1950s Archive

Food Flashes

Originally Published February 1951

Is there any better dessert after a dinner than a red-meated grapefruit broiled with sweet sherry? Or dress the halves with a cherry or a dot of cranberry, or drizzle on honey. Order these hard-to-find fruit direct from the tree, one dozen of the large size comes packed in a colorful, handmade Mexican palm tray, thirteen by seventeen inches by four inches deep, delivered anywhere in the United States except California, Florida, and Arizona, price $6.45 prepaid. Red-meated grapefruit sell also by the bushel, 55 pounds, postpaid $7.75. The firm guarantees the package satisfactory or your money returned. Address Tex-Groves Fruit Company, Dept. G., P. O. Box 1147, Brownsville,Texas.

Stop and Go onions (red and green) are a new fashion note for the cocktail table, packed by Holbrook's of England. These onions are medium to small size, not too strong of flavor, made nicely sour with vinegar. The colors, thank goodness, are not so dark as to appear dangerous. Notice, too, that the color goes all the way through the onion and is evenly distributed. A red onion for the Martini, a green for the Gibson, provide more than eye shine—they serve as color cue telling which drink is which. These color winks may be used effectively to garnish a savory canapé or to bead onto toothpicks, a good-to-eat decoration to serve with a sandwich instead of the wedge of pickle. Stop and Go onions provide contrast, texture- and colorwise.

The new onions have had a warm welcome by the food buyers. Everyone's stocking these wee color balls, price around 69 cents the 7-ounce jar. In New York: B. Altman, R. H. Macy, Gristede stores, Martin's Fruit Shop, 1040 Madison Avenue, Enoch's Delicatessen, 872 Madison Avenue, H. Hicks and Son, 30 West Fifty-seventh Street. In stores across the country: Simon Brothers, San Francisco; Marshall Field, Chicago; Woodward and Lathrop, Washington, D. C; Prague's, Cincinnati; G. Fox, Hartford; S. S. Pierce, Boston; Cohen Brothers, Jacksonville, Florida.

Seashore Surprise is a mighty good catch for a sea-food loving family. This is an assortment of seven Gorton-Pew Fisheries products packed in a white and red-metal picnic basket with sturdy wooden handles. It's quite an array: two cans of the ready-to-fry codfish cakes, a can of New England clam chowder, also fish chowder, a tin of flaked fish, a tin of fish roe, one large oval tin of kippered herring, and that new canned salt codfish which comes ready to use. This, by the way, is the same firm, boneless Atlantic salt cod that has been packed near the Gloucester docks since 1849. It was the first product processed by John Pew and Sons, the original firm. Gorton-Pew sell it dried and salted in pound blocks, in five-ounce cardboard packages, and now in the new way, cooked and ready to use for women who hate to bother with freshening dried fish. On the back of the label of the 11 1/2-ounce tin are recipes for creamed codfish, for a New England fish dinner, for codfish balls, and salt codfish hash.

A word about the chowders: these are concentrates, meaning that an equal amount of milk should be added to the contents of the tin. We find both the chowders well seasoned, a good proportion of clams in the one, with plenty of fish in the other, the potato firm and evenly diced—two excellent products.

The fish roe is cod, haddock, and pollock. This to be mixed with bread crumbs and egg, seasoned to taste, made into cakes to fry in smoking hot fat. A big money's worth if used as a spread for hors-d'oeuvre. The roe can be mixed with softened butter, then a few drops of lemon juice to heighten the flavor. Along with the kit goes a 36-page, color-illustrated recipe book, “105 Deep-Sea Recipes, ” the price $3.25, postage paid. Send check or money order direct to Gorton's of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Adventure with cheese; a boxload of surprises is offered by Macy's—seven kinds of processed cheese cut in 30 small wedges, each labeled so you know what you are eating, the price $3.94 plus 16 cents postage. Here's what you get: Swiss Gruyère; sharp, aged Cheddar; plain Swiss; Swiss Gruyère with caraway; the same blended with ham; Swiss Tilset; and a kind called Rigis.

Each wedge is cut dessert-sized and is packed in sunburst pattern in an acetate, see-through box looking festive as a block from sunburst quilt our grandmother kept on the spare-room bed.

A virgin peanut oil came to market last spring named Bowl and Cruet and selling great guns; the number of reorders surprise even the makers who knew all along they had a fine product. One enthusiastic user is M. Louis Diat, of New York's Ritz-Carlton.

The makers are a husband-wife team, Helen and William Friedburg, who have the peanut oil business as a side line to their everyday jobs. Helen is a home economist and for several years now has been making a study of virgin oils, searching the country for someone to produce a product to her rigid specifications. The Friedburgs' idea was to make an oil from peanuts in a manner similar to the nut oils common in France but little known here. Not just another salad oil but one virtually perfect. A Texas edible-oil producer became interested in the project and went all out, as Texans can do, to make a fine job of it.

The oil is made of freshly shelled, hand-sorted nuts, these pressed in small batches in special presses that can be kept sweet and clean. The filtered oil is run immediately into the containers. The closure is screw-capped so the oil is easily accessible.

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