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.
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.
The same firm has canned game birds, packed whole—pheasant, guinea, and mallard duck. The dressed bird is placed in a perforated Cry-O-Vac bag, then into the tin to cook in its own juices and be turned out whole and firm, now into a hot oven for 20 minutes to come to golden perfection.
The birds are raised on Spencer's Berkshire Game Farm, and the canning process is exclusive with his kitchen. The most outstanding product to our way of thinking is the whole pheasant in natural broth with sherry, the price ＄6.90, or six tins ＄40.50, 12 tins ＄78.00; the whole guinea in natural broth with port wine, ＄3.75 for one, ＄11 for six, ＄42.50 a dozen. Soups, too, in this line: a pheasant broth with wild rice, also a clear pheasant broth, a jellied pheasant consommé with sherry wine, pheasant soup with pheasant meat, and a wild mallard duck stew. The items are beautifully prepared; why not write for the leaflet which describes each in detail and gives the prices? The pheasant à la Newberg, for example, is one we have served, one tin just right for a twosome. The light and dark pheasant meat is diced amd prepared with chopped mushrooms and truffles in the rich sauce well seasoned with sherry. Have it on toast or on wild rice or in patty shells for a luncheon, ＄2.25 for a tin.
Minnesota wild rice, cooked, light, and fluffy, is sold ready to heat and bring to the table in ten minutes flat. The 12-ounce tin contains the proper amount to accompany a brace of pheasants or mallards, price ＄1.10.
“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, ” sang Shakespeare—and some three centuries later, food writers are singing the praises of bay and basil, rosemary, savory, and thyme. Every cook in her kitchen is experimenting with every familiar dish from soup to salad.
Packed for the amateurs in the herb game is a sampling set of six of the most commonly used herbs, packed in round plastic boxes with chart directions for using, a mail-order offer for ＄1.50, postage included. The herbs are basil, orégano, thyme, rosemary, savory, and marjoram. Freshly cured, these herbs, and no dust, as the see-through box plainly reveals, no twigs. The herbs have a fresh color, and up with the lid, let the nose discover the aromatic fragrance. The boxes each hold around 1/4 ounce, which sounds next to nothing, but a little goes a long way. Address orders to Piquant Products Company, San Andreas, California, and ask for the Hostess Herb Set.