One glorious month in the Far West on the hunt for good things to pass on to gourmets. First stop Seattle, to visit Samuel Martin, importer of men's topcoats and Scottish and British woolens, his side line and hobby, game birds. We have told you before about Martin's game products, Wild Life In The Kitchen, selling in delicacy stores from West Coast to East, but this was our first visit to his wild-life bowl, a two-hundred-and-forty-acre bird Eden on Whidbey Island, thirty miles from Seattle. Here he has around nine thousand ring-necked pheasant and wild turkeys eating themselves fat.
Raising pheasant and wild turkey in an atmosphere akin to their natural habitat is the chief factor responsible for the gamy flavor of these birds. Wild things love to roam, and the Martin birds have the range to themselves, eating cafeteria style. Berry- and seed-producing trees and shrubs have been planted to supply the foragers. Leafy green vegetables are grown in abundance from garden seeds plumed in hit-or-miss fashion over the fields. Wild birds don't like to cat from grain troughs, so gamekeeper Martin has attached an endgate seeder to a tractor. which flings the grain in a great arc.
Mr. Martin spends three days a week at the farm, but it's Elmer Tasche and his wife, formerly of South Dakota, who keep the place running. The game products, packed by a local cannery, include cooked whole pheasant in tall lithographed tins and pâtés made of pheasant meat and smoked wild turkey meat combined with the giblets. There are such rare foods as wild turkey à la King, pheasant à la Newberg with sherry wine, and a pheasant broth with wild rice. This Christmas a new pack will be offered direct from the farm, an eviscerated hen and cock in full plumage, fresh-frozen, packed with real wild huckleberries. Price ＄12 with traveling expenses prepaid. Ask for Wild Life In The Kitchen products in the delicacy stores of your city or write direct to Samuel Martin, 605 Union Street, Seattle, Washington.
Fresh salmon is Seattle's big dish among sea foods—that and the Dungeness crab. Along the Puget Sound water front is the fish-market area where we found numerous shops offering to ship home a fresh salmon. These big fish are ice-bedded in wooden boxes, sent express to every state in the Union. Our companion on this water-front jaunt, a native of the city and one who knows her way around, suggested the Pacific Fish Company, 819 Alaskan Way, Seattle 8, Washington, as a reliable house. Here you can order a whole salmon, express prepaid, around 10 pounds in weight, for about ＄10. Giant Dungeness crabs are sent express, 6 big ones ＄4, plus the express charges.
Papaya research chemist J. H. Newmark of Miami has come up with a “bag” way to use papaya as a meat tenderizer. The fruit is dehydrated and packed into a tea type of envelope so the cook can make her own tenderizer by a mere addition of water. One little envelope in a cup of water makes enough tenderizer to prepare forty pounds of meat at a cost of less than a penny a pound. Distribution to stores will start this autumn. Meanwhile, if anyone is interested, Mr. Newmark will mail two envelopes of the dehydrated enzyme, price postpaid ＄1. Address the Papaya Research Laboratory, 4895 S. W. Eighth Street, Miami. Florida.
There's still gold in “them hills” —but in California we discovered a different sort, a golden olive oil, sold mail order by olive-rancher Strafford Wentworth.
He flew his four-seater Stinson down to Bakersfield to pick us up and fly north over valleys and mountains to the back door of the ranch home near Loma Rica. It's the name of this little town he has borrowed as the brand name for his oil.
Young Wentworth, a Harvard graduate, is chairman of the Olive Oil Advisory Board which administers the olive-growers' state program. He is president of the Oroville Wyandotte Irrigation Project, Vice President of Butte County Citrus Association, and Vice Chairman of the olive section of the State Farm Bureau—or, in other words, a responsible young man who can be trusted with your orders. He started in Oroville ten years ago and built up its run-down groves, adding groves from near-by districts until today his two-hundred-and-sixty acres of over a thousand trees average three tons of olives to the acre. These olives are the Mission type, for the most part, with a few manzanillas. The bulk of the harvest is processed by the Lindsay Ripe Olive Company, a local cooperative, but a certain amount each season is made into olive oil for mail-order selling from the Wentworth's home basement. We sampled this fine oil of a pale golden color, made from fresh, sound Mission olives without heat application, without the use of chemicals. This oil squeezed from the olive, will keep fresh and sweet to the last drop in the tin. Prices, delivered, ＄6 a gallon west of the Rockies, ＄7 east, or a case of 12 quarts ＄18 west and ＄20 east. Address Wentworth Orchards, Palermo, California.
At Mecca, California, in the kitchen of the Garden of the Setting Sun, Edna Cost has had her candy expert turning out date-nut pralines in record tonnage to supply numerous stores ordering this novelty confection, introduced early last spring. On the West Coast in California we find the fruited patties selling at Bullock's in Los Angeles and Pasadena, at Laura Carey's in Palm Springs, and at the Kampus Korn Krib in Berkeley. In Seattle the candy is at the Bon Ton; in San Antonio at Joske's; and Mrs. Cast tells us, in New York at B. Altrman, Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, H. Hicks and Son, 30 West 57th Street, and Alice Marks, 9 West 57th Street.
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