New Orleans, Queen City of the Mississippi. Sip a Ramos gin fizz, dull circs forgotten, bury disappointments in a heady Sazerac. Sing as you dip into the velvet tastiness of a gumbo filé. One bite of the boiled beef brisket with its Louisiana hot sauce, and the taste buds snap to ready attention. And the shrimp! Nowhere else in the world is there shrimp sauce to compare—it's shrimp sauce divine!
Buy a cookbook to duplicate Creole masterpieces; it's a search then for the necessary ingredients.
If you would inhale the aroma of New Orleans cookery rising from a rich gumbo, would eat jambalaya flavored with saffron, or enjoy shrimp in a rémoulade sauce made with the true Creole touch, visit Solari's, go visiting by mail.
This Solari's is one of America's finest grocery stores, eighty-five years old, looted in the old French Quarter of the Crescent City. It is a store known throughout the South for its vast collection of delicacies, including items typically Creole and sold on mail order to all parts of the world.
One afternoon a few weeks ago, when we were sightseeing in the heart of the French Quarter, we came face to front with Solari's old store and stopped for a look. We missed the bosses, the Cheers, father and son, but learned that one of the fastest selling mail-order items is the Creole pecan pralines, packaged in the Mardi Gras box, ten soft tongue-melting patties, price ＄1.70, post-age prepaid anywhere in the country. This store has its own candy kitchen on the third floor, the emphasis on Old Southern confections. One assortment called Old Creole Days contains twelve varieties. Four we sampled: sugar pecans, pecan clusters, honey Curls, and cream nutty tops, the box cover depicting the historical St. Louis Cathedral. 2 pounds ＄2.75. Address Solari's, Vieux Carré, New Orleans, Louisiana.
This year Solaris has started making sea-food sauces which they are selling to delicacy stores in many cities. New Orleans women tell us that the new rémoulade sauce is extra nice and not too hot for the outlander's taste. It is made with a vegetable oil, ground fresh vegetables, tomato sauce, vinegar, and a handful of spices.
Quite different is the Creole sea-food sauce, with a base of ground fresh vegetables with mustard, with tomato, but a different spicing entirely. There is a Creole cocktail sauce and the unique Creole mustard, hot with red pepper. The firm offers its own mayonnaise, tartare sauce, and Thousand Island dressing. Their Creole salad dressing is quite unlike anything we have in the North. Mayonnaise is the base with green pepper, tomato sauce, considerable garlic, and Italian cheese.
These sauce items are being handled by the following stores: in Chicago, Marshall Field and Company and the Fair Store, State and Adams. In California, Fancy Pantry, La Jolla; Jurgensen's and F. C Nash and Company, Pasadena; Lloyd's, Santa Barbara; Piedmont Grocery Company, Oakland; Vendome Fine Foods, Beverly Hills; Gourmet Shop. Carmel; LIords and Elwood, 8847 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles; Sun Ripe Date Company. Long Beach. In the South. Waite's, Birmingham, Alabama; the Snack Shop. Victoria, Texas.
If these items are not carried in your city, you can order by mail direct from Solari's plus postage. Prices are as follows: Creole cocktail sauce, sea-food sauce, and rémoulade sauce, quart ＄1.45. pint 75 cents; Solari's own mayonnaise. quart 75 cents, pint 45 cents; Creole mustard, quart 45 cents, pint 25 cents, Thousand Island dressing and tartare sauce, ½ pint 35 cents; Creole salad dressing with Italian cheese flavor, pint 95 cents.
Something else we discovered in New Orleans and well worth writing about is the soup line made by Maison Creole. Inc., strictly a local business and selling by mail. Five soups for your pleasure: crayfish bisque, shrimp bisque, turtle soup, Creole gumbo, and Creole sea-food gumbo. We ordered a shipment sent to our kitchen for sampling, and our tasters rated every last item as excellent. The thick turtle soup had a most delicious flavor, subtly combining the finely chopped turtle meat with onions and scallions, parsley, tomatoes, celery, bell peppers, and spices.
The crayfish bisque is thick and well flavored and contains the traditional stuffed crayfish heads to be used as a garnish for the bowls. A soup not so good as the one enjoyed recently at Antoine's, the world-famed New Orleans restaurant. Still a very fine substitute, made of crayfish, shrimp and shrimp stock, onions, shallots, garlic, bell peppers, tomatoes, parsley, celery, thyme, bay leaf, and a big sneeze of pepper, richened with butter and oil.
How to eat those devilish little heads? Serve an oyster fork along with the soup spoon. Hold the head firmly anchored with the fork while the spoon dips out the savory bread stuffing.
The sea-food gumbo is an especially rare delicacy as packed by Maison Creole. The recipe is one passed down by many generations in an old Louisiana French family. In this, crab and shrimp join forces; okra is used with shallots, onions, tomatoes, parsley, celery, bell peppers, and a long list of spices. Serve it piping hot as a main dish. In New Orleans, garlic bread accompanies the soup. Split toast and spread a French loaf with garlic butter, more garlic than butter. A second gumbo is called merely Creole, crabs and shrimp in this, with ham and beef. Again the usual line-up of seasonings. okra the thickener.
Prices F.O.B. New Orleans per case of 12 are as follows; crayfish bisque and shrimp bisque ＄6.60, turtle soup and Creole gumbo ＄6.00, sea-food gumbo ＄5.40. Address Maison Creole. Inc., 8613 Oak Street, New Orleans 18, Louisiana,
Tur-King is a new kind of turkey, a 9-pound roll of boned, uncooked turkey meat, light and dark, all the meat that's usable on a 19- to 20-pound bird, wrapped in heavy aluminum foil, pressed into log form, and frozen. Tur-King is being packaged now in 2 ¼-pound logs for home use to sell through the frozen-food markets. It is processed and packed by Farmers' Produce Company of Willmar, Minnesota, for the Norbest Turkey Growers' Association of Salt Lake City.
New York has a precooked turkey roll built for two, bringing along its own gravy gratis. The name is Marty Snyder's Boneless Turkey Roll, the meat cut into large pieces, seasoned, sewed into a casing of turkey skin, and roasted. Choice here: Some rolls are all-white meat for the white-meat lovers, or all-dark for the drumstick fans. If a house is divided, use then the dark and light meat in combination. The gravy is a concentrate made of turkey giblets and pure turkey stock blended with seasonings and condiments. Sufficient gravy for the portions is packaged in a transparent envelope, requires only diluting and heating.
The units range from 1 pound to 6, made of the best meat taken from 27-pound birds. The dark units are of second joints only, the white unit is made entirely of the breast. Sold in New York at Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue; Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue; R. H. Macy. All-white meat sells around ＄3.50 a pound, all-dark meat around ＄2.25, and the mixed around ＄2.35.
This year turkey broilers will be taking their bow on summer menus. The turkeys are the new, small Beltville white, the breed developed by the government. The birds are tailored for market by Rex Farm, Altura, Minnesota. During the past winter, these broilers, averaging 4 to 6 pounds, sold in the markets around Minneapolis. Distribution now is being extended to Chicago and the East. The turkey can he split for broiling or roasted whole—one just right for two.
The chemical capon is the newest development in the poultry industry. These are hormonized birds, synthetically caponized by the insertion of a hormone pellet under the skin of the neck, a trick that adds fat, enhances flavor, and increases tenderness. The chemical-capon development is still in its infancy but growing rapidly in response to favorable consumer reaction. In some areas these hormonized capons set the market price and are so popular that other poultry often sells at a discount. Poultrymen predict that very soon the hormonized chickens will have nation-wide distribution.
Sophisticated refreshment to accompany a cocktail is a smoked rainbow trout, its brown-tinged flesh flaked from the golden skin and laid on buttered bread fingers. These trout may be ordered direct from Idaho's mountain springs, A special sample offer provides two beauties, each 1 foot long, price ＄4.25, shipped prepaid. Send your check to Earl Hardy. 809 Vista, Boise, Idaho.
The Goudu-makers of Holland have produce a new product and much against the tradition of their order, taken a few liberties with their famous flat loaf. A cheese spread is the item, made especially for the American market. It is a processed cheese made of whole milk in an oblong 3 I/2-ounce block, foil-wrapped and cartoned like a bar of nougat, selling for around 29 to 35 cents. Aged Gouda forms the base of the spread, giving the half-sweet, half-nutlike flavor. Taste the cheese, be your own judge; taste it on Melba toast and notice how easily it spreads, soft as sweet butter.
The spread is a product of the thirty-year-old cooperative organization De Producent, which handles virtually all the products of the cattle farmers of south Holland and Utrecht. The oldest and a most important department of this vast organization is the Farmer's Cheese division. No fewer than 620 farmer members deliver their homemade cheese to the organization's warehouses. It is this Farmer's Cheese especially that has established Holland's reputation in cheese-making. With the greatest care, the well-known flat, round cheeses are matured in the warehouses until they have reached the proper age for the particular flavor desired by the buyers. It was Ernest Hirsch, who had once represented De Producent in Europe, who urged the making of the Gouda spread for America. The cheese-makers hesitated to do anything new with the age-old favorite, but tests were run, and the product so pleased them, they decided to put out the new spread, which has had ready acceptance in the New York market. Producer, as it is trade-marked, sells in the city at Gimbel's; Bloomingdale's; the Gristede Stores; Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue: London Terrace Food Market; and at L Bamberger's, Newark. In other cities, too: Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Washington, and Philadelphia. Ask in your local delicacy stores.
Cherubs came in with the New Year, came in from Holland, these toasted cheese wafers made of Edam and Gouda, 95 per cent cheese, 2 per cent flour, just enough to hold them together. They are crisp little wafers, shaped Eke a lady's finger but of midget dimensions. Snappy of cheese, light as a feather, over a hundred in the 4-ounce tin, selling at B. Altman's in New York City, price 85 cents.
All the way from Texas, a dashing red-and-yellow box packed with a pound of pralines made in sunny San Antonio. The pralines. 15 in our package, each measuring 2 ½ inches across, are jam-packed with nuts, the average count 8 to 9 pecan halves to a patty. The nuts give the flavor, the candy is just sweetness, but pleasant eating chewed in company with the crisp nuts. The price is ＄1.50 for the box, plus 25 cents postage. Each praline is individually wrapped, not one broken specimen in our sampling—yet a patty moist and tender. Order from Sanchez Candies, 1119 West Martin. San Antonio, Texas.
Philadelphia-famed snapper soup, done in the traditional manner with a base of one hundred per cent turtle meat, has been put into cans. It comes well laced with sherry, fragrant of spices, thick with a puree of many fresh vegetables, including carrots, tomatoes, onions, celery cabbage, and Limas.
Philadelphia has been known for this soup since Revolutionary times when the nation's capital was located in the City of Brotherly Love. Then foreign visitors were continuously coming and going and spreading the word of this wonderful brew. It was spoken of in the same breath with Philadelphia terrapin or with Fish House punch.
To introduce the product, the firm is offering snapper soup by mail, four large 19-ounce tins. ＄2.25, or a case of 24 for ＄5.95, postpaid, plus 20 per cent west of the Mississippi. Address: Penn's Manor Products. Cornwells Heights 2, Pennsylvania.
John Sander of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. has a treasure of an heirloom, a packet of recipes inherited from his family in Europe, once suppliers of sea-soned to the great houses of the Continent. Three of these “unusualities” he packs for the American market and sells them mail order. One item is an herb salt to sprinkle sparingly over cheese spreads for canapés or to use on cold meat such as sliced chicken or turkey. It does subtle things to the flavor of fish and is excellent with eggs. A second salt is pungent with both herbs and spices and is at its best used on meats; especially fine in a stew. Let a few shakes of this improve the flavor of a baked potato, scrambled eggs, or Creamed dishes.
A third combination Mr. Sander calls Sandora, this his greatest pride, far more herbs than salt in this instance, creating a subtle zester for all manner of soups. Do us a favor. If you should order Sandora, use it just once in place of parsley on new “taters,” butter-tossed.
The blends are packed in old-fashioned one-footed glasses, about4 ounces of each mixture to a nimbler, price ＄1 apiece, postpaid. Address House of Sander, Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
Traveling midwest, we met a new sauce for steak, the Sirloin Club Sauce made by John Sexton and Company, manufacturing wholesale grocers located in Chicago. It's a sauce good on roast beef, on lamb chops, on fried fish, on any kind of meat sandwich. Some use it for Cooking, some prefer it at table. It is one sauce, we find, which can be added to butter to serve as a dunk for artichoke petals, to use with clams or lobsters or sweetbreads. It has a pureed tomato base; this is combined with malt vinegar and with tamarinds, with soy sauce, onions, and a pinch of garlic. There are prunes in the puree, and spices, sugar, and salt. The red-brown stuff is a smooth blend of flavors and just slightly hot. There's a big come-on to its flavor. Tasting while writing, we enjoyed three whopper doses.