There are homely dishes that taste as you expect them to taste, macaroni and cheese, for instance, the cheese melted into the cream sauce, which is blended throughout the macaroni, then a deep blanket of grated cheese over the top to melt and turn amber in the oven's heat.
The beans are the Saturday night baked beans of New England. They are given a whole night of unhurried drinking, to plump and double in size. They are simmered in water to cover until the beans wrinkle into the first tenderness. Then the beans are ready for potting. Salt pork is cut into generously sized cubes and buried deep in the beans. Brown sugar for sweetening, with New Orleans molasses for that extra tang. For the seasonings an outspoken onion, a sprinkle of dry mustard, cloves, pepper, a small snowfall of salt, and a new one on us—a little port wine and grated lemon rind as the finishing touch. Eight hours of baking in unlidded pots. It takes a strong character to resist the fragrance flowing out of the kitchen like something from heaven.
But you may prefer a chicken pie built for two. Dark and light meat of chicken is cut in fairly big dice and mixed with celery and onions and arranged in a deep dish. Carrots cooked with the chicken are sliced thin and layered over the meat, then a layer of cooked fresh green peas. This topped with cream sauce and the crust laid over.
Chickens are split and roasted, stuffed with an old-fashioned sage dressing. Slowly the birds turn before the open fire—an ancient but never improved-upon method of cookery which seals in the juices.
There is baked ham off and on, baked with all the care and tradition of a manor house of old Virginia. It glistens in its overcoat of brown sugar, pocked with nailheads of clove.
This is no dime-store bargain kitchen. You go there for quality, for superior cooking, for pleasure in the eating, pride in the serving. yet prices aren't extreme. A dinner picked up at The Cookery will total around $2 a person. To give an idea, clam chowder is 75 cents a pint, vichyssoise 60 cents a pint, chicken pie for two $1.85, beef steak en casserole for two $1.50, curried shrimp, rice, and chutney $1 a portion, Virginia ham 60 cents a portion, a large roasted chicken stuffed $4.75, deviled crabs 75 cents each. Vegetables run about 25 cents a portion, salads from 25 to 30 cents a portion. Pies to cut four portions $1.50, biscuits 60 cents a dozen. If you live between 39th and 96th Streets, between Fifth and Lexington Avenues, the store will deliver. Telephone your order to RHinelander 4-4775.
Something different in Christmas sweets are the Hungarian cookies, rich and nut-crunchy, made by Mrs. Herbst, 1443 Third Avenue, New York City, mailed anywhere to your order. During the war hundreds of pounds of these little cakes traveled to England, Africa, the Pacific. When the Hungarian baker's two sons were off to the wars directly after Pearl Harbor, she started sending them cookies, enough for a regiment. And the boys kept writing. “Mamma, send more.”
If you are ordering you might just as well sample the Hungarian nut slice. This is made in great squares, then sliced after baking. First a sheet of butter dough, this spread with jelly, then over this a cooked mixture made of nuts, egg white, and sugar. Then into a slow, slow oven to crisp.
Nowhere in the city is strudel made with more artistry than in Herbst's shop. Apple strudel is the year-around seller. To keep apples in stock the firm contracts for the crops of half a dozen orchards. There are poppy seed strudels, others are nut-filled, some have a filling of sweetened pot cheese. There are cherry strudel, too, and other strudels with fresh fruit in season like plum and huckleberry.
Hungarians from all over New York City go to Mrs. Herbst's shop to buy the butter biscuits or the pogacsa, made of a rich coffee cake dough baked in biscuit form. Butter, flour, sour cream, eggs, sugar, and a dash of salt—that for one kind. Pretty they are, brushed over with egg wash and baked to a turn, the price 6 cents apiece. A similar biscuit is made with mashed potato and almost no flour. No sour cream in this.
Little biscuits like those the Hungarians pass at a coffee Klatsch. Then too the kuglof is sliced. This is a plain yeast dough coffee cake, baked in a form pan. It bakes up fluffy and almost as light as an angel food cake. Cut a slice and notice the great whirl of cinnamon that goes looping 'round and 'round with a few raisins tucked in. This is available in many sizes, from the 45-cent loaf, enough for six, to a $1.75-ring which is baked on order for various organizations to serve at refreshment time with the coffee.
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