The membership fee of $45.95 provides a gift box of fruit each month around the calender with a special de luxe basket for Christmas day in the morning. This is a hand-woven Mexican fireside basket heaped with twenty-five pounds of fruits, red and golden Delicious apples, du Comice pears, oranges big as grapefruit, candy-like dates and figs, giant walnuts, and preserved treats.
And here's what you get the other months of the year: January brings lovely pink grapefruit chosen for size and sweetness, these discovered by Mr. Green in a small, out-of-the-way grove in the Texas grape fruit belt. February's box holds the red and golden Delicious apples, crisp, tart-sweet in their flavour.
D'Anjou pears, a cousin of the du Comice, are the treat for March. April is jam and jelly month, five jars in the box: orange marmalade, strawberry and boysenberry jellies, blackberry and raspberry jams— all made in the West expressly for the Stagecoach Orchards. May surprises with candied fruit treats: apricots, black and white figs, orange sections, cherries, pineapple, dates. Big, black, mouth-watering Bing cherries almost the size of plums go places in June. In July it's palm-ripened dates from the California desert.
Giant Siskiyou pears are for August. In September the matchless Hale peaches are packed for the gift kit. In October it's ruby-red Delicious apples, giant size, delicious, crisp, sweet. November's offering is the du Comice pears to fill the fruit bowl. These are the pears which the French nobility made their favorite at the court of Louis Napoleon. It was in the 1870's that a French horticulturist brought a few of these trees to southern Oregon where the rolling valleys and snow-capped mountains reminded him of his own southern France. The warm days, the cool nights, the fertile soil he felt would be perfect for the du Comice, and he planted a little acreage staked out along the Old Stage Road. Later he was recalled to France and left his orchard forever, but in the hands of one he had trained to bring the trees to full growth. These pears proved so big and delicious they were in turn shipped back to London and Paris for the tables of the great.
Other gift offers are made for three, six, and nine months for $19.95, $28.95, and $36.95 respectively. Also individual boxes are available for any of the monthly fruit boxes at $2.95 except the jellies and jams, the big cherries and dates—these are $3.95 per box. But get yourself a catalogue and study these fine fruit offers. Write to Gordon Green, Stagecoach Orchards, Box 23, Old Stage Road, Medford, Oregon.
They vanish before you get your back turned, those tiniest of the cocktail crunchers called “Snappycrax,” made in Denver, Colorado. A queer mixture these are of nuts of various puffed cereals, midget shredded wheat biscuits, sawed-off pretzel sticks. Everything tastes like everything else, having all had a good spraying with a salty meat-tasting something, likely a protein derivative. But whatsoever, it's good. Hands reach for more and still more. A box of thirteen ounces sells at Hammacher Schlemmer's, 145 East 57th Street, for $1.60. Order three and you can get them by mail, postage extra, of course.
Cuban guava peel is in after long absence, this, too, a discovery on the Hammacher Schlemmer shelves. The peels come half-shell style to serve as holders for a dessert or a salad. One eye-arresting trick: Fill with cream cheese, sprinkle over toasted almonds, arrange the shells on a water cress bed, and you have a salad-dessert to serve with the coffee. Shake off the shackles of timidity; try something different. Fill the guava shells with chicken salad and arrange on beds of finely cut lettuce, serve with hot popovers for a luncheon temptation.
The shells may be cut into strips and used to lift the face of a pudding or filled with a frozen pudding mixture to serve as dessert. The fifteen-ounce tin sells as in the olden years at 65 cents. When the guava is gone, the fragrant syrup remains a sauce of distinction for puddings or icecream. Sweet to taste as a syrup, try it on waffles.
Dutch treats cross the ocean. Nine-pound kegs of the full Dutch herring in brine are in New York City stores and delicatessens. This herring, conceded to be the finest in the world, is caught off the coast of Holland in the North Sea and immediately put down in a brine made by an old Dutch formula. After the catch is ashore it is graded and keg-packed, as milkers and mixed.
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