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.
This Amana colony is a cooperative company which started with a religious motive some two hundred years ago in the Province of Hesse, Germany. In 1842 the group moved to America to avoid persecution and find a new freedom. Today it has achieved its ideal in a far greater degree than ever was visioned in the wildest dreams of its founders.
The Amana people own 25,000 acres of rich Iowa land all on one tract with central villages, operating farms, stores, restaurants, filling stations, woolen mills, cabinet shops, factories. It's a $2,000,000 corporation in which workers are the stockholders, truly working for themselves, a corporation in which the management guides rather than commands.
In the early days there was no concern with making a profit. The idea was to produce enough to supply the needs of the community and perhaps lay by a small reserve for emergencies. But strong influences outside the colony brought changes. To the younger members came long suppressed desires to try their wings in competition, to enjoy little luxuries commonplace to those on the outside.
Far-sighted leaders realized the group would be disintegrated unless measures were taken to strengthen its foundation. In 1932 more than 90 per cent of the members voted to accept the new plan of a joint stock corporation organized for profit and set up for centralized buying. Some 18,000 acres are under cultivation. The principal crops are corn, oats, wheat, and soy beans. More than 5,000 head of cattle and 7,000 hogs are raised and marketed annually. Amana Westphalian-style hams and bacons from corn-fed porkers are demanded by mail-order customers in every state in the union. But right now the hams and bacons are few, except to regular customers. But plentry is the word for the Schwarten-magen.
It's a tea for royalty, that scented mixture the “Aromatny,” the Philippoff brand, blended by Doctor David Isrin, the Russian chemist. It's blended of two Ceylons with a flowery Indian and a China black, then treated by a special process to increase the fragrance. So high soprano the perfume, it's like tea brewed by mistake from a potpourri. The doctor worked out this bit of tea wizardry twelve years ago but only now has he got around to putting the item on the market.
The tea and its name are based on a historical anecdote about the famous Russian Czar Alexander III. Enjoying his afternoon bracer, the Czar was approached by his Minister of Foreign Affairs, who announced that a group of ministers had arrived for important conference. “Your Majesty,” said the Minister, “the fate of all Europe is at stake.” (So the story goes; more likely he said, “Gulp it down, Your Majesty, bigger things are brewing.”) But the Czar, cool as a cucumber, replied, “While the Czar has tea, all Europe can wait.” The tea he was sipping was the Philippoff brand of Aromatny, a tea prepared in that time especially for the Russian Imperial Court. This blend sells at Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue, R. H. Macy & Company, and Gimbel Brothers, New York City, price $1.50 for the four-ounce jar, or you may order it by mail from Dr. Isrin, 169 Spring Street, New York City, adding 10 cents for mailing.
Grocery stores are getting into the wedding cake business. Now you can buy tiny wedding cake squares wrapped in wax paper packed in little white boxes, ready to give wedding guests to carry home and tuck under their pillows for lucky dreaming. These sell twenty-four to a box for ＄5 or individually at 21 cents apiece at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, and in better class delicacy shops throughout the country.
The cake is a brandied cake, massed with fruits and nuts. The quantity of the glaceed fruits is large in proportion to the raisins. The fruits in the cake are their own neutral color, no artificial flashiness. Nuts are of two kinds—pecans and walnuts. These squares are small cuts of Hoenshel's nationally known brandied fruit cake which sells around the calendar. A cake soft and moist to the touch, no sogginess. Give it the nose test. The perfume is compounded of brandy and wine. A clean taste. The cake retails for around $1.05 a pound.
When the wedding cake is baked at home, it's such a nuisance always to bake an extra square for use in the give-away boxes. The cake is a trouble to cut and wrap and you have to go shopping for the little white wedding boxes which have been on the short side since the war years. Now the job is done for you, done to a turn. One thing you might add for a flourish would be a white satin ribbon looped around each box and tied in a perky bow with a spray of lily of the valley.
Here are a few of the many stores we find are handling the product: Gus Blass Departments Store, Little Rock, Arkansas, The May Company in Los Angeles, California, Daniels and Fisher, Denver, Colorado, Maison Blanche Company, New Orleans, Louisiana, Hall Galleries, Springfield, Massachusetts, Crowley Milner Co., Detroit, Michigan, A. Polsky, Inc., Akron, Ohio, John Shllito Company, Cincinnati, Ohio, LaSalle & Koch Company, Toledo, Ohio, J. A. Brown Company, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Gimbel Brothers and Bonwit Teller, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The Shepart Company, Providence, Rhode Island, the Boston Store, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
A new type of salad oil is one extracted from the pits of peaches and apricots, combined with the oil of the English walnut. The new blend is produced by the Morris Specialties Laboratories, to the tune of 1,100 gallons weekly. Fine Grocery and Food Specialty Shops have the oil retailing in pint bottles for $1.28. Thinnish and golden (artificially colored), it behaves like any salad or cooking oil when used in a French dressing or mayonnaise. A high smoking point, so it lends itself nicely for use in the frying pan.
Hearts of palm come again from Brazil, ready to turn from the can and serve as a salad. Try the hearts braised or serve them heated and dressed with a hollandaise sauce.
Domestic-made Chinese rice cakes return packed one hundred wafer-thin circles to a box, selling at the Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue, the price $2. These palatable, crisp nothings are of neutral flavor, only slightly sweetened, at their best with wine or ice cream.
Newest olive assortment seen at Shaffer's Market, 673 Madison Avenue at 61st Street, is a pimiento-stuffed green olive, packed in your choice of dill-, hickory-, or garlic-flavored brines for a new taste sensation. Roland brand, ten-ounce bottles, 98 cents.
Delicate, tender artichoke hearts are packed in pure olive oil, twelve ounces selling for $1.25 at Hammacher Schlemmer's, 145 East 57th Street. After the hearts have been served, enough oil is left to make an olive-sweet French dressing.
A new product found at Hammacher Schlemmer and just getting around is the smoked mussel, Au Gourmet brand, five and three-fourths ounces, 70 to 75 cents. The mussels are less leathery, sweeter smoked than the oysters which before the war were coming in from the far West.
Back again from Stavanger, Norway, is the smoked cod roe, the little one-and-one-half-ounce tins 15 cents, seen at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue. This small white roe is exceedingly salty, but mixed with chopped egg, then a touch of mayonnaise to hold it all together and spread on a cracker, we call it a thirst whet of the first order.
Cocktail news of the month is a trio of wafers, pie-shaped, tissue-thin, crispy, sandwiched with a choice of spicy cheese, creamy celery, or the ardent anchovy. Only a thin, thin spreading, but the wafers being of no particular flavor allow full power to the fillings. Feather-weight these tidbits, thirty large pieces weigh but four and one-half ounces. They come packed in round tins, each kind to itself, to sell around ＄1, a Cresca Company production. In New York City, you'll find these novelties at B. Altman's, 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, and at Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street. The wafers are reported to be selling like hot cakes in Marshall Field's in Chicago, at William H. Block's in Indianapolis, and in Washington, Baltimore, and cities south.
Fish aristocrats of river, lake, and ocean are the daily wares of Wynne and Treanor, a fish firm of elegance at 712 Madison Avenue. Jeweled beauties cased under glass sparkle against a background of “snow.” Spattered with jewel dust is the trout, silver gray, dotted in brown, flecked with red rose. Not a trout there weighs more than half a pound, one trout to a serving, sold boned and stuffed with whatsoever you please. But to everyone's pleasure is a stuffing of green shrimp. Sauté the trout as usual and serve with shrimp sauce. Stuffed or unstuffed, rainbows of the brook sell at 75 cents apiece.
The Nova Scotia salmon is smoked for the store by a Russian who boasted a million-dollar smoking business in Paris before Hitler took over. A light smoke he gives, only a haunting shadow of the wood-fire flavor, not to muffle salmon's sweetness. The price, $2.50 a pound. On the best tables, this salmon is used with fresh asparagus as an entree.