Charles and Constance Stearns, proprietors of the Bird and Bottle Inn of Garrison, New York, mecca of the menu for gourmets in the know, are packing five specialties of their kitchen for mail-order delivery anywhere in the United States. A sampling kit introduces the line, selling for $7, postage included. Let's see what we get—four kinds of soup, two of black bean, two of Louisiana shrimp, a jar of dilled olives, one of Swedish lingenberry preserves, and a box of the richest, tangiest, meltingest cheese sticks that ever fluttered away on the tongue.
The black-bean brew is a thick smooth puree of black turtle beans, chocolate-brown in color, made herbal with thyme, bay leaves, and parsley. Green peppers in the blend, and onions, garlic, and cloves. To whip-snap the taste, mustard has been added and hot Tabasco. No sherry in this, that's for you to add just before serving.
Shrimp soup Louisiana is a shrimp and vegetable chowder, tomato the base, combined with shrimp stock, deftly blended with onions, peppers, garlic, and bay; Tabasco peppers for pep.
Lingenberry sauce as served at the Stearns table with game and roast poultry has a stiff jolt of apple brandy added just before passing. About 1 ½ ounces is right to give the get-up-and-go to a 10-ounce jar of the sauce. Glorious as a filling for a thin rolled dessert pancake, served piping hot. And over ice cream—wonderful!
The dilled olives, firm of flesh, yet tender, are prepared with fresh dill, garlic, Tabasco pepper. One olive gives an extra something to a dry Martini.
Careful there, while you eat those flat, hand-rolled pastry sticks, golden of cheese. A careless breath will float them off in a flutter of flakes. In the mouth the sticks crash into a thousand crumbs each butter-rich with Canadian Cheddar—a perfect accompaniment for drinks, soups, and salads.
A homemade ham sauce—a tasty job—is selling mail order direct from the turkey farm of Arthur Vinton, radio actor of Rock Tavern, New York, the price $1 per pint postpaid. Baste this elixir over a tough old hen, rubber tires, anything, and you can eat it with gusto. But best of all over ham. Remove the rind, score the ham in diamonds, insert whole cloves half an inch apart. Baste frequently with the sauce. Result—a ham golden-brown as October painting the maples. The sauce mixings are a beautiful abstraction called Early American, made with tamarind, anchovies, wine vinegar, soy oil, tomatoes, garlic, shallots, onions, and spices. The recipe came from Mrs. Vinton's grandfather, Dr. James Stuart of Louisville, Kentucky, who moved there in 1850 from the “Old Virginie” ham country.
Ginger-hot wafers, each the size of a quarter, are at home in a gold and red tin from the Charlotte Charles kitchen, Evanston, Illinois, ready and eager to be passed with the tea, the wine. The recipe reads as for any good ginger cookie, made with fresh eggs, creamery butter, sweetened with honey, but a difference—the ginger used is the crystalized, this finely chopped and long soaked in brandy, to give the quick nip and that lingering bite. Hot from the oven, the wafers are sprinkled with sugar, become crisp as they cool, and crisp they remain. Around 130 in the 12-ounce box, price $1.89 at B. Altman, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, at Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street, and Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, New York. Also in delicacy shops in other cities, coast-to-coast distribution.
Alpine wine sticks are a new idea with us but centuries old on the Continent, another recipe of the Charlotte Charles French collection handed down in the family of Count Antoine Drouot, the great French general of Napoleon's army. These come in stick form, stubby as thumbs, brushed lightly with frosting made of a dough similar to Nuremberg Lebkuchen. What's in the mixture? Flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate, almonds, apricots, the complete family of peels, all ground together, then steeped in brandy and rum and made spicy as Christmas, yet not the least heavy. These sticks will keep a couple of years if stored in their tin. Eventually they harden, but a few days in a stone crock and they limber up again. In France, the harder the sticks the better the going, since they are dunked into wine. Pound tins are $1.95, at the same stores as the Charlotte Charles ginger-hots.
The fruited yogurt of France is being made in New York, selling in health shops, chain stores, and delicatessens. It's Dannon's regular yogurt made festive with two ounces of strawberry preserves parked in the jar bottom. Chill well and stir, and this snowy-white milk food streaks strawberry pink. Eat with a spoon, this dessert with the consistency of a junket. Or stir briskly, now a few shakes and you have a smooth drink. The price is 21 cents for a half-pint jar of the fruited, 18 cents for the regular. Those who have wanted to use yogurt for health's sake—but somehow didn't fancy its tart taste—can enjoy it now if they order the strawberry flavor.
In the Balkans where this milk food has been used for long centuries it was fermented by a process of nature, by a bacteria known as Bacillus bulgaricus. The scientists after long research isolated the souring agent and thereafter the culture could be made in the laboratory. It was then that the new milk food was introduced into France.
Originally it was sold by the pharmacists only on a doctor's recommendation. But the French soon discovered yogurt's good eating qualities, and factories were established to make it in volume to meet the demand. Before the war it was selling in virtually every European city.
One of the important makers was the Dannon Company of Paris which, the year the war started, was turning out around 80,000 5 ½-ounce jars of yogurt a day, both fruited and plain. Daniel Carasso, son of the firm's founder, transferred the business here in 1942. Now the product so carefully made in a modern laboratory factory in Long Island City has created a Manhattan boom in the consumption of this tart milk custard. Possibly the internationalizing influence of the United Nations personnel has had something to do with the rush of business. When the Assembly was still in session the United Nations Cafeteria sold 300 jars of yogurt a day. United Nations or not, yogurt is selling in unheard-of volume in some 2,000 outlets in the metropolitan New York area with a special route coverage through New Jersey and Westchester. Now plain platinum-blonde yogurt will be seen everywhere with its sister, the daring strawberry blonde.
Holland prepares a ham similar to the Westphalian and has sent a shipment to this country. It's a ham long-cured, not cooked, to be eaten as is, sliced very, very thin. We like it spread with cream cheese, sprinkled with chives, to team with cocktails. Price $2.95 a pound at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue. Another Dutch offering is turkey boned, rolled, and tied like a rib roast, then baked. Slice thin and serve as an hors d'oeuvre or a cold-plate special. Dark and light meat are in separate rolls—the light $3.95 a pound, dark $3.25, or half and half (attractive on a plate) $3.50.
Butter-iced breakfast buns are announced by the Arnold Bakers of Port Chester, New York, the eighth item in their growing line of home-style breads and rolls. A rich yeast dough for the buns, with little chips of candied orange peel here and there. Lots and lots of butter, fresh egg yolks, pure vanilla bean. A dozen small buns lightly frosted are packaged in a colorful box with full-view cellophane window, 33 cents a dozen at the Gristedes, Grand Union, and A & P chains, and at scores and scores of markets in fourteen states from Portland, Maine, south into Virginia.
Fancy honeys come again to the store shelves. One of the largest collections of unusual state honeys, over twenty kinds, is seen at Hettie Hamper's Honey House, 671 Lexington Avenue, New York City. Honeys are there which haven't been packed since the early years of the war, honeys from the South, New York State, the Middle West, the far West.
California sends the tamarack, eucalyptus, manzanita, the creamy blue curls, and the dark strong cactus. Arizona is there with mesquite; Oregon with her strong hairy vetch. Sourwood is up from Gatlinburg. Tennessee. North Carolina sends a pine honey and a queer one called “purple”; huckleberry provides the nectar for this. Michigan has an original in milkweed and wild raspberry; a thin honey, winelike in flavor, only vaguely sweet, redolent of raspberries. New York State honeys are the purple loose strife and wild thyme from the Catskills. Purple loose strife has a greenish-gold cast, thinnish, a honey with sharp undertones.
Wild thyme is a thick honey delicately herbal. Sheep brought to the Catskills from Greece, where they had grazed on the thyme-covered slopes of Mount Hymettus, carried the herb seed in their wool to scatter over new pastures. So it is that United States bees harvest the “nectar of the gods.” a honey identical to that known in the days of Marathon and Salamis.
Creamy blue curls has the consistency of hard sauce, the same yellow-white color, with a faint raspberry flavor. Goldenrod is an odd one, pale gold, thick as soft butter, tasting like the smell of the flower stem when it's broken, acrid but pleasant. Heartsease is reminder of autumn after the first frost. A taste of drying leaf, of lingering flower, of ripening grape. Frugal in its sweetness, lacking that wanton way of the nectars of summer.
One other honey we must mention is the aromatic sourwood from the great Smoky Mountains, not overly sweet but with distinctive flavor that only the mountain wild flowers can give. This is a handsome pack in 3-pound jars with long rods of the comb, price $2.15. All the other honeys are in pound jars, price range 55 to 75 cents. If ordered by mail, add the postage please.
Before the war Honey House had around two hundred honeys; today they offer fewer than thirty kinds, but by summer's end Miss Hamper thinks she will have over a hundred. Imports are now mostly from countries to the south. Australia is keeping her honeys at home, ditto for France. No heather honey from Scotland or pine honey from Switzerland. But a shipment of Lake Como honey has come in from Italy. It's the state honeys which Miss Hamper hopes to bring into town to swell her collection. If there is a special honey you have been hankering to try, write Honey House, 671 Lexington Avenue. If it isn't in now, it should be before long.
Thirst-inspiring appetizer is Espy's Oyster Herb Pate, a smooth mixture, easy-spreading, made with smoked oysters, these blended with mushrooms, onions, tarragon, capers, then sherry to sharpen the flavor; other zesters are lemon juice and Worcestershire, the 3-ounce jar 89 cents at Hammacher, Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street.
Zombie its name—a rum drink to chew! A small but engaging excitement to pass with ice cream, a confection of sorts made of coconut, made potent of rum, baked to a delicate tan. Allergic to wheat? No flour used in a Zombie, coconut mostly with sugar and syrup, egg white holds it together. Each cake but two bites, little but terrific! The pound tins around $1.50 sell at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, and Seven Park Market, 107 East 34th Street.