Angel foods, the real heavenly kind, snowy white, soft as down, tall and lithesome, are going places by mail, traveling in the Wearever aluminum pans in which they are baked. These are big cakes, the thirteen-egg kind, nine inches in diameter, four inches high, a size to serve twelve, the price ＄2.50 postpaid.
The pan is yours, or return it for refill; the next cake costs but ＄1.25. Address your orders to Rekul Pan-o-cake Company, 114 West Main Street, Urbana, Illinois. If you live in New York City, buy the cake at Gimbel Brothers, same cake, same price.
How can a delicate angel food go traveling long miles and not toughen, not shrink? That's the secret of baker Jackson M. Luker. He seals the cakes in their pans to keep for ten days to two weeks at average temperatures. When kept in the refrigerator at 35 degrees, they will keep fresh for six months.
The cakes have been selling since 1939 throughout Illinois. Now the war's over, the business is expanding. The plan is to license the cakes to retail grocers, later to bakers, but for now you can order direct from the maker.
Jackson Luker made his “cake-to-keep”discovery when the Kroger chain opened a market across from his shop and offered a cut-rate angel food at 39 cents. Luker saw the cake sign go up and said to his wife,“I won't be a chump and put my cakes out. They cost me more than 39 cents to make.”He was so hot under the collar he didn't turn the cakes from the pans, just let them stand, thirty-six cakes a total loss. In a couple of days, the Kroger foo store had turned its interest from angel-cake bargains to prunes. Luker, with his neck feathers down, dug a cake from the pan. He would start baking again.
The cake turned out a dandy, goo enough to eat; the Lukers served it for supper. Each day the baker tried another few of the cakes; the longer they stood, the better they tasted.
His angel cake is the meringue type similar to the meringue topping on a pie. The first day, you know, pie meringue cuts easily; the second day put in a fork and the whole top may lift off. But the angel food adhering to the walls of the pan had kept the air in those millions of cells created by whipping. Even without a cellophane wrapper the cakes held close to their original volume and kept beautifully tender.
Luker has an inventive mind an started dreaming ideas for selling angel cakes by mail. All he has done for the last ten years, he claims, is fiddle with “the angels.”Now he has them down to perfection, with a patent on the package, on the machine that ties on the cellophane topping, on the depositor which places the dough in the pan, and on the pan-washing equipment.
Today the Luker's cakes are selling 400,000 a year and could sell that a hundred times over. But materials remain scarce. This year the bakery will have enough sugar and pans to make 500,000 cakes and no more. During the war when aluminum pans were at a premium, a ＄10 deposit was put on each pan to insure its return. Some women were so crazy for a good cake pan that they kept the container an let the ＄10 go galligan.
Just before the war, Mrs. Luker's fudge cakes were put on the market. A white cake, with a thick fudge frosting, the ratio, one pound of cake, one poun of fudge topping, and one ounce of nuts. But these were forgotten in the sugar-short years. They may return with the autumn.
Trader Vic's Trading Post is a California landmark located in Oakland across the bay from San Francisco, a restaurant outstanding on the West Coast, its atmosphere South Sea, its foo Polynesian. Now Trader Vic is packing a few of his exotic foods for retail stores. Comes his Javanese Salad Dressing, a strange stuff indeed, made of rice an vegetable oil in combination with wine and pineapple vinegars, soya sauce in the mixture, sugar, egg yolks, tomato, Worcestershire, the final touch the herb medley of the Trader's designing. Pour that into an avocado half-shell—the effect is pretty utter. One thing about this dressing is you can't make it better because you can't make it. You haven't what it takes, we mean the ingredients such as rice oil and some of the odd seasoners.
Javanese sate spice is going into national distribution, a blend of importe spices with chilis and mustard predominating. It's the spice mixture blende originally for Trader Vic's famous dish called meat on a stick, the recipe on the label. But there are a dozen ways to use sate and the best are included in a two-page folder that goes along with each purchase. We like the blend in gravies, soups, salad dressings, and sauces.
Another item new in the Trader's line is a pomegranate grenadine with the full rich flavor of the fruit and its vibrant tang, the very grenadine used to flavor the rum drinks at the restaurant. Aroun the neck of the bottle hangs a tiny book about the size of a lavaliere giving the mixing directions for the Kailula cocktail, shark's tooth, shingle stain, and the Singapore sling.
“Mai Kai”is a seasoning powder to use in pointing up flavors in soups, gravies, vegetables, sauces. This is similar to the Chinese “Ve Tsin” and the Japanese “Ajinomoto,”both of which were imported here before the war in considerable quantity—a requisite with the chef.
Trader Vic attributes the goodness of his barbecued squabs, chicken, an steak to a splash of the special soya sauce, one highly concentrated, not watered down as some we have tried, around since the war.
The entire Trader Vic line is handle in New York City by B. Altman, Fifth Avenue at 34th, Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street, Alan Berry, Ltd., 676 Madison Avenue. Out-of-town outlets are Brady in Buffalo, Strouss-Hirchberg, Akron, J. L. Hudson and Macmillan in Detroit, Marshall Field, Mandel Brothers, and Carson Pirie Scott in Chicago.
Gin and tonic returns. Billy Baxter is the first bottler to introduce a quinine soda made with U. S. P. totaquine, the new approved replacement for the real thing.
It was midway in the war that the Baxter Company came to the end of their quinine, and as the government had stopped sale of the drug to the bottlers, there was no more available. Baxter began a search for a substitute an found it in totaquine, made from the bark of the cinchona tree, the same bark from which quinine is produced. Totaquine contains a large amount of quinine and proves a first-rate alternate with identical taste.
Gin and soda got its start years ago in India when Englishmen on the government administrative staff were required to take quinine daily to aid in withstanding the heat and to ward off fever. The easy way to get the stuff down was to add it to gin, which they dubbed gin and tonic. They came to like the taste and introduced the drink to London. Gin and tonic became the standard drink of those fashionable people who shop on Bond Street.
Now the tipple is celebrated everywhere in the British Empire. Celebrate here too in night clubs, in men's bars, in home bars, it's available at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, ＄2 for one dozen ten-ounce bottles.
Greatest little thirst quencher of the summer is Billy Baxter's ginger beer, ＄2 a dozen, also at Charles and Company. Buy Grandma a case of the sarsaparilla.
Pink pygmies of the shrimp family travel in schools, packed over three hundred to a pint jar. They come from the Palmers' Rockland Plantation, located on Wadmalau Island, twenty-five miles out from Charleston. These shrimp are the home-kitchen product of Eloise Lynah Palmer, and several hundre pounds are prepared daily with the ai of thirty-five workers and the help of son Paul, supervisor of the plantation factory.
Except for the war, these shrimp would stay home. In the old days the Palmers took vacation-time tourists an set a royal table. The sea gave abundantly of shrimp, oysters, terrapin, a variety of salt-water fish. The Island fields were prolific in the growing of fresh fruits and vegetables. Then came gasoline rationing; people stopped touring, stopped taking holidays. Mrs. Palmer had to think fast. Her table was her business, it kept five young Palmers in school. Packing shrimp might solve the problem.
Six jars of the tiny crustaceans calle chicken shrimp were packed in her famous oil dressing and carried into Ohlandt, the leading grocer of Charleston. Those shrimp sold themselves. Ohlandt now orders forty cases at a time.… Shrimp is packed in three sizes —jumbo, medium, and miniature. There is also shrimp paste, a paste with a waiting list. It's gone the minute Mrs. Palmer gets it to town.
Now that Paul Junior is out of college, the business is being expanded, as is the plantation line. Paul operates the shrimp trawl, the catch from one hundred to five hundred pounds daily of the medium and large sizes. Chicken shrimp are caught in small creeks in the summer, fished from rowboats with the use of cast nets.
Shrimp are brought immediately to the farm factory, washed, iced, hel overnight. Early morning the catch is cooked, cooled, hand-picked, and packe into the sauce by early afternoon. Eight women-pickers are kept on the job, an a particular job it is. Mrs. Palmer pays the help extra to pick the shrimp out and leave the tail on, and that goes for the tiniest. Each shrimp must be perfect. Shrimp minus tails are used for the paste. After the cocktail shrimp are in the jar, a boiling sauce is poured over them made of vinegar, salt, oil, similar to French dressing but not so heavy. Chicken shrimp are packed 300 to 375 in a pint jar. The medium run 150 to 200; the jumbos are elephants.
The very tiny shrimp can be used in sea food cocktails or laid out on fingers of well-buttered dark bread as a go-along with the drinks. The shrimp paste is all the go at Charleston's debutante parties, mixed with mayonnaise to spread on crackers or rounds of bread, then a slice of stuffed olive for the decoration. For a salad Mrs. Palmer blends the paste with mayonnaise, rolls the mix into small balls, and arranges these on lettuce, six to a portion.
Newest fancy is the palmetto pickle, the heart of young palm put into a mustard sauce. Put-ups this summer will include figs, damson-plum jam, pumpkin chips, pears, pecans—all farm-grown.
Stores in New York stocking Rockland Plantation shrimp include: B. Altman, Fifth Avenue at 34th, Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street, Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue, Hicks and Company, 660 Fifth Avenue, the price around ＄1.50 for the pint jar. The tiny and the medium shrimp are handled by Dussourd and Filser, 960 Madison Avenue, and B. Altman have stocks now of the shrimp paste. In Washington, D. C., the Palmer line is handled by Woodward and Lothrop, also Wagstahl's. In Baltimore by Hutzler's, in Richmond, Virginia, by R. L. Christians Company and Woods Grocery.
Two Holland biscuits are back, the first to come since the war, the “Petit Beurre”and the “Marie,”made by Verkade's and known throughout Europe. These biscuits are the Dutch version of those crisp, dry, and not overly sweet English-type tea cakes. Plain as a butter plate, but just the right texture an flavor to pass with iced tea or ice cream or fresh fruit. The Petit Beurre, oblong in shape, sells two pounds vacuum-packed ＄1.95. The Maries are round an just a trifle sweeter than the Beurres, ＄1.85 for the two-pound container. Available at B. Altman and Company, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street, and Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue.
The tin shortage has held back the imports, but a regular supply is promised now by the Netherland American Import Corporation, 346 West 15th Street, New York City. This firm has the exclusive distribution on all Verkade products, also of Blooker's famous cocoa and the Betz and Van Heijst's superior Dutch imported herring.