Happy Thanksgiving! Everything is working toward a day of fine feasting. Plenty of turkeys are coming despite the fact that the crop is less this year than for 1945. But don't get excited; you are'nt going to miss out on that second drumstick. Turkey production is down 12 per cent, but large cold storage stocks bring estimates up to last year's record of almost four and one-half pounds of turkey per person.
Turkey's consort, the cranberry, is a crop above average. The production is around 70,000,000 pounds as compared with the 64,000,000-pound harvest last year. A bit over half the crop is being canned, a little less than half goes fresh to the stores. A limited pack of cranberry juice cocktail is due. Remember that bright red and vibrant juice around before the war?
There will be a 500,000-case pack of orange cranberry marmalade, enough for national distribution. A new product packed this summer is an apricot cranberry mix, a delicious smooth combination to spread on hot buttered toast. It can be used as a cake filling or a tart stuffing. The fifteen-ounce jar, Ocean Spray brand, is selling at R. H. Macy's, Herald Square, for 39 cents.
Remember those plastic cutters in turkey, Christmas tree, and bunny shapes introduced several years back for the fancy cutting of cranberry sauce? These are in circulation again and in new styles, including chick, heart, and tulip. Three of these are free with three Ocean Spray labels.
Grace Rush, the Cincinnati packer of the Martha Ann specialities, has one of the outstanding gift boxes of the holiday season. It's a green-lidded box with a shimmery sheen, a beauty for the money, $6.35 to $6.95, selling in fourteen cities and cram-packed with goodies. Off with the lid! It shouts “Merry Christmas!” See what you get. First out is a nine-ounce jar of spiced almonds for serving at the eggnog table or with the after-dinner coffee. There is the famous Martha Ann conserve made with gooseberries and a medley of fruits and nuts to give crunch. Rich eating in that pound jar of ginger conserve. Fresh fruits, raisins, walnuts join with the ginger.
Never a Rush box made up but a block of the Rush fruit cake goes in. The cornerstone of the business, this English fruit cake with the Southern variations is made from the recipe of a Mrs. Emma Peebles Blanton who was born in St. Petersburg, Virginia, in 1836. The ingredients are of the best and include ten varieties of fruit and four kind of nuts. Mrs. Rush uses but nine pounds of flour to one hundred pounds of cake. The cakes are preserved in bonded brandy and long-cured. After baking they are put away in a light, airy room which is kept at a temperature of 36 degrees. There the cakes slumber in brandy for eight months to a year and a half before being shipped.
The fruit loaves are so rich and moist that they substitute nicely for plum pudding. Cut the cake in thick slices and heat in a double boiler, then serve as plum pudding. A four-ounce jar of hard sauce accompanies the cake to be used as a topping. Two five-ounce boxes carry glaceed peels, one of orange, one of grapefruit. Here is the list of stores stocking this Christmas-cheer buy: John Wanamaker, Inc., Philadelphia and New York City, Hutzler Brothers, Baltimore, Maryland, Miller and Rhoads, Inc., Richmond, Virginia, S. S. Pierce Company, Boston, Massachusetts, L. Bamberger and company, Newark, New Jersey, Joseph Horne Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, City of Paris, San Francisco, California, Frederick and Nelson, Seattle, Washington, Halle Brothers, Cleveland, Ohio, The J. L. Hudson company, Detroit, Michigan, Nieman-Marcus Company, Dallas, Texas, J. W. Robinson, Los Angels, California Davison-Paxon company, Atlanta, Georgia, Marshall Field and Company, Chicago, Illinois. In New York City the box is handled by Stumpp and Walter, 132 Church Street, Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street, B. Altman's, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, and Bloomingdale's, Lexington Avenue and 59th Street.
Membership opens in a year-around connoisseurs' fruit club bringing a full twelve-month procession of America's finest fruits from the romantic valley of Oregon's Old Stage Road. Stagecoach Orchards is the name of the ranch which offers to supply superb apples, pears, peaches, and other rare fruits. The packer, Gordon Green, has “been in fruit” for twelve years but always working for somebody else.
His fruit club venture is being limited in its membership. He wants only as many customers as he can take care of himself, supplying the bulk of the fruit from his own orchards. He grows the du Comice pears, the ones so sweet and tender they can be eaten with a spoon. He grows immense Delicious apples, mammoth Hale peaches, magnificent d'Anjou and juicy, sweet summer Siskiyou pears, as well as other varieties.
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.
This “Mill” brand is the spring catch so welcomed in Holland that in late May when the first herring comes it sells from street carts. “Spring herring, spring herring!” is the hawker's cry. Old and young come running, guilders in hand. The herring is eaten whose and on the spot, the fish held by the tail as the treat is consumed. Spring herring is to the Dutch as the hot dog is to us.
Numerous the ways of serving the fish but the favorite, perhaps, is to skin and filet, then to use as an appetizer with marinated onion rings and a big dip of seasoned sour cream.
A keg of these herring would do well for the main refreshment at a man's poker party. Behead the herrings with the scissors, skin, then filet. Trim the jagged edges of filets and cut into mouth-sized pieces. Let the guests help themselves to dark bread. Have a dish of sweet butter to bed down the herring and onion rings. Some will like lemon quarters handy to drizzle the tart juice over the salty fish bites. If the herring is too salty for your taste, soak first for twenty-four hours.
Some 10,000 kegs of this herring are in the markets, imported by Netherland American Import Corporation. It was in late May that the firm executives, Paul A. Spitler and Leo van Munching, flew to Holland to arrange for imports—herring, cheese, biscuits, and canned meat delicacies. The herring was the first arrival. Next along was a shipment of Heineken beer.
Blooker's cocoa will come in the sweet bye and bye but not yet, due to price restrictions by the O.P.A. Grondsma cheese will be heading this way by early spring, and it's hoped the Edams may be along before Christmas.
Pass the muskrat. “Marsh Hare” is playing a return winter engagement. Remember early in the war the plans Louisiana had for quick-freezing this little beastie of the swamps which she traps to the tune of some 6,000,000 annually? The fur is stripped off for market and the meat discarded. That wasted meat, Louisiana told the North, was equivalent to 6,000 beeves and would be a thumping contribution to aid the food shortage. New York nibbled at quick-frozen muskrat—but meagerly. “East Shore Maryland eats muskrat,” said new mothers. “Fine,” said New York, “let Maryland eat the swamprat.”
Now Mr. Muskrat is coming from Canada, and turned out mighty ritzy in aspic. The meat has been cooked until it virtually falls from the bones and is canned solid-pack with just enough gelatin to hold it in mold form when chilled. A pretty little pat, softly rose-tinted, in taste something like Sauerbraten. Don't think you can slice it, there are too many bones. The eight-ounce tin is selling at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, price 89 cents.
It's all-American home cooking, the old-time favorites like apple pie and clam chowder, that Mrs. Billie Hanrahan turns out at 947 Madison Avenue in a tiny shop called “The Cookery.”
It's a mother-son business. Son John figures prices, keeps accounts as well as helps with the cheffing. “He's a throw-back,” his mother explains. “All my family are good cooks, but my grand-mother, Elizabeth Marlow, had a famous inn in Lancastershire, England. John's like my grandmother.”
Mrs. Hanrahan must be like Grandma, too—she has always loved cooking and for years has been saying “Some day I'm going to open a food shop.”
“So you did it at last,” her friends say unbelievingly as they stop in to buy chowder or a hot chicken pie or a pot of Saturday beans. Everyone, of course, knew “Billie” could cook but she is the wife of that publicity power, John Hanrahan. It's a wonder he let her do it. But John Hanrahan thinks it's a great thing for Billie now that the children are grown. John himself wrote the aristocratic little folder, a hand-out to entice New Yorkers to buy the carry-home dinners.
Here's Papa Hanrahan's definition of the Parker House rolls: “Wispy, crisp, and golden brown, baked a few at a time the way they were done at the old Parker House. The apple pie,” he writes, “is filled with fresh apples and just the right spices with mouth-melting crust—the king of American desserts fit for the queen of the gods.” He likes his lady's cooking, all right!
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.
Pozsongi is made in big and little rolls. A hard word to pronounce but a stuff easy on the palate. The rolls are made with a sheet of thin butter linzer dough, then a filling of either poppy seed or walnuts over this, and all rolled like a strudel. The rolls are given an egg wash and frozen for an hour before going to the oven. They come out wearing a crackled cloisonné effect.
Quince jelly molds are made for serving in place of mints or preserved fruits as an after-dinner sweet bite. Quince and apple are cooked down together like a thick jam—then dipped into fancy-shaped tins and baked until solid. Large molds are made on order for buffet tables and decorated fancy as a wedding cake. The price is $1.10 a pound. The sweet is similar in its texture to the fruit pastes coming to market from Latin American countries.
More dates this winter. The United States has dated up 6,720,000 pounds of Iran's 1946 crop.
It's a snowy-white butter stained strawberry pink, smooth-spreading, delicious! And it's butter all right, and somebody has sugar. Umm, the flavor! Fragrant as when strawberries are crushed for a shortcake. Curls of pink butter on a hot waffle melt down like new snow. Lay it thick on fruit bread for the tea-table sandwiches, dot it over thin little French pancakes, then roll them up to serve as dessert. Crush it over breakfast toast—angelic stuff! Use it like hard sauce on pudding, for hard sauce it is, just butter, blended with confectioner's sugar and the crushed strawberries. The eight-ounce jar is $1.59, the one-pound $2.50, selling at B. Altman's, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.