Rejoice, the berries have come! A sigh for one that has gone—the strawberry of firm red flesh and gay green cap, most delicious berry of them all, if you agree with Elizabethan Dr. Butler, who held that “Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”
Maybe God didn't, but the scientists have been very busy since that long ago, and the perfect blueberry is the work of man. Blueberries are right in their season now and right in their element, cradled in meringue shells which you can buy at the bakers. Or eat the big blues just as they are, wading knee-deep in cream.
It's the red raspberry which would be queen of berries if we had the crowning to do. These berries with orblike cups, each tiny drupelet swollen with juice, should never be defiled by heat's wanton touch.
This queen of berries is attended to market by a retinue of lesser dignitaries. Come the “brambles,” the ancient name for blackberries and their little brothers, the dewberries. Here are gooseberries, the big fat hairy ambers brought here first by the English settlers. Here's their kin, the juicy currants, loganberries, huckleberries, all marching to town. The wheels of refrigerated trucks and trains turn quickly and the blackberry roll, the red currant pudding, the blueberry tarts, gladden the menu. Welcome July, dripping berry ambrosia!
Stone-ground, whole-grain bread is traveling mail order, two different loaves weekly and never the same two, mailed for a period of three months within a radius of 150 miles of New York City, the price $6.50, including postage. This offer is made by the Grist Mill Bakery, 3535 Broadway, where the grains are stone-ground just before using.
The mill, trim as a bandbox, a white enameled affair, no larger than an electric washer, is the invention of Peter Schwarze, the baker. Touch a button, the mill runs electrically, yet stone grinds the grain. Lift up the top, see bur stones do the grinding, these brought from Alsace Lorraine. Slowly they revolve at the exact speed of stones turned by an old-fashioned mill wheel. There is no overheating; smooth and fine is the flour, the grain's germ left intact.
Breads slated for mail order total thirty kinds. There is the old-fashioned milk bread of dependable, honest virtues, made with all milk, made with a combination of white flour and whole wheat. On the list is a cracked wheat bread, honey-sweetened, oatmeal bread made with cut oats, Swedish limpa, a rye bread made with orange juice, pulp, and rind, and scented of cardamom. There is bran bread, whole wheat raisin bread, a raisin egg bread, a white bread perfumed of cinnamon, especially fine for the toaster, a peasant sour rye bread, heady, hearty, chewy, continental in type. Have Boston baked beans the week you receive the cylindrical loaf of old-fashioned brown bread. Another old timer, a staff of life which will never bend under you, is made with whole wheat, whole rye, oats, and corn meal, sweetened of molasses.
And still they come—potato bread, cheese bread, and cheers for the Holland Dutch bread, topped generously with streusel. A glorious surprise, that salt rising bread, humble, unpretentious, now almost extinct. This is made for the baker by a Quaker who makes it when she pleases. Her way is to appear at the shop in late afternoon with the simple announcement, “I've come to make the settings.” She mixes the dough and the baker does the baking. Some of the fancy sweet breads of the week-subscription plan are the whole wheat loaf with dates and nuts, whole wheat with raisins and peanuts, this a bread much admired through Alabama and Georgia, a cherry nut bread, a whole wheat prune bread, an orange bread made with juice and rind. A fancy loaf is the one called Holiday, jam-packed with nuts and a variety of fruits—here's manna, not bread!
Green almonds put in their annual appearance, noted at Buchanan's Fruit Shop, Grand Central Terminal. What's a green almond? The young sweet almond while its shell is still butter-soft, its outer covering green and tender. The white creamy kernels peeled and served raw are an excellent munch to pass with the before-dinner apéritif.
A summer sausage, the Schwartenmagen, is a mail-order item from the Amana Society, the Walter Schuerer Meat Market, Amana, Iowa, at 40 cents a pound, one sausage averaging in weight around seven pounds. It's a head cheese, really, made of sundry parts of the hog, bits of jowl, head, meat, and ears, all handsomely spiced. The recipe came from Germany a century or so ago but has been altered through the years, made less fatty and more to modern American taste. The meat mixture is encased in a pig's stomach, then hickory-smoked long enough for the tang to penetrate the very heart of the cheese.
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