The gangplank grumbles, creaks, and is slowly lowered. Vacation-hungry America is going places again. Bon voyage! Happy landing!
Basket departments take on new meaning now that baskets are packed for traveling the seas. Hampers, hat boxes, trays, bowed in satin, serve as carriers for sweet stuffs and snacks. Look, here's one different. A mammoth ring loaf of crusty Spanish bread is tie to a bread board and see what it carries: Camembert cheese, pears, grapes, a bottle of sherry, or make it champagne. Top-off is a bouquet of spring flowers. A corkscrew accompanies the bottle. A plastic knife is on hand for bread and cheese slicing.
Ann Hagan, florist unique, of 141 East 40th Street, New York City, introduces this newest bon voyage gift to replace the usual, all too usual, bounty basket. That loaf of bread measures two feet across, a loaf turned out on order by a Spanish baker. The bread board acts as serving tray, as work table in preparing the feast.
Some time take time to visit Ann Hagan's place. Open the black doors that close it off from the street, walk through the brick-paved court, open to the sky, march up the steps into one of New York's old stables. Here's a florist shop like no other you've seen. Nothing is done in the always-has-been style. Pink, yellow, green berry baskets carry bouquets, bedded in colored excelsior. At Christmas, white plastic hands clasp holly to hang on the door. At Easter, blossoming shrubs wear pink satin bows, almost one to a blossom. Food and drink gifts are dressed up with flowers—but go see for yourself. You can't believe all the things we tell you about them until you do.
Back comes the musical cake, ready at the cut of the knife to tinkle out its little tune. Choose music to suit the occasion: “Happy Birthday,” “Auld Lang Syne,” a wedding march, or “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
Music boxes are from Switzerland, fastened to a cardboard base; then the cake is placed on, but first a piece is whittled out to accommodate the tune box. Cake in position, it is frosted an decorated. A red jelly arrow points the knife-line for the cake's first slice. A firm cut touches off the music which plays seven minutes.
Cakes are decorated with cartoon drawings, each individually made to surprise the honored one. If he is a great fellow for fishing and telling tall tales, he might see himself caricature standing in a wobbly boat hauling in a fish the size of Jonah's whale.
The medium in which the artist works is a radiant jelly, easy-flowing, quick-drying, which makes it possible to exercise a freehand drawing technique. Cartoon cakes are designed for stork parties, announcement parties, going-away parties. You name the event and the Laurette Bakery at 180-09 Jamaica Avenue, telephone Jamaica 3-4551, will turn out a cake good for a big laugh. Cakes are priced according to size, ＄3 for the eight-inch up to ＄12 for the sixteen-inch width. There is a ＄3 deposit on each music box. Return the box and you get back ＄2.75. It costs only a quarter to cut your cake to a tune.
If you send a snapshot of the one to whom the cake is being given, the artist baker will draw his likeness in cartoon fashion.
The cakes are made of quality materials, butter, eggs, cream; they have a fresh, clean taste. Louis Fitzie, a baker here forty years, does the baking, son Irving is the artist. The bakery ships cakes all over the country by railway express in boxes designed to deliver these fragile affairs without a chip off the frosting.
Sauce BS has the shortest name an longest list of ingredients of any sauce in the world. Its taste is similar to that of sauce diable, a creation of Escoffier. A strange and subtle mixture considere fine enough by its maker to be name for Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French gourmet, who made his life one delicious meal. Brillat-Savarin are only in part to appease his hunger, in part for the sheer joy he derived from his food when it was selected with care, perfectly prepared, intelligently served.
Take a deep breath. Here's the ingredient listing for Sauce BS: aromatic vinegars, Indian tamarinds, garden-grown mushrooms, French truffles, fresh ripe tomatoes, choice peppers with other selected fruits and vegetables. All are spiced by a master saucier with Spanish paprika, frankincense, chervil, salt, marjoram, sugar, sweet basil, Lampong pepper, cayenne, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, coriander. The sauce is an all-purpose condiment to use with steaks, roasts, poultry, and fish, in soups and in gravies. Seeman Brothers of New York is the distributor. Among the numerous Manhattan shops carrying this sauce elixir are Lewis and Conger, Sixth Avenue and 45th Street, and Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street; price ＄1.58 for fourteen ounces.
Koulicht, the spicy Easter bread of the Russians, is being made daily by a Polish-Russian bakery on the New York East Side and selling at B. Altman's, Fifth Avenue at 34th, fresh as the dew.
The koulicht in its usual form is a high-hat, yeast-raised bread, we mean high. The loaves are made tall enough to last the Russian family the entire week of the Easter feasting. The koulicht now in the stores is baked in miniature, the loaves one and one-fourth pounds, the price around ＄1.37. That's a good size to last an average family over a weekend.
You needn't be Russian to enjoy this yeast-raised novelty—not bread, not cake. It has a taste half of fruit cake, half of brioche. It is a yeast bread so high in butter that it has developed the crumb and dryness of a raised poun cake. The bread appears dry to the eye but is moist in the eating, except for the well-baked outside which has the brioche-like crust.
A harmony in its perfume—candie fruits, dried fruits, vanilla bean, cardamom seed, saffron, all happily blende in the heat of the oven. The proper way of its cutting is to stand the loaf upright, then slice off “the hat,”lay this to one side, and cut the slices horizontally. After the serving is completed, the hat is returned to the loaf to keep the bread moist.
Matzoth, the Jewish “bread of affliction,”breaks with tradition and appears in new forms. Newest type is name “manna,”a cracker-like matzoth made to break as no matzoth has ever broken before, scored to divide into nine squares. It tastes as no matzoth has ever tasted before, being littered with poppy seeds, flavored with onion. A happy taste combination to accompany a cocktail, and that's the idea.
The product made by the Manischewitz Brothers factory in Cincinnati is now in test markets throughout the Midwest and for tables both Jewish and Gentile.
It was the Manischewitz firm which as long ago as 1920 started the matzoth on its varied career. The Passover matzoth is but flour and water. The first matzoth variation was a “tasty”variety for year-round use to spread with cheese, to carry a herring. It contained malt, salt, and leavening. Next idea was the egg matzoth, made with fresh eggs, with cider, sweeter and richer than the regular product and sold as a Passover delicacy. Then came a matzoth to vie with the Ritz-type cracker, made cracker size, sprayed with hot coconut oil, and well dusted with salt as it came from the ovens. Tam-Tam is the name, now in national distribution.
People learned about allergies. Doctors put patients on diets. The firm introduced the wholewheat matzoth. Now manna appears. Next along will be a matzoth made with rye flour.
TALK OF CHEESE: First baby Goudas and Edams are coming from Holland. A Port Salut, domestic-made, is selling at R. H. Macy's, Broadway and 34th Street, to the tune of 700 pounds weekly. This is a round, firm-skinned cheese of slightly gelatinous texture. It is not so maidenly and tender as the importe Port Salut we knew before the war, yet in its strength it is a thousand leagues from Rabelaisian Limburger whose flavor it but echoes.
The Marin French Cheese Company of Petaluna, California, makes a Brie superb. Cut into the tender-cruste block, and it empties itself of flowing white cream. It has a sweet way on the tongue with a sharp, particular note that exactly suits our cheese-loving palate. Trade-marked “Rouge et Noir”it sells at B. Altman's, Fifth Avenue an 34th Street, 39 cents for four ounces. There too we found a garlic-flavore Cheddar of spreading consistency packe in a cellophane casing made like a link sausage. No mistaking the garlic an very nice it is on dark bread to enjoy with a glass of cold beer.
Johnnycake meal as the Rhode Islanders like it is made of the native Indian corn of the long slender ear of large smooth kernel of the rich creamy color. Farmer David K. Hoxsie grows such corn to have water-ground smooth as face powder to sell to his neighbors an to B. Altman's grocery, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. The price is four pounds for 80 cents.
Roast beef for Sunday dinner, with a Yorkshire pudding made of the white meal, now that's really something! Down Easters consider the powdery meal indispensable as a dusting flour when pan-frying fish. And in johnny-cake there can be no substitute, not at least for a Rhode Island cook.
The Trinacria Importing Company at 29th Street and Third Avenue, one of Manhattan's outstanding Italian bazaars, is a store of color, of character. The clublike provolone cheeses form a golden brown tapestry hanging by ropes from the overhead rafters. Big salamis in their midst and those little shavers, the supersaltis.
Great gunny sacks with their tops back show off the lentils, the beans, the shining chestnuts from Italy. One side of the store is jam-packed with gay bas-kets with the clay cooking pots classic in form. Dried fruits form a colorful embankment—apricots, prunes, apples, pears, figs, and raisins. Peels, too, of orange, of citron, winking gold, winking green.
Around five in the evening there is the never-ceasing whirr of the slicing machine. Customers wait in line to buy the prosciutto, the Italian-style ham. Year in and year out there is the fresh panettone, that rich sweet Italian loaf packed with fruit peels.
Trinacria has recently installed a coffee roaster in their basement and can give you a fresh roast on order. They roast almonds in the shell, so nice to munch with a sweet wine at the end of the meal; people have time for things like that now.
There is scarcely an Italian food available in the city that Trinacria doesn't carry. They have the fresh ravioli, the various Italian sauces in tins. What is your search for? Torroni? The har Roman cheese for grating? Italian olives? Macaroons imported from Italy? Trinacria will have what you want. They mail things out if the order is ＄5 or more.
Lapsang Smoky souchong, with the old-time twang, and Formosa oolong of finest quality and fragrance are available again, for the first time in several years. Some ordinary grades of these have been around the market during recent months but not exciting enough to interest tea lovers. Now after many months of persistent effort, Simpson&Vail, Inc., of 89 Front Street, New York City, have secured these teas of truly top quality.
Other rarities in stock include: choice Darjeeling, Travencore, Ceylon, China black and China green and Japan green of finest grades. As usual their prices are decidedly lower than what specialty shops charge for teas which lack such outstanding quality.
Customers are guaranteed satisfaction. You don't pay for the purchase until after receiving shipment. Then the bill wanders in.