, some were fair-skinned and dreamy, altogether too delicate; some were overpowering and positively unwholesome; others ran like little rivers when cut through the rind. Quite a few were fair. a very few were divine, but how they got that way Mrs. Leavitt wasn't quite sure. She began taking notes on each batch. If she varied the making in any degree, it was noted in her diary. At long last, she learned what it was she did when the cheese came right.
Now every cheese comes out the same, identical to its neighbor, and every batch uniform. Poona is its name, made in flat oversize pancakes about one and one-half inches thick. The rind is a reddish orange, the paste a pale cream. The price is $1.50 a pound and the cake varies from one pound to one and one-four pounds.
Piqan is the newest homespun sweet, a thumb-sized roll, made with butter, sugar, flour, crunchy of nuts, so deeply mantled in powdered sugar each little cake looks like it's frosted. Crispy and dry, these short fat fingers are perfect to pass with wine, good with tea.
Backers of the Piqan are an odd trio a Long Island housewife, Mrs. Adelaide Grundling, and ex-lieutenant, John Laphan, just home from the wars, and a business-minded, want-to-make-money, advertising agency fellow named Franklin W. Dyson.
It was just another morning that marked the prelude to the cookie adventure. Mr. Dyson's secretary, Adelaide Grundling, suggested he try one of her mother's special nut cakes. She had brought in a box to pass around the office. Mr. Dyson had one, he had two, he had another, he ate them all. As usual Mr. Dyson had an idea. Hatching ideas is part of his job—so why not hatch a few for Dyson himself?
When John Laphan got out of the army, wishing to start a business of his own. his friend Dyson told him about the fancy little cakes; the two went to see Mrs. Grundling and for a fee, arranged to take over her recipe. Today the cookie business is an up-and-coming concern, located at 40-06 150th Street, Flushing, with Mr. Laphan in charge, and young Dyson handling the contracts in his spare time. Dyson has done a good job with the selling. Those Piqans, Mrs. Todd's Piqans (Grundling isn't a pretty sounding name for a cake), are handled by S. S. Pierce in Boston, B. Altman's and Bloomingdale's in Manhattan, and Loeser's in Brooklyn. The half-pound box is 89 cents; twenty-five cakes, each nested in a paper holder exactly like a fancy bon bon and all traveling attractively, are packed in a box of pastel colors.
BREVITIES: The “Island Packers” of the prewar Hawaiian fruit delicacies are at it again. Expect sliced papaya and papaya nectar and papaya-pineapple nectar, guava nectar, and sliced pineapple to be back in the markets this month.
Green coffee, good coffee, a blend of fine Bogotas, sells ten pounds for ＄5 packaged and mailed to Europe; combination packages of tea, coffee, and cocoa are made up to order. The cocoa is a Dutch chocolate powder already blended with milk and sugar, selling price 50 cents for a pound. These overseas beverage boxes are bringing big business to the Empire Coffee Mills, 323 West 42nd Street, New York City.
Smoked wild turkey à la King and a smoked wild turkey pâtéare being marketed by Samuel Martin of Seattle and are selling in the delicacy stores of the larger cities from the West to the East Coast. In New York City these products are handled by the Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue, Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, and Enoch's Delicatessen, 872 Madison Avenue, the price around ＄1.49 for 7 ounces of the a la King and ＄1.49 for 3 ½ ounces of the rich smooth pâté.
It's a chip off the old block. A novel little chopping stand, we mean. made in the form of a butcher's block to save your table surface from nicks and stains. Just the right size when slicing a lemon or mincing a few twigs of parsley or dicing an onion. This gay addition to salad or bar tray is made of hard wood with a waxed surface. The width is four and one-half inches, the price ＄1.25 plus 15 cents postage, mail ordered; or pick it up by hand at Edith Chapman's, 168 East 33rd Street.
Have you tried crushed olives? These are olives just cracked but not split wide open, cured in a sauce made with olive oil, vinegar, garlic, and spices. Twelve ounces, 65 cents, Mirco brand at Dussourd and Filser, 960 Madison Avenue.