Dark red, clear as crystal, it pours from the bottle, a smooth, velvety syrup with a glistening look. Ribena by name, made from pure black currant juice and sugar, not a thing else. Add water for a drink that's tart, fresh, and fragrant. A newcomer this year to our grocery shelves, a product from England that has moved in to stay. Its makers, H. W. Carter and Company, Ltd., expect sales in the States to average a million dollars a year.
That may seem sheer optimism, but foreign firms have a monopoly here on black Currant products. The growth of this currant is restricted in the United States since the plant carries the white pine blister, a killer of the valuable pine, a tree disease native to Europe but curbed there by natural conditions. Here it threatens to wipe out the white pines as blight killed the chestnuts many years ago.
C. H. Massingham of the Carter firm of Coleford, Gloucestershire, who came here a short time ago to study the American market, told us something of Ribena's success. The syrup was made first in 1937 when the Curter chemists were working with the Agricultural Research Station of the English Government to find new ways of using surplus soft fruits. A beautiful syrup formula was developed for using strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, and black currants.
But little use for these until an Australian came to London to open England's first milk bar and conceived the idea of using the syrup in milk shakes. Soon other milk bars were opening, and the heavy, fragrant elixirs had ready sale.
The sugar shortage put an end to the syrup except for black currant, which the scientists had found richer in vitamin C than citrus. Ribena is still a priority product with over two and one-half million bottles selling in England a year, but now distribution is extended as production has doubled.
The firm has 400 acres of black currants under contract in different sections of England, staggered so the harvest runs forty tons a day for four to six weeks. Also arrangements have been made with Denmark and Australia to grow the currants. The juice is pressed where the currants are grown according to the firm's formula, then shipped to England where the syrup is processed.
The syrup will be promoted here as a sauce for puddings and ice cream, as an addition to punches and cocktails. The juice is derived from the same black currants used in crème de cassis—but unlike the French beverage, there is no alcohol in the English product.
The Carter plant in Birmingham is the most modern factory built in England since the war. John Brent, Inc., 37 West 57th Street, New York, the United States distributor, has placed the syrup in such stores as R. H. Macy, B. Altman, Gimbel Bros, the 13-ounce bottle 72 to 79 cents.
Fancy desserts can be achieved in a hurry if Martha Ann's Ice Cream Sauces are kept stocked in the pantry. Eight in the line, three of them fruits—strawberry, pineapple, and red raspberry; three of them chocolaty—bittersweet, plain, and thick fudge. Seventh sister, a butterscotch sauce, is extra rich, and the last, a caramel of old-fashioned homemade goodness, is one you are sure to enjoy. The sauces are made especially for ice cream but do as well when topping a pudding.
Recently story-hunting in Cincinnati, we took time out for a visit at the Grace Rush factory. We liked what we saw in this two-story building so immaculately kept. In one refrigerated room we counted over 500 barrels of fruits aging in syrup—pineapple, orange, cherries, citron, ginger, and lemon waiting their turn to be mixed into fruitcake batter or to be glacéed and into the package. The firm buys fresh fruit in brine and docs its own processing in order to control the quality. The ice cream sauces are in the delicacy stores in larger cities across the country.
Speaking of saucing ice cream, remember Nesselro by Raffetto. This is a caterers sauce not practically made in the home. It's a combination of imported marrons and fruits in a fine rum punch. It's delectable used for Nesselrode pic or in a pudding for a frozen dessert. Leading food shops of all the larger cities have the 10-ounce jar for around 70 cents.
France sends her famous tripes à la mode dec Caen packed at Capdenac-Gare in Aveyron. Tender two-inch pieces of tripe combine with boned beef feet in a thin winy gravy, an item discovered at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, New York City, the 14 ½-ounce tin ＄1, or servings for two. The gravy for this dish is made separately from the bone stock of the beef feet. Tripe and meat are cooked together first, then into an earthenware casserole to be hermetically scaled with dough and baked in a slow oven for long hours. Not to be forgotten: the bunch of fresh parsley, the indispensable stick of celery, the classical toe of garlic, the cayenne, the cloves, the thyme, the bay leaves. Then the white wine and last the cider brandy, so dear to Norman throats.
Live lobsters hermetically scaled into cans will soon be traveling to kitchen doors by express and by air. A method has been developed by the Live-Pak Seafoods, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts, for keeping canned lobster in perfect condition for six days to two weeks. The cans contain a treated water plus oxygen and a material to absorb the waste product. During shipment the lobsters must be kept at forty degrees Fahrenheit to slow down metabolism and the oxygen requirements.
We read about live lobsters in tins and immediately ordered a sampling. Came a 30-pound box, lined in a shock-absorbing paper, two cans, each holding two medium-sized lobsters with two extra cans in the box, these scaled with a refrigerant. When the tins were opened, the lobsters seemed sluggish but a few moments later were traveling in a hurry down the kitchen table with every intent of going back to the sea. They cooked sweet, with a flavor reminiscent of lobster we have eaten at down Boat beach parties, fresh-trapped beauties boiled in sea water over a bed of spruce coals.
The live-lobster packers tell us that a related process has been successful for packaged fresh-cooked lobster meat. The lobster is cooked, the meat placed in the can with the special treating material and with no sterilization to destroy the delicate flavor. This pack kept in the can at household-refrigerator temperatures can be held safely for a week. In the home freezer the meat keeps well for three months. This product sells around ＄2.20 a pound and represents about 4 ½ pounds of the live lobster. The low price is possible because the lobster is canned at its source, usually at Prince Edward Island, Canada, at peak lobster season.
A top-rater of a potato soup, one to serve hot or cold, is on the market this summer, made by Penn's Manor Canning Company of Bristol, Pennsylvania. They call this a vichyssoise, but it isn't exactly as it's made with the onion instead of the leek.
Fresh rich milk in this soup, along with creamery butter, with potatoes, with onions and garlic and celery; everything fresh. One of the best potato soups you are likely to turn from a can, honestly homemade in flavor. It's a soup we like hot even better than chilled. A medium-thick brew, ready to serve, nothing to add.
But heat, beat, beat to disperse the fat globules. Add a garnish of chives or snips of parsley for the green touch. Order direct by mail from Penn's Manor Products, Cornwells Heights 2, Pennsylvania. Six 19-ounce tins for ＄2, postpaid anywhere in the United States.
Cooked baby shrimp are being flown weekly to New York's delicacy stores fresh from the Continent. A miniature shrimp barely one and one-half inches long, caught off the coast of England, off France, Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries. On the Continent these midgets are cooked, peeled, and eaten just as they are. In England they are served frequently at bars as a snack item to be accompanied by a glass of dry sherry. Served cold usually, with warm melted butter as the last word in a dunking sauce. That with a big sprinkle of freshly ground pepper.
The shrimp are more delicate in flavor than Florida's big jumbos, and because the flavor is elusive, much of the goodness is lost when put into cans. Charles and Company carries these shrimp for 69 cents for ½ pound, that's portions for two. Or 35 cents for ¼ pound bag.
What to do with them? We put the question to Théophile Kieffer, veteran chef of New York's Sherry-Nctherland Hotel. He suggests the shellfish be sautéed with a little onion and paprika and added to a sauce similar to Newberg, then dipped into patty shells. Or have them done in a rich cream sauce and serve on toast as a supper dish.
In Denmark, which still sets the world's snacking pace in way of the open-face sandwich, these little fellows are shucked and prepared in sweet butter on bread to make one gigantic pyramid portion. Use any bread and spread it thickly with butter and lay on the midgets for the appetizer called “shrimp in a crowd.”
It carries the taste of crisply fried bacon, yet no film of grease. It's French-fried bacon rind, tender, slightly porous in texture, crunchy as popcorn. So often these bacon skin appetizers around in the stores are mighty tough chewing. Not these Krunchy Crackles put out by Krunchy Foods, Inc. of Marcy, New York. Pass these Krunchies with the drinks. Good eating with a vegetable salad or a cheese sandwich. Scatter a few coarsely crumbled over a vegetable cream soup.
These are found in better food shops all over the country. S. S. Pierce of Boston, for one, Marshall Field of Chicago, Daniels & Fisher of Denver, McLean Goldberg and Bowen of San Francisco, Jordan Marsh of Boston, Loblaw Groceterias through New York State, for others, your favorite local shop very likely for another. The price is about 39 cents for the 2-ounce net weight jar.
Pickle Chips by Sexton are bright, sweet, and spicy, a crisp, cool-looking garnish for the cold-cut platters. A chip that adds nip to a salad, a sandwich. Easy to locate in the food shops which carry Sexton products; 20th Century Pickle Chips, that's the whole name.
Found a jar of crêpes Suzette that taste freshly made, homemade, and are. Little pancakes unsubstantial, thin as a whisper, the yellow-brown of an omelette, elegantly and generously sauced in Cointreau and cognac. These are ready to serve after reheating, unless you wish to flame them when dished, then sprinkle with cognac and touch off the big blaze.
The crêpes are made in small batches by two French women, Jeanne Douglas and Berthe Louis, of New York. Mrs. Louis bakes the pancakes, and hot from the griddle passes them along to Mrs. Douglas who has the spirited sauce ready and flaming. A few tosses of the pan-cakes ill the bubbling elixir until they absorb all the sauce, folded into a triangle, and quickly into the jar. The pan-cakes aren't allowed to linger an instant —result, they couldn't be better.
No neat rolling of the cake—they are much too gossamer to stand up on end. These cakes relax, fragile and limp, oozing the odors of paradise, and not the teetotaler Mohammedan kind. The 8-ounce jar, Chanteclair the brand, sells for ＄2.25.
The same kitchen has ready an excellent sauce named Suzette Delight for those who prefer to bake their own pan-cakes, then lave on a prepared sauce. This sauce has exactly the same ingredients as used for the crêpes packed in the jar and is but half as expensive, ＄1.25 for 8 ounces, enough sauce for 12 thin little pancakes. Nothing to add except the extra bit of brandy if you wish the dish flambéed. A second sauce is the rum, a marvelous thing for puddings, to spread over cake, to dollop on baked apple, add to broiled grapefruit, or spread over toast. It's made like the Suzette Delight but with more orange than lemon, and rum instead of Cointreau and cognac.
The sauces are made with sweet butter, the best of liquors, the finest of fruit. The goodness of these products is evidenced by the ready acceptance of the New York City store buyers. The crêpes and the two sauces are at Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue; Seven Park Avenue Foods, 109 East 34th Street; Dover Delicatessen, 683 Lexington Avenue; Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street.
Slewed prunes have been added to the grocer's cold case. The humble is no longer humble, not these plump, rounded beauties packed by James Mills Orchards of Hamilton, California. This firm, by the way, is the largest independent prune company in the country, their orchards located on the banks of the Sacramento River at the very foot of seething Mount Lassen, the only active volcano left in the United States. It's the lava-enriched soil that is said to be responsible for producing some of the finest prunes in the West. A picture of the peak serves as the trademark on, the 1-pound heavy cardboard pack made with a metal top and bottom. We counted 29 prunes in the package, the fruit precooked in pure prune juice with a small amount of sugar and a dash of lemon. The prunes arc small, seeded, tender-fleshed, almost without wrinkles.
The formula was developed in cooperation with the University of California, the Prune Institute, the Palace Hotel of San Francisco, and food experts of the Union Pacific Railroad. Serve the prunes the moment they are defrosted, nothing to add, they are flavored just so, unless you would like to smack them up with a jigger of sherry.
Newest munch team is a jar of cocktail crackers, diamond-shaped crackers, Karats so-called, traveling to shops with a green-gold spread, a cream cheese blended with spices, touched lightly with curry. This pair are home-kitchen-made by Mrs. George I. Malcom of Norfolk, Connecticut.
The cheese came first, but Mrs. Malcom thought the salty crackers on which she served the spread spoiled its delicate flavor. Her son John, a young gourmet, said, “Try this on those biscuits you turned our last week,” biscuits Mrs. Malcom had found in her mother's cookbook and tried just for fun. She made a second batch. “Too big and too thick.”
She tried the recipe again, adding, omitting, and finally developing a biscuit simply perfect as a base for virtually any snack topping. The cracker has a pleasing flavor of its own, yet doesn't detract from a delicate spread such as caviar or pâté de foie gras or the spiced cream cheese. The final product is a perfect two-bite size, a noncrumbling type of cracker, so tender it snaps in the middle without showering bits of the spread on the eater.
Karats sell in New York at Bellows and Company, 67 East 52nd Street; Charles and Company 340 Madison Avenue. In Connecticut at Sage Allen in Hartford, Henri's in New Haven, Food and Bakery Shop in Litchfield, Mayflower Gift and Tea Room in Washington, and Richard Whalen's Shop in Norfolk. In Massachusetts, The Wine Cellar in Stockbridge, and Gorham and Norton in Great Harrington. Price of Karats is 85 cents for the 5-ounce jar, the cheese spread 60 cents for 4 ounces.
Czechoslovakia's Prague hams return, the first since the war, can-packed 7 to 8 pounds At ＄1.29 a pound, handled by Bloomingdale's, Lexington Avenue at 59th, New York City.
A row of odd things on the tasting table. Indian condiments and all strangers to us, Hot, hot stuff! Some hot enough to make the mouth smoke. A nip of this, a nip of that, strange thrills are recorded on the palate. These mixtures are each a curious spicy alchemy of genuine Indian inventiveness. Only one slightly familiar, this labeled tomato chutney and reminiscent of the tomato preserves made in our grandma's kitchen, except for one thing—a strong taste of ginger. A sweet-hot preserve, clear, with little pieces of tomato to surprise the teeth.
Taste here the prawn balchow. Zingo! It leaves the taste buds virtually paralyzed by its heat. Yet it's something we would certainly enjoy mixed in with curry, if used in the tiniest of dips. The ingredient listing reads fruit, ground chilies, mustard, mustard oil, garlic, turmeric, salt, sugar, and vinegar.
A curry paste next, to be used instead of curry powder with the advantage that the paste is more complete in its seasoning elements.
Lemon pickle in mustard oil is hot and oily, spiced with the fragrant herbs of antiquity. Use it, we'd say, as a curry accompaniment. Bombay duck pickle is slightly tart yet a bit sweet, hot as unmentionable places. It is most unusual in its flavor, with little brusque fumes for the nose and a bitter sharpness for the throat. Even the mango pickle becomes an oddity, done as it is in hot mustard oil.
It is a fact that mulligatawny paste gets into Indian dishes about as often as salt and pepper does into American cuisine. This paste is to be used like the curry paste, the ingredients the same but in slightly different proportions and with tamarind added. Indian cooks use the curry paste or the mulligatawny as a seasoning for soup, meat, poultry, vegetables, and stew.
One syrup in this Indian line is rather thick, fragrant of rose, clear pink, pretty for flavoring a pudding. We would like it, too, for the icing on a white layer cake, one tinctured with rose water.
Widely traveled Americans who have eaten their way around the world and found themselves eternal converts to Indian cooking will find these curry accompaniments well worth sampling. Tomato chutney, 8-ounce jar ＄1.50; prawn balcbow, 1-pound jar ＄2.25; curry paste, 1-pound jar ＄2.25; lemon pickle in mustard oil, 1-pound jar ＄1.60; Bombay duck pickle, 1-pound jar ＄2.25; mango pickle in mustard oil, 1-pound jar ＄1.60. Mulligatawny paste, ＄2.25 per pound; and rose syrup, ＄2 for a bottle containing 26 fluid ounces. All handled by C Henderson, 52 East Fifty-fifth Street, New York. Packed by A. Kalvert and Company of Bombay.