Honey in comb for a summer breakfast treat. Crash in with the fork, spill out the white clover sweetness, a bee's content distilled with a trace of the basswood bloom, a pinch of the nectar of the apple blossom, this something extra, a gift of the furry architects thrown in for good measure. An epicurean delight on toasted muffins, on wheat cakes. About 14 ounces to a comb, 4 combs ＄2.50. You pay the express from Smith-town Bee Farm, Jericho Turnpike, Smithtown, New York. The farm has liquid honeys, too, and very fine.
A new pickle in H. J. Heinz “57” line, a processed dill, a crisp-skinned juicy one with a loud smack of dill in its flavor, packed in 25-ounce jars, sells in local groceries and delicatessens, in national distribution.
This pickle, like all Heinz pickles, is a quality job. It has a homespun flavor and has been subjected to rigid kitchen and laboratory tests before getting into commercial production. Heinz is a firm not satisfied with the ordinary run of crooked little cucumbers so often found in home pickle crocks. Their horticulturists have developed a strain of cucumbers especially suited for the jar. These cucumbers have thin skins, are straight as toothpicks, tender-hearted, a pickle that can easily absorb the savors of spiced vinegar.
The seeds of this pedigreed pickle stock are distributed by the Heinz Company to independent farmers in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Colorado, California, and Iowa, who grow the pickle harvest under contract. It takes about one and one-half months for the crop to mature, and during this period, Heinz field specialists are on twenty-four-hour call to answer questions or actually to pitch in and help the grower with any plant crisis. Different pickle varieties require chat cucumbers be picked at different stages, and each day, as the cucumbers reach varying sizes, they are hand-gathered. The pickles are packed in special crates designed to prevent bruising and trucked to a near-by Heinz plant for immediate processing. Not only are Heinz cucumbers of top quality but so are the seasonings; spice-buyers for the firm cover the globe selecting the best grades of spices. Heinz's own jewel-toned vinegars are used for the processing.
Spoor's Mosterd of Holland, that's one for your book, made by royal recipe and for five hundred years. The business was founded by an emperor who fled Portugal in the fifteenth century, when his family was assassinated and he himself badly wounded. It was at Culemborg in the Netherlands that he was nursed back to health in the country home of the Count of Gelderland, near the Count's castle. There on the castle grounds the exiled emperor found employment by grinding seeds in an old windmill.
First product to come from the mill was this imperial mustard made according to a family formula already centuries old. Today the largest mustard factory in the Netherlands, known as N. V. Mosterdfabriek, W. A. Spoor, Jr., stands on the original site of the castle. The old windmill is still there; so is the count's country home, made into offices. The picturesque mill serves as a landmark, also a trademark, its reproduction appearing on every label of the Spoor products.
The mustard has unusual smoothness; this, the importer tells us, is achieved in the processing of the seeds. Its sharp, delightful flavor is the result of a special blending job.
Last year, Spoor's opened a new addition to their plant to meet a growing world demand. Henry Greenebaum, of M. H. Greenebaum, 165 Chambers Street, New York, is the importer of the mustard and the sole American agent for Spoor's. The first shipment is selling in New York at Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street, 35 cents for 4 ½ ounces.
Leftover Sunday hum will bask again in family esteem if passed with the new Persian Mustard Sauce made by Fred Fradkin, It's Fred Fradkin, violinist and radio conductor, who has brewed this concoction of mustard with fruits, with vinegar and oil, and sweetened it mildly with honey so cleverly spiced. The sauce was made originally for his home table, then by demand for his friends, now for the stores. Mr. Fradkin describes his sauce as having a velvety singing tone on the tongue. We say, simply, it's a hot but smooth blend. The recipe had a ten-year workout in the Fradkin kitchen before its market debut. Why call it Persian? Because an Oriental cook in the home of one of Fradkin's friends made it originally and gave him the recipe, which he has been tinkering with ever since, trying to improve on perfection.
Good on other things than ham; cry it on lamb, use it on corned beef, or tongue, or with cold meat loaf, or on a hot Bowser. Serve it hot, serve it cold. Heating doesn't change the consistency one speck. It's a sauce that keeps indefinitely at pantry shelf temperature, selling in 7 ½-ounce jars at B. Altman's, New York City, 65 cents.
Corn has been married to onion under the name Onion-ette. A fine team they make stepping out at gay parties, holding forth at the best bars. This newest appetizer is corn, plain corn, soaked, ground, then cooked with salt and plenty of onion juice. The paste is run through a hydraulic press which spews it out in thin, narrow ribbons to drop into a tank of boiling vegetable oil. A minute to brown, then out to drain and cool on large trays. The ribbons are broken into short lengths, packed into bags and glass jars. These corn shreds are like Fritos but a brand-new flavor, reminding us of the crisp little hush puppy.
The new product is having a landslide in popularity. Since its debut early in February, it has found shelf space in a thousand stores in New York and Brooklyn. The honeymoon started in the town's best bars, university clubs, and quality hotels. Retail outlets in New York are Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue; Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue; Hicks and Company, 50 West Fifty-seventh Street, these offering 7-ounce jars, price 49 cents to 55 cents. In Brooklyn, Abraham & Straus's grocery carries the item.
Peeling a chestnut is a task women hate. It makes the arm ache; one may slice off a finger. Any way you do it, chestnut peeling is tedious. Now chestnuts come prepeeled, precooked, in 18-ounce jars, packed in the lightly salted water in which they are cooked. The chestnuts are whole—no broken specimens in our sample, at least—and perfectly peeled, not a fleck of skin left. This new product for the American cook who has no patience with tedium is the idea of B. V. Ossola, vice-president of the J. Ossola importing Company of New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Miami.
B. V. stands for Betty Victoria, who for ten years has done a man's job as executive manager and buyer for her father's importing firm, bringing in Italian products and Spanish delectables. Father, that's J. Ossola, has trained Betty to carry on his business, and no man-child could do the job better, he boasts.
This week, Betty came calling with a satchel of samples. She asked for a can opener and a bowl and zipped out the chestnuts, 32 the jar-count, these to purée and serve as a vegetable, to use in soup or as a stuffing for turkey.
Another remarkable product made by the Ossola firm is the olive condite. This is a combination of pitted, crushed olives, packed with slices of sweet pimiento and capers in a mixture of olive oil with vinegar, salted slightly, and orégano added for the final taste touch. Turn over a bowl of greens, then toss, no salad dressing needed. Or the mixture may be used as an antipasto or relish.
The 13-ounce, bell-shaped jar is 42 to 45 cents, selling in delicacy shops in Boston, Providence, Albany, New York, Washington, D. C., Baltimore, Charleston, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Chicago, and many other cities.
From that beef-loving town of Kansas City comes a barbecue sauce, the Hot-N-Tot, made by the E. H. Wright Company and made, we suspect, with a touch of erupting volcano. It's not only molten hot but has a new flavor with a different tang resulting from the blending of many spices.
Same firm offers a bottle of smoke. Yes, smoke condensed from choice hardwood and put into liquid form, nothing added. The principal use of this product for many years was by farmers for smoking hams and bacon. But with the popularity of the backyard barbecue and of oven-barbecued food, people everywhere are buying smoke to dash over meat. It's easy to use and inexpensive.
Suppose ribs are the meat for your barbecue. Apply a coat of liquid smoke to both sides of the slabs and allow to dry for 20 minutes. Salt and pepper and prepare in any way you please. If a stronger smoke taste is desired, give the meat a second coat during the cooking. Liquid smoke may be brushed over any meats going to the broiler, and that woodsy, outdoor smoke taste is there to pamper the palate. A swish of smoke over a hamburger, and you have an epicurean delight fresh from the barbecue pit.
The Wright products are distributed throughout the United States and to many foreign countries, sold in all better food stores. Liquid smoke sells rather generally through the drug stores of the country—this practice resulting from the days when drug companies sold farmers the necessary mixtures for home-curing their own butchered meats.
Bring gold to the summer breakfast. Bring a marmalade whose spirit is the bitter orange, deep amber stuff, tasting of the slow-cooked citrus, a sparkle here of the assertive lemon, but well tempered by the sweetness of the sugar. Extravagant in its goodness, surely a marmalade that will make a name for itself, labeled Mendip Cottage, out of Old England by way of a New England kitchen in Hamilton, Massachusetts. The makers are Michael Wynne-Willson, an ex-RAF fighter-pilot, and his American wife Jackie, a Smith College graduate.
This couple had no intention of going into the marmalade business until just a year ago when, as Michael said frankly, “We were busted.” Friends came to call, and Jackie served tea and toast and passed the marmalade she had made by her mother-in-law's recipe. Guests mightily admired the amber spread and several asked Jackie to make a few jars for sale. The Wynne-Willsons took a chance and invested in citrus.
The marmalade sold and resold. The fruit is cut in large pieces, cooked tender, set in thick jelly. Made simply of sugar, oranges, and lemons, but somehow it's different, a homemade spread, English to the last bitter shred.
This spring, Mendip Cottage introduced a new product, a butterscotch sauce—golden and velvet-smooth, tasting of butter, made with heavy cream, corn syrup, sugar, vanilla.
Marmalade and butterscotch sauce each sells for around 65 cents for the 11-ounce jar, handled in New York City by the Woman's Exchange, 541 Madison Avenue, and at the Mary Elizabeth Tea Room, 8 East 37th Street. Also at the Woman's Exchange, Stamford, Connecticut, and at the Woman's Educational and Industrial Union and the Farm and Garden Shop, both in Boston. Johnny Appleseed's Country Store in Concord, Massachusetts, and the Country Store in Ipswich, Massachusetts, also have the products. More shops will be added soon. Buy the marmalade and sauce by mail order, if you wish: three jars for ＄1.95, six for ＄3.70, 12 for ＄6.90, postage prepaid. Address: Mendip Cottage, Ltd., Hamilton, Massachusetts.
Solomon sang of “a feast of fat things.'' We recommend a king salmon fresh from the Northwest. Clare Allen selects the choicest of kings, red salmon gleaming and silver-sided, caught in the deep, cold waters of the North Pacific. The fish is packed in ice and sent by fast express, price ＄10. These big beauties are for those special occasions when you plan for twelve to fifteen guests and want one fish to feed the multitude. You won't know the weight exactly, but 10 pounds is promised as the minimum. Address Clare Allen's King Salmon, P. O. Box 287, Seattle 11, Washington.
Literally oceans of juice are packed now for the table, and more and more of it frozen. New is a concentrated frozen orange juice, packed for Crosse and Blackwell, the 30-cent tin making 1 ½ pints of juice or servings for six. The contents average the juice from twelve oranges. Our Listers gave it the blindfold test and couldn't tell frozen from fresh.
Another new frozen orange juice is the thaw-it, pour-it kind, meaning natural, single strength. This is made by Freshline and is doing exceedingly well at R. H. Macy in New York City, selling for 21 cents the 12-ounce tin. And it's a lip-smacker—no canned taste.
Frozen tangerine juice comes wearing the Minute Maid name. The juice is extracted, concentrated, then frozen by the same vacuum process pioneered by Minute Maid for orange juice.
Word comes that Puerto Rico is developing a new market for its growing pineapple industry with the production of frozen, concentrated pineapple juice. The product will be ready for retail sometime this summer.
By now, surely, you have sampled the frozen fresh cranberry juice, new early last autumn, selling cross-country. This is the pure cranberry juice pressed from freshly picked berries, sweetened slightly, fresh-frozen, of brilliant red color with a mighty twang to the flavor.
Rare honeys come again, a golden harvest from literally all corners of the globe.
Little “birdlings of the heather” have been busy on the English heaths. The newest heather honey is thick as whipped jelly, a grainy sweetness dark as caramel with a caramelized-sugar echo deep in its flavor. Very strong like a healing balsam of herbs and flowers. A magic healing always has been attributed to the heather. Taste—catch that fragrance of the heath where the heather and furze live so happily together?
Next, the Pax of Mount St. Benedict from Trinidad, dark-amber-colored, fairly thick and smooth, exotic in its undertones, but a heart-easing goodness to spread on a toasted muffin to enjoy with tea.
Coffee honey is a clear, dark amber, tasting young in its flavor, lacking in mellowness, but enticing that sharp twang. “To your own honey the devil puts one spoon; to a strange honey, two spoons.''
The Japanese honey is a polite, languid, gold liquid without too much flavor. It is made from the nectar of the blossoming horse chestnut, of milk vetch, and of rape. One reads the label and expects a bold, strong taste; instead this delicate, thin sweetness.
Pound jars of coffee honey 65 cents, Japanese honey 95 cents. Pax honey of Mount St. Benedict 95 cents, all at Hetty Hamper's Honey House, 671 Lexington Avenue, New York. The heather honey is at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, New York, the 1-pound jars ＄1.49.
America's first canapé wafer that came in with the twenties came here from Switzerland, named Caviarette, a J. R. Ritz product. Absent a decade, it returns this year in all its pristine freshness. A crisp, waffled wafer made diamond-shaped with a raised edge to keep the filling from skidding. It comes packed, as in old years, in the diamond-shaped tin sealed inside with tin foil. Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street, New York, have Caviarettes on the shelf, ＄1.15 for a box of 70.
And back again, the J. R. Ritz zwie-back, thin slices, crisp, tender-toasted, made with a yeast bread, one slightly sweet, perfect with tea. The delicate flavor of the toast doesn't usurp tea's royal place in the mouth. Again to Maison Glass for Ritz zwieback, 30 pieces, price ＄1.15.
Pickapeppa Sauce originated on a sugar plantation in Jamaica, B. W. I. Popular here before the war, it returns to the American market.
This is a sauce slightly akin to chutney, but a more liquid condiment. It contains ginger, mangoes, raisins, tamarinds. There is a trace also of several other ingredients — tomatoes, peppers, onions, vinegar, spices—in a beautiful blend. A dash added to other sauces gives a new zest to their flavor.
Sold at specialty food shops, department-store groceries, and delicatessen stores in the larger cities throughout the country.