Food Flashes

Sky in July is the best roof. As often as not we eat dinner outdoors. Crisping meat perfumes the air; again an abundance of steaks, chops, chickens to broil over charcoal. House of Herbs has a new sauce ready for the summer barbecue bouts. Tomato purée for the base blended with broth made of meat an chicken extract and a combination of vinegars spiked with nine different herbs. Into the finished job go freshly chopped tarragon, fennel, dill, and sweet marjoram. It's a sauce about as thick as a thick French dressing, the exact red- brown of a new saddle, with flecks of herbs to promise surprise. The sauce is for use in cooking almost any kind of meat. Add it to the pan fat in frying chops; use it for basting poultry or roasts of beef or lamb; use it as a table sauce. It would give a nice zip even to a Dead Sea fruit. A plain but honest bean soup is transfigured by a single drop, and there is nothing wrong with adding it to the French dressing.

It blends its flavor with baked ham in a way to make the taste buds hol consultation: What a flavor! Is it dill? Or maybe tarragon? Could it be fennel? Or is it sweet marjoram? But first of all it's ham we're eating. What an unusual taste to the crust. A taste any ham might covet and could easily acquire by this barbecue treatment: After boiling the ham, coat it over with a paste made of thick sour cream in a half-and-half mixture with herbal mustard. The ham is baked forty minutes, then the basting starts. Every twenty minutes spoon over the barbecue sauce until the sour-cream coating takes on a red-brown blush.

The twelve-ounce jar sells for ＄1 at Lewis and Conger's herb shop, first floor, Sixth Avenue and 45th Street.

Picnic packers should stock a supply of those wee macaroons, twenty-four to a tin, each one of half-dollar size. Tender little cakes with just the right pull for the teeth, the right chewiness, bake gently golden with a fresh, fresh flavor. The cakes are packed as they come from the oven, not to be opened until ready to eat. Price 39 or 40 cents, selling in Manhattan at Wanamaker, Broadway at 9th Street, Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street, Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, packed by Town and Country Food Products in Brooklyn.

Now that the pantry's emergency shelf is again for unexpected guests an not for unexpected shortages, these macaroons should have a nice spot of space for themselves. Good to serve with canned fruit or with tea or ice cream and, as we were saying—a thumping contribution to the picnic kit.

Maybe you have tried smoked oysters and weren't really impressed. Try again, try the “smoky” traveling out of Oysterville, Washington. Pleasant to behold, light to reddish-brown in its coloring, no dark, shrunken, shriveled old toughies to discourage the palate.

The label reads “packed in cottonsee oil” but not more than a tablespoonful, just enough to give the oysters an oillaved, gleaming appearance. Serve them as a dinner appetizer, or as a quick bite with drinks to toothpick from the tin.

“Espy's Own” is the brand name, a name you should know, one famous in the oyster world of the Northwest. H. A. Espy, the packer, inherited the business started by his father in 1854. Today the Espys' oyster farms cover 1,500 acres, the oysters selling fresh to West Coast canneries. The smoked pack is a new venture styled for club service and retailing through stores. The oysters are hand-opened, hand-cleaned, then the meat smoked, each oyster cut into six to eight hunks, then packed into tins. It's the sweetest smoked oyster we ever have tasted, and New York merchants agree.

Here are a few of the many places handling the item: Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street, Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue, H. Hicks and Sons, 660 Fifth Avenue, and the department store groceries of R. H. Macy & Co., Gimbel, and John Wanamaker. In Chicago you'll find them at Marshall Field, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at the Arden Farm Store. The five-and-one-half-ounce tin sells around 95 cents.

Leterman-Glass, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, distributors of the product, report that some of the finest clubs in the country, New York's Union League, for example, are serving the treat.

The biggest bud of the garden worl you can pick from a can. It was in downtown New York at the King an Company store, 49 Nassau Street, that we purchased a tin of two tenderhearte artichokes, their total weight just over one pound. Medium-sized these buds, of natural green color, cooked just tender in water tanged with herb vinegar. Split the buds to make salads for four; left whole they provide servings for two. Reheat in the water in which they are packed. With the fresh artichokes costing around 15 to 19 cents apiece, this pair, ready to eat, every leaf sweet an fleshy, seems gently priced at 59 cents.

Hash starting at scratch can be a peck of trouble to make, nothing to undertake in a hurry. Better turn it from the can ready to heat and straight to the table. Team it with shirred eggs or fol it into an omelette or make it into a puff, a loaf, or hashburgers. A gourmet chef at your elbow tells how to do it.

The hash we refer to is a de luxe variety labeled Art's Brand, and no less an artist than GOURMET's chef, Louis P. DeGouy, developed the formula. It's a hash 60 per cent corned beef, 30 per cent potato. The meat is chopped into small, even pieces, no unexpected hunks. The potato is finely diced, each ingredient cut separately, then mixed, and so carefully! Seasoning is added—salt, pepper, and herbs. The hash is neither watery nor dry, which is exactly how a hash should be.

Want Chef DeGouy to step into your kitchen and supervise the preparation? Then ask your merchant for the set of five recipes prepared on file cards to give away with your purchase.

Here's one of the DeGouy specials; like the others, this has a soupçon of French in its seasoning; you'll taste the difference. Chef DeGouy uses four individual shirred egg dishes to turn out a picture platter. Each dish is grease thoroughly with bacon drippings, then one-fourth of the tin of Art's Corne Beef Hash is placed in each, a hollow is made in the center, large enough to hold two eggs. Be careful not to break the yolks as you slide them into place. Season to taste with pepper and salt an a dash of paprika, and bake in a moderate oven 350° F. for fifteen minutes. Here we are! How do we look? Goo job eh? Serve us immediately.

Art's hash is selling at Charles an Company, 340 Madison Avenue, the twenty-ounce tin 59 cents.

Clem Castleberry of Augusta, Georgia, is sending his famous Southern sauces and condiments to New York City for the first time. These tongue- tingling numbers are well known throughout Georgia and in other southern states. Five are in the set, a steak and meat spiker, a lively Worcestershire, a barbecue number, a soy sauce, and a sauce for sea foods and sea foo cocktails. The sauce family is package in six-ounce bottles, boxed to sell as a unit, the price ＄1.19 at B. Altman's grocery, Fifth Avenue at 34th. A sweet vegetable relish is a sixth item, this selling separately, the twelve-ounce jar 29 cents. A garden medley it is of red an green tomatoes, cabbage, onions, cauliflower, put up in vinegar and spices but not too spicy; a relish of crisp texture.

The barbecue sauce is the hot number and exceptionally fine. This is the sauce Clem's father invented when he started out as a youngster selling barbecued pork on the streets of Augusta. The ingredients are tomato purée, soy sauce, hot pepper sauce, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and tongue-nipping spices.

That sea food cocktail sauce will zoom up flavor when dashed on frie shrimp. It weds happily with any cocktail made of sea foods and is marvelous for flavoring fish gumbo and chowders.

Steak sauce is a combination of tomato purée with apples, lemons, raisins, soy sauce, orange marmalade, prepare mustard, and spices, each added by an exacting hand for perfect harmony. First taste, it surprises, then burns. The taste lingers on the palate ever so pleasantly.

Guess what's in the chop suey sauce —soy sauce, of course, and vinegar with a wee touch of salt. Later when supplies are available, the Castleberry Company plans to introduce a line of Georgia specialties, the first to be Georgia hash, the second the state's famous Brunswick stew.

Tangerine juice is a new citrus beverage, more spicy in twang than the juice of the orange. It has a taste on the tongue of the tangerine's own pungent perfume of that vaporous oil release from the peel. Newest brand is “Premier,”the eighteen-ounce tin holding the juice of approximately fifteen tree- ripened tangerines, enough for four breakfast servings. The price in New York City shops is around 29 cents, seen at the Seven Parks Market, 107 East 34th Street, Mansbach Market, 1372 Sixth Avenue, Kensington Delicatessen, 162 Seventh Avenue, Regent Foo Shop, 1174 Lexington Avenue, an other delicacy shops.

During the past year we have foun occasional small stocks of this juice, the total pack running some half million cases as compared to the 65 million- case citrus juice production for 1946. This year with the tangerine crop a record-breaker, a larger juice pack is promised. The juice is to be considered as a specialty, its price well over that of the juice of the grapefruit or orange. But it's a fussy job in extraction—ever try it by hand?

Short Shorts:

French tarragon wine vinegar of Orléans joins its rose wine vinegar sister, the first to arrive. The pair are selling at Bloomingdale Brothers, 69 cents for the one-pint, eight-ounce bottle.

Durkee Famous Foods announce a new apple pie spice, a blend of finest cinnamon, nutmeg, and other such, of which they aren't telling. Sprinkle over the pie filling or the crust as you please. Recommended for applesauce, bake apples, rice pudding.

Hormel's hams are back in the can—but not the three-sided kind you knew before the war. These are round like anyone's cans, the one-pound fourteen- ounce size ＄2.95, at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue.

Blueberries come from Fredrikstad, Norway, the first in long years, Fir Tree the brand, one pound, twelve ounces for ＄1.40 at Old Denmark, 135 East 57th Street, New York.

England sends Escoffier sauce Robert, the first to come since the war, seen at the B. Altman grocery, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street.

Sorrel soup of the green shading with a breath of fresh sorrel, of onion an herbs, with the heartiness of potatoes, the richness of butter, is one of the very special soups we urge you to try, a thirty-two-ounce jar ＄1.25 at America House, 485 Madison Avenue, New York City. Some like it cold, and it's good so in summer. For cool days, have it hot with a big dip of sour cream flecke with paprika.