That's a good batter recipe given on the can label. The coating puffs in the fat and is almost as flaky as pastry. The product sells for around ＄1. Expensive, but so are the soft shells in the market today, running around ＄2.98 for a dozen of mediums. With the canned specimens there is no cleaning to do, no cutting off the crab's face, a job women abhor.
The crabs are the newest Vieux Carré product selling in New York City at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, and Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street.
Vieux Carré Canning Company of New Orleans is located in the old French Quarter and has been in Eastern markets with its excellent fish products since 1932. The firm was started by the “Dour Scotchman,” a little man four feet nine inches not given to smiling but demanding his factory be kept “medicinally clean.” The recipes for the foods he packed were begged, bought, and borrowed from the best restaurant chefs around the old city. The original line included such typically New Orleans items as shrimp, crab, and okra gumbo, turtle soup, Southern style oyster soup, New Orleans crawfish bisque, bisque of shrimp, and a bouillabaisse.
In 1940 the little Scotchman died, and the family have since sold the business and formulae to a group of New Orleans advertising and promotion men. The new owners continue the line exactly as in the beginning but have added a few items. Smoked oysters are one of their recent additions, and excellent. Serve them hot or cold on small squares of toast. Top of the heap in the pâté kingdom are pâtés of smoked shrimp and one of shrimp au naturel. The shrimp is finely ground, then seasoned. These pâtés may be used as they are but we like them stretched by mixing with cheese, with hard-cooked eggs, with mayonnaise, and such.
It's not a minute too early to be thinking of Christmas gift packages, and the Shagroy Farm has five selections ready and is taking orders now. The least expensive gift, at ＄5.00, is a pair of smoked turkey drumsticks with second joints wrapped in colorful cornucopias and packed in a gift carton. A second choice, at ＄7.50, is an assortment of 12 tins of the Shagroy smoked and canned products, gift-packaged.
A smoked turkey breast, minimum weight 2 pounds, packed in a sugar scoop sells for ＄13.75. This pine scoop is a handsome thing to use for nuts, potato chips, candies and such on the buffet table. A gift at ＄17.50 offers a whole smoked turkey, minimum weight 8 pounds, packaged in an oblong mixing bowl, 9 by 16 inches.
The works, the utter, in magnificent eating costs ＄25. What goes? A whole turkey, minimum weight 10 pounds, a pint of the farm's Christmas cranberry relish, the whole wrapped in a red-and-white picnic cloth and packed in a covered, two-handle picnic hamper.
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