It's a little patch of heaven—gourmets' heaven, we mean—Bellows' Gourmets' Bazaar, 69 East Fifty-second Street, New York. Here we discovered little delicacies from the Continent not generally found in the States. Suppose you are wanting again a box of those certain peppermints, Bètises de Cambrai, meaning “little nonsenses of Cambrai.” Yours for the asking, a thin white Candy stick with a pale gold stripe. Crisp under the teeth, sharp the mint flavor. Remember buying these long ago at Hediard's famous shop in the place de la Madeleine?
Remember Calissons d'Aix packed in a sealed tin? Bellows' again. The little sweets, a sort of cooky-candy, are diamond-shaped with an egg-white film for a base, almond pastry for a middle, pale cream frosting for a top.
And souvenirs from Dijon, the town smelling of mustard. Remember standing on the corner where Grcy-poupon has its window filled with squat little pots? But this is Bellows', and it's Moutarde de Dijon, a 5-ounce jar for 50 cents. A man's mustard, this pure pale Dijon with all the strength and flavor of the type known in France as nature au vinaigre, being only mustard seed and vinegar with salt. Quite sharp, it is true Dijon. It stands shoulder to shoulder with a jar of Moutarde à l'Estragon, this the same price, this the best Bordeaux mustard, tarragon-flavored, milder yet more savory.
The French have a way of turning elaboration into perfect simplicity. They have done that with quenelles, which long years ago began appearing on their finest menus. These were very much in favor on royal tables of the last century and today hold an important place in the French cuisine. This special dish of the country is a force meat ball of veal, chicken, or fish. They may be used as an entree, either cooked in butler or with a while or brown sauce, or as a garnish with timbales, vol an vent, and patty shells, with fricassees and fish stews, and with large fish. Quenelles de brocbei made from pike are a new item at Bellows', to serve in a sauce over filets of fish for a dressed-up main dish. And also newly arrived are the quenelles aux écrevisses à la Nantua, these made with crayfish from Tours, packed in their own sauce. A third quenelle is made with chicken, quenelles de volaille, to be used in a cream of chicken soup, in a chicken pie, or as an entree.
In the French mood, serve the liny green lentils grown in the volcanic soil of Le Puy, in Auvergne. Nothing else just like these anywhere in the world. The famous French cassoulel is packed into cans, made with round beans, with goose fat and sausage and a piece of pork meat. Purée of chestnuts in the Bellows' French collection, unsweetened to be used as a vegetable stuffing, in making chestnut ice cream, for fancy desserts.
Searching for a lost memory of Paris in the springtime? A certain little restaurant looking out upon the Seine, a waiter at your elbow holding a coeur à la crème resting on a bed of green water cress? Bellows' has everything one needs for preparing the cheese, the woven heart baskets for the molding, the Bar-le-Duc, either white or red currant preserves, to serve over the heart. Two little jars of the Bar-le-Duc, the basket, the recipe, cost ＄1.95. Now you have all that is needed for preparing an exquisite dessert, except the cream and cheese.
Holland sends her famous maanlujes herring in cans and in kegs. In Holland maaljesbaring are the kind they cat raw when the first catch comes in. This herring is very lightly salted and needs no soaking. It's the later catches that bring in the firmer fish, better for export, which is sent here in heavy brine, to be eaten smoked, dried, pickled, kippered, sometimes raw.
The herring is economical food, especially when purchased undressed in the 9-pound keg or dressed in the 5-pound can, each with about 30 herring for ＄2.50. Or you can get a 1-pound 2-ounce can, price ＄1, with about 7 of the maajes herring, headless and dressed. This delicate herring requires little preparation other than freshening. Once the container is opened, the fish can be preserved in brine for several months kept in a cool place.
The maasjes herring is available in New York at Hansa Delicatessen, 1543 Third Avenue; at Bay Shore Fish Market, 1603 Second Avenue; and at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue. Distribution also in Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Grand Rapids, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Ask at the better food shops and delicatessens.
Sea Fare, one of New York's noted sea-food restaurants, serves fish and more fish, yet the main dish is salad. Haystacks of tossed salad go to the tables, and never a twig of chicory or a spear of water cress is left—it's because of the dressing. And because customers kept pestering the management for some to buy, it was decided to bottle the stuff to sell at the cash desk. This is like a thin mayonnaise, pale pink, made with imported olive oil, soy oil, vinegar, fresh lemon juice, and the fresh yolks of eggs in shell. Mustard is in the blend, a combination of spues and the sharp twang of garlic. Orders are handled also by mail, three 16-ounce jars ＄2.50 postpaid. Address Sea Fare Restaurant, 1033 First Avenue, New York.
The plain looks of pain d'amandesof Belgium leaves one quite unprepared for the surprise of its goodness. This dry, light-textured oblong biscuit, neither thick nor thin, is scattered through with bits of chopped almonds. It has the rich flavor of caramelized sugar due to the long, slow baking. In Antwerp, the biscuits' home town, it is passed with the coffee. But just as cheerful, we say, with a cup of tea or when served with ice cream. It is here in pound cartons, fifty cookies for Around 90 cents. The box is sealed in a manner to hold the crispness of the wafers for as long as six months if kept unopened. These biscuits never go rancid, being made with a vegetable oil to. which just enough butler is added to give the buttery flavor. Selling in New York at B. Altaian's, Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street; Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue; Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue; and H. Hicks, 30 West Fifty-seventh Street.
Among the most beautiful of the world's wedding cakes are the flower-decorated tiers by Eleanor Street. Word and deed attest to their beauty and edibility in “GOURMET Sets a Table.”
But Mrs. Street doesn't stop with wedding cakes. She will do any sort of cake desired for birthday, baby showers, bon voyage parties, all manner of anniversaries, any gala occasion at all. If it's a baby shower, she might suggest her oblong loaf cake made like a bassinet. A border of good-to-eat pastel-hued baby roses and forget-me-nots surround the cake which rests on an oval board base.
Contact the Eleanor Street Studio, 2 West Sixteenth Street, New York 11. Telephone CHelsea 3-6698 for further information. Prices start at ＄10 for an eight-inch cake serving fifteen to ＄250 for a five-tiered wedding cake for six hundred guests. Deliveries are made in Manhattan up to Seventieth Street for orders of ＄35. Sent by Air Express in warm weather or by Railway Express in the winter. The customer pays the transportation. By air, this will run to a pretty penny.
That hickory-smoke taste is a hard flavor to capture. That is, in the bottle— but it can be done, and Hickory House, Dallas, Texas, announce the victory. By a patented process they permeate sauces with smoke, a meat sauce, a hot sauce, a sharp lovely mustard—these to use in soups and gravies, with game and in salads. A touch of these sauces and there's outdoor-cooking taste, all yours right at home on the range. The three items are ＄1.50 postpaid anywhere in the United States. Send check or money order to Hickory House, Inc., Dept. G, Box 7318, Dallas, Texas.
New kinds of chicken wing their way to the table; two new breeds are starring the restaurant menus. One is a chicken crossed with a pheasant, the breeding triumph of James H. Knowles, veteran geneticist of Centralia, Washington. The second bird, a Rock Cornish game hen from Pomfret Center, Connecticut, is a cross between a domestic hen and a Malayan gamecock.
The Knowles Northwester is the first commercial cross between pheasant and chicken, long a dream of the poultry men. This cross has taken fifteen years to perfect. The hybrid was evolved by a natural crossing of a Chinese ringnecked male from Texas with a Mongolian female pheasant from California to produce a Mongolian ring-necked male; then followed the crossings. The first gave a half pheasant-half chicken, produced by artificial insemination, using the cross-breed pheasant male with a Cornish hen. In the final cross both sexes are sterile. This is an advantage because the males are natural capons and at eighteen weeks are delicious 7 ½-pound roasters—just family size. The hitch is that the new hybrid cannot reproduce itself, and the complicated breeding program must be repeated with each generation.
This bird, one-sixteenth pheasant, is claimed to have 25 per cent more meat per pound than the average chicken because of its broader breast and meatier thighs. This is in line with the present trend to meatier birds at an earlier age to give an all-purpose chicken for use as broiler, fryer, and roaster. Through some quirk of breeding the dorsal muscle in the leg is while, giving the drumstick a thick layer of white meat. On the hoof, the hybrid looks much the same as any chicken, except for the heavier breast and leg and the tail feathers resembling those of the pheasant. It's in the eating one meets the important little difference, that delicate but definitely gamy flavor.
The new Rock Cornish game hen is an Eastern production. The broad breasts are plumply rounded, the meat finely grained, the flavor combining the sweetness and gamincss of the grouse with the while meat of the finest milk-fed poussin.
Jacques Makowsky of Pomfret Center, Connecticut, is owner of Idlewild Farm and producer of this butter-ball creation. The diet for these “fancy feathers” starts with a game-bird feed to which is added ground acorns and berries to give the sweet flavor. Fish is never included in the mix.
The birds, selling in sizes of 1 to 1 ¼ pounds, are notable for small bones and broad breasts and a slight gaminess to the taste. Some twenty restaurants from Boston to New Orleans feature the new breed.
“From peat and purple heather” comes a unique honey from the Buckfast Abbey Apiaries of Devon, England. Sheaves of hart's-tongue ferns, orchards laden with blossoms, long coast lines indented with sparkling bays. In the center is the plateau Dartmoor and among its rivers “the arrowy Dart.”
About midway between Darthead and Dartmouth is a beautiful valley. surrounded by undulating hills, which for many centuries provided a peaceful setting for a prosperous abbey, reputedly founded by Celtic monks. Certain it is that our Anglo-Saxon fore-fathers, long before the coming of the Normans, sanctified this spot by a life of prayer and work, and called it by the name which ten centuries have not substantially altered. Bucfaesten is the old word for Buckfast, which suggests a safe refuge for the herds of deer frequenting the neighborhood long ago.
In August the countryside is a sea of scented glory; here is mile upon mile of heather where the bees drone endlessly among the drooping bells, bringing to their hives the richest honey known in the world.
When the purple begins to show, the bees are carried by lorries from the quiet seclusion of Buckfast Monastery gardens and placed in groups in the heart of the moor to gather the feast. For a month the work goes on in Devon's purple, then back to the monastery garden with a harvest for themselves and for us.
In the abbey a mighty press extracts the honey from the combs as the delicate cell walls are splintered and flattened to a slab of beeswax. Thick as jam, this honey has the color of a rich orange marmalade and a flavor as delicate as the perfume of a flower. In England they take a spoonful of Devon's cream, a spoonful of Dartmoor honey, mix, and spread on Devon scones. Or they eat the honey with oatcakes spread thick with butter. Have it with toasted English muffins or add a spoonful to the cored hollow of a baked apple or dab it over baked custard.
Sold by Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, the decorated 15-ounce carton is ＄1.50.
Those tiny, sugar-sweet currants of the Greeks, the Zante currants, absent from this market since 1940, are back, so slick and clean and plump you'd scarcely know them. The reason for this is a new packing plant at Aigion, in the northern part of Peloponnesus, built with Marshall Plan aid.
Greek currants, it is claimed, have a higher sugar content than any other kind grown. All we know is that bakers have always admired these little black beads for raisin bread or for Christmas fruitcakes and plum puddings, for hot cross buns or for Danish pastries. Few of these newly arrived currants sell at retail, almost all being snapped up by the bakers. R. H. Macy in New York has them, but only now and then.
Spiced Orange Tang for meats is the grandest stuff spread over a ham just before it goes to the oven for baking. The ingredients of this thinnish, palate-titivating mixture are orange juice, water, lemon, sugar, orange peel, vinegar, the sharp bite of mustard, salt, and spices, and cornstarch to thicken. And do as the label suggests: Add the sauce to gravy for chicken or turkey. Serve it with roast pork or pork chops or ham fritters, though its soulmate is duck.
The concoction blends nicely with ham spread, chicken spread, or cream cheese with chopped nuts and raisins to tuck into a sandwich. Just because we told you so. add it to cranberry sauce —a new relish with fowl. Add it to applesauce when serving roast pork. A sauce unusual and useful and gorgeously good, 12-ounce jars selling at B. Altman, New York, 75 cents, and at S. S. Pierce of Boston under their label.