Brooks boil. Apple bloom is on the back of the wind. Peepers shrill the news, the year's at the spring. Lambs frolic to market. Leg of lamb today; tomorrow lamb leftover, prepared as a curry.
A curry sauce newly arrived on the market is made by home-kitchen careerist Vera Sanville, a sauce rich of oil, rosy of tomatoes, subtly exotic in its spicy alchemy. The little pint jar contains all the needful ingredients for a genuine curry, every last thing but the meat, fish, or fowl. It's a sauce long cooked; a poem to put into the mouth. It's a concentrated sauce to be thinned with water or stock, an ever-ready item to have handy on the shelf to run up a quick repast when the occasion demands it.
Infinite are its uses. Add a small amount to the soup for the zest of spice. Spread the sauce over chops, then slide them under the broiler, mix it with chopped meat, blend it with cream cheese for the prickle of heat it gives to a sandwich. Mix it in a cheese sauce to blanket poached eggs. Add a spoonful to mayonnaise and exult in its spiciness, so right for salads of fruit. It gives the curry treatment to any leftover meat as well as shrimp, lobster, and chicken. Hard-cook half a dozen eggs and heat them in the curry sauce; serve in a rice ring.
This sauce, a family recipe from the British West Indies, begins with the frying of onions, parsley, and celery in a pure olive oil. Tomatoes are added, either the fresh or the canned, next the curry powder, then the long cooking. Pint jars are selling in New York City for around ＄1.35 at B. Altman and Company, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, Farm and Garden Shop, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue, H. Hicks and Sons, 30 West 57th Street, Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, and Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street.
Bees are busy. Lilac buds unfold. Fruit salads return. Bring on the mayonnaise, one flavored with curry, a beautiful product, sun-colored, smooth as whipped butter. This too is homemade by a Mrs. Robert Dehlendorf and selling like crazy in numerous shops in New York. The goodness of the mayonnaise is the goodness of its ingredients. Pure corn oil, fresh country eggs, herb vinegar, lemon juice, onion salt, garlic salt, dry mustard, a dash of cayenne, all whipped to velvety smoothness. Richtasting the flavor, tanged with fresh lemon.
The curried mayonnaise is the same mayonnaise with an addition of a very fine imported curry powder. Mrs. Dehlendorf suggests its use with fried oysters, on smoked turkey canapés, as a dip for shrimp when it's served as a cocktail canapé, and with salads of fresh fruit.
The first asparagus pokes a cold nose from the ground. Mrs. Dehlendorf's homemade hollandaise comes into its own as a dressing for the green spears. This sauce is a combination of fresh egg yolks, freshly reamed lemon juice, creamery butter with garlic and onion salt, dry mustard, and a dash of cayenne as the seasoners. This item, like the mayonnaise, is blended in a homogenizer so it holds up without separation and right through reheating.
The mayonnaise and hollandaise are handled by the Women's Exchanges in Greenwich and Norwalk, Connecticut, in Scarsdale and Bronxville, New York, and in Brooklyn and New York City. The Farm and Garden Shop, 30 Rocke-feller Plaza, New York City, carries the items, also the Farm and Garden in Boston.
Spring—a Dutch Edam at your next dinner party. Let it center the cheese board, this to pass with fruit. Sure it's back, that jolly red cannon ball cheese of north Holland, named for the city of Edam where its manufacture is centered. Holland Edam is stocked by the Alan Berry Food Shop, 676 Madison Avenue, New York City, and at other stores too, at 89 cents for a pound with the average weight four pounds or there-about. This is cow's milk cheese colored bright yellow. It's a Cheddar type but more nutty in flavor and slightly sweeter. Edam's southern counterpart is Gouda (pronounced gow-da) and very like Edam except that the cheese may be larger and flatter. The bright red color of the cheese is achieved by dipping the loaves in an alcoholic solution of carmine, which is harmless, and isn't it gay?
40-Fathom is a new canned clam chowder in concentrated form being introduced nationally by General Sea Foods of New England.
Cautious, this firm, when they styled the new product—it's noncontroversial. It aims to please chowder fans in all parts of the country. You like chowder Manhattan, made with tomatoes? There's the recipe on the label. You are New England-minded and make your chowder with milk? The label tells how.
General Sea Foods are too foxy to put their neck into trouble by coming out for only one method. They played safe on the name. It's 40-Fathom Clam Chowder without regional significance. They give you a concentrate of clams plus seasonings, you add milk or tomatoes. Or use the minced clam in fritters, in croquettes, or in little clam pies.
Basket on arm and away, to gather April's first mushrooms—“Children of the Night.” These are cocktail size, packed in olive oil, flavored with herbs, oregano, thyme, marjoram, black pepper, and the Italian crushed red pepper, a new Twin Trees item selling at B. Altman and Company, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, the eight-ounce jar ＄1.65. These are midget mushroom caps, snow-white against the dark spray of the herbs with which they are packed. The caps may be served whole as a cocktail appetizer or sliced to fold into an omelette or to garnish a steak. Drop the caps over a vegetable salad for something pretty special or turn a jar of these into a bowl of mixed greens before tossing with dressing. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a recipe!
Something else new from the Twin Trees kitchen—ground dried chives, packed in salad oil, just enough oil to coat each little flake. Handy they are when you want chives to blend with cream cheese or a spoonful to flavor a sauce or garnish a cream soup. The fourounce container sells for 75 cents, at B. Altman again.
Twin Trees are packing a tiny shell-pink seed onion in wine vinegar, flavored with wormwood. Altman has the four-ounce jars, 85 cents. What about a little pink onion impressed right in the middle of a deviled egg?
Guava shell halves, pink and pretty, are back in the Hammacher Schlemmer delicacy department, 145 East 57th Street. Fill these with seasoned cream cheese and serve as a salad with a sprinkling of toasted almonds and a thin salad dressing. Wasn't that what we used to do with the rosy pink holders? It's been a long time—with a war between.
The home of the pepper mill family is the Post Mart, a little shop gaining a big reputation, located at 230 East 78th Street, New York City. Here the pepper mills set up business early last fall—and such an array! Mills are made of Cuban teakwood, of Honduras mahogany, of kiln-dried black walnut, of sterling silver, and in numerous styles. All have the same works machine-milled, made of the finest of steel, case-hardened to assure the working parts a long life.
The pepper mill grinds to various degrees of coarseness and fineness by the simple process of an adjustable knob.
Salt mills are made in woods matching the pepper, the two styled for each other as the left shoe to the right. The prices run from ＄3.25 for standard jobs —individual pieces in walnut or mahogany—up to ＄6 for the hand-turned designs of hand-rubbed finish. The sterling silver pepper mills are for you who won't blanch at spending ＄22.50. The sterling salt grinders are ＄18 apiece.
Handsome? Yes, but handsome is as handsome does, and these do dandy. A salt mill we admire is made entirely of wood, no metal to corrode. When dampness clogs other salt receptacles, this grinder with its hard oak grinding ball carries faithfully on.
Tellicherry whole peppercorns, both the white and the black, sell at two and one-third ounces for 39 cents. This pepper is coming now from the Malabar region of the Dutch East Indies. If ordered by mail, the peppercorns are two jars for ＄1, this to cover the postage.
Now anybody anywhere can feast on Maine's famous delicacy, that royal red head the lobster. Chicken lobsters averaging one pound apiece, picked on order from the briny deep and immediately boiled, are packed in a pliofilm container, tucked into wooden barrels, nicely bedded on crushed ice and seaweed, and off to your house. The prices, express prepaid, are ten pounds ＄9.75; fifteen pounds ＄12.75; twenty pounds ＄15.75. If you live west of the Mississippi, add another 75 cents for traveling expenses. Address orders to High Island Lobster Company, Box 39, Newcastle, Maine.
Inlanders who seldom sample lobster in shell shouldn't miss this opportunity for a grand feast. Figure one small lobster serves one. Split, season with salt and freshly ground pepper, dot well with butter, then under the broiler until the lobster is hot and the meat turns golden. Or drop the “chickens” into boiling water, just to heat through. Or pick the meat from the shells to use for salads, for lobster Newberg.
To remove the meat from cooked lobster, place the back down on a board and with a sturdy knife cut from head to tail through to the underneath shell. Spread open with the hands and with a small, sharp, pointed paring knife, remove the long dark line which can be seen running down through the white meat into the tail. Lift out the small sack behind the eyes. All that remains is good to eat. To get the meat from the claws, crack them with a hammer.
Don't be shocked, but what about a golden-brown, crisply roasted turkey for Easter Day dinner? American enterprise is promoting the idea that a turkey is a bird to love in May as well as December. Also the government is pushing the turkey as a spring-platter piece to help use up the heavy stocks now in cold storage.
That's not our idea for talking turkey for spring. It's not a storage turkey we would suggest for Easter eating but one of the Holiday Farm birds of David P. Earle of Allenwood, New Jersey. No fooling, these are the sweetest, meatiest, juiciest birds we have met in a heck of a while. They are broad-breasted, double-chested, the white meat district extending right to the starting point of the legs. Mighty the drumsticks threatening to slip tether at the stern pit. The birds cook to really juicy perfection. When the knife cuts in, moisture exudes. And how unusual the flavor, rich and sweet, due, Mr. Earle claims, to finishing them off on a diet of sunflower seeds mixed in with their regular mash.
David P. Earle is another of those Wall Street gentlemen who have a money-making farm as a backlog against the time they plan to retire. Turkeys are the sole crop of his thirty-acre investment. This year 1,300 birds were raised, mostly the broad-breasted bronzes with a few white Hollands for good measure. His breeding flock of 400 birds has been tested and approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the State of New Jersey inspectors.
Until this year the Earle birds have gone only to restaurants. Now production has increased to a point where he can offer turkeys by mail. The price is 65 cents a pound, including mailing cost and insurance, within one hundred miles of New York City. If the weather turns warmish, the birds travel packed with dry ice. The bird is handsomely dressed, not a pin feather left to mar its ivory curves. The giblets are cleaned, wrapped in wax paper, and placed in the cavity.
Supply will be constant winter and summer with birds from ten pounds to thirty. Send your orders to Box 272, R.D. 1, Lakewood, New Jersey.
Those who know Calcutta Club chutney of the mango base will be wanting to try the firm's new salad dressing and onion soup. “Bon Bouquet,” the trademark, the recipes originating in France. The soup has a beef-bone stock of real strength, and no wonder, the cracked bones are cooked for ten hours along with such vegetables as carrots, celery, turnips, tomatoes, and parsley. It is seasoned with garlic, pepper, and spices, then strained and clarified; toasted small bits of the onion are added. The recipe was purchased from Jules D'Anjac, chef de cuisine of a restaurant bearing his name in Fontainebleau, France.
Tom Hebert, president of Calcutta Club Products, first met Jules D'Anjac after World War I. All these years he has remembered the wonderful dinners this Frenchman prepared in his Fontainebleau restaurant. Last spring he bargained with the chef for the onion soup formula.
The salad dressing is also from Jules D'Anjac's kitchen made with 55 per cent oil and 45 per cent vinegar, the flavor well balanced with spices. It's a translucent liquid, paprika-colored, tangy and good as any commercial French dressing we ever have tasted. It can, however, stand additional herbs and a good dash of onion juice.
The chutney, in case you haven't sampled, is East Indian style, a brown spicy sauce, thick with little pieces of mango, of citron, of preserved Jamaica ginger, seeded raisins, candied lemon peel. Mild Texas onions and hot chili peppers give flavor and fire.
The sauce has a cider vinegar base and lime juice in its blending. It's a chutney cool in the mouth, yet hot. It's fiery, yet bland. It is sweet, yet pleasing with an acid undertone. This chutney spread on Melba toast makes a perfect canapé to accompany a sweet cocktail such as an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan.