At present it is impossible to make enough of this product to supply the market nationally, so Bowl and Cruet sells mail order only. The price is ＄2 for 2 pints; west of the Rockies, add 20 cents. With your order goes a leaflet of choice salad recipes with directions for making taste-perfect dressings. Included are tricks still unknown to many cooks for cleaning and crisping salad greens. Address orders to: Ryedale Products, Inc., Pleasantville, New York.
Brandiocas are a new confection from the Charlotte Charles Kitchen in Evanston, Illinois. The recipe out of Old Charleston combines coconut, chocolate, and finely ground almonds blended with brandy and rum and a mere touch of curaçao. The white coating on the cooky is characteristic; as the sweetened brandy dries, the sugar coating forms. The sweet is dry and tender, the flavors perfectly blended. Each piece is just the size of a quarter, 100 or thereabouts to a pound, the price ＄1.50, packed in a tightly lidded tin. Not too sweet; something to enjoy with punch, tea, or coffee. Selling in New York at Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East Fifty-seventh Street; at the Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue; and Sherry's, 300 Park Avenue. Sold also in the better food shops of larger cities.
Wild rice no longer belongs exclusively to the Indian, to the wild game menu, or to the gentleman's club. It goes now to the family table for game day dinners, for any day meals. This grain of the smoky sweetness is used with fish, with barnyard fowl, with beef. In two decades the red man's harvest has become an American industry. The Indian's primitive methods of curing, packing, hulling, and cleaning have given way to improved methods introduced by the paleface.
But wild rice is still wild; there are no commercial fields growing this grain. It's a rice which is not rice but an aquatic grass, Zizania aquatica, growing from four to eight feet high in the loam of shallow lakes and rivers. It grows abundantly throughout northern Minnesota to the Canadian border and beyond, and today is sent into every state in the Union, is exported to far lands. Although the processing of the rice has given way to modern methods, machinery doing the job, the harvesting remains largely the handwork of the Indians. Two by two, the workers shake the grain from the tall, rustling grasses. One man poles, another paddles the birch-bark canoe; two more pull down the rice heads and beat the grain to the bottom of the boat. Never must the rice be cut, and some seed must always be lost to reseed the lake beds.
Here are no strange machines, only rush mats and birch-bark baskets. The rice is spread over sheets of birch bark to dry in air and sun. And then machines take over. The cream of the crop brings a premium price in the white man's market where the grain is factory processed and packaged to the paleface's finicky taste.
One of the cleanest of the wild rice packs comes here from Canada, the trade name Canwest, packaged by the Red River Grain Company, St. Boniface, Manitoba. This is a natural, black wild rice, unpolished and full-flavored, gathered by the Indians from fresh-water lakes. It has been carefully graded for size, and only the choicest grains selected, these of almost identical length. With your order for the 12-ounce package, ＄2 postpaid, comes a wild rice recipe book, 36 recipes included. Address: Agricol Corporation, 92 Liberty Street, New York City, distributors for the United States.
Sampling a rangy blueberry jam coming from the Douglas Blueberry Plantations of Douglas, Michigan, brings back the memory of a Sunday breakfast with the Corbetts, Lucy and Sid. Early morning I had driven out of Detroit to Ile Grosse, to the back door of their century-old house and into a kitchen that is the heart and the pulse of the Corbetts' world. This I knew from reading their latest book, Long Windows, and long windows they were, from floor to ceiling, overlooking the Detroit River at the great Livingston Cut.
French pancakes for breakfast, one, two, three, each paper-thin and of dinner-plate size. With the pancakes came a bowl of fresh Michigan blueberries, a bowl of sour cream. The blueberries were to spoon across the middle of the well-buttered hot cakes, the sour cream to ladle over berries with a sprinkle of sugar, then roll up the cake using fingers and fork. A platter of crisply fried bacon came, too, so one time we rolled the pancake with blueberries, the next time a bacon strip was laid down the middle.
Sid said when you haven't fresh blueberries, use blueberry jam. We did this very thing only a Sunday ago, using the Pure Quill Douglas brand prepared from Michigan blueberries, made in small batches; almost a purée, it spreads like butter. Six jars, 10 ounces each, ＄2.95 per case. Shipping and insurance charges paid. Open one jar; if you aren't completely pleased, send the other five back. Address: Douglas Blueberry Plantations, Douglas, Michigan.
Don Spencer sent us a treat for dinner. Don's a gamegrower who sells game in feather, game in the can, game quick-frozen ready to push into the oven. But something new in our package, a quick-frozen pheasant, one already stuffed, and stuffed by Jean Issaly, one of the finest chefs in the business, ruler of La Crémaillère kitchen, famed country inn at Banksville, New York. There it's French food as fine as served anywhere. So, the way of that stuffing: a combination of finely ground veal, pork, and partially cooked salt pork, mixed in along with wild rice. Cognac and brandy are added, and the whole is seasoned with salt and freshly ground pepper. These ready-for-the-oven pheasants sell for ＄15 a brace postpaid, to be ordered from the Berkshire Game Farm, 271 Madison Avenue, New York City.
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