The Food of a Younger Land (9 page)

That a drug store soda fountain can offer such a variety of food and drink with seemingly limited facilities is surprising, but these places are equipped with the latest time-saving devices and organized to separate the functions of each worker. The drip coffee is served from glass pots kept constantly in use on a five or six burner gas or electric plate, making possible the continuous brewing of fresh coffee. A small broiler and grill (the “radio,” in a luncheonette gob’s jargon) turns out orders of crisp bacon or ham and eggs. Each electric toaster keeps sixteen slices of bread revolving on its wheel. A small aluminum steam table holds containers of hot meats and various shining pots whence are ladled the soup, gravies, and hot vegetables. Jelly, pickle jars, and mayonnaise are handily lined up.

During rush hours the sandwich man deftly and swiftly builds “three deckers,” completing each success with a shout: “Take it away!” The steam table man dishes out hot dinners. If the job is not too “hot foot,” the sandwich man may handle both. The waiters serve the food, mix the drinks, and punch the checks. Used dishes are tossed into a sink under the counter where they are cleaned in a jiffy by the “bottle-washer.” All is compact, tidy, stream-lined.

The stool diner does not loiter. Waiting customers may be lined up behind him three deep. Dare he rest a moment, he may be the recipient of sub-zero glares or even a little verbal “needling”: . . . “He’s tryin’ to scrape the design off the plate—” . . . “Give ’im a couple tooth picks—” . . . “Let’s try hollerin’ fire!”

MARI TOMASI

H
ow about an Italian feed tonight?” Government official, professional, clerk, or truck driver—daily someone within a 70-mile radius of Barre makes this suggestion in gustatory anticipation. These dinners are strictly of economic origin. Since the ’80’s, Barre, the largest granite center in the world, has attracted hundreds of skilled carvers from the granite and marble centers of northern Italy. Many, succumbing to occupational sickness, left young wives and growing families. A few widows turned for support to the art they knew best, cooking. They cooked at first for a neighbor, then for a neighbor’s friend. Gratified palates publicized the food. Today some fifty homes in Barre make a business of providing Italian feeds.

The word
feed
no doubt calls to mind fodder, or provender for cattle; but that gourmet, the unrecorded Vermont Yankee who titled these dinners
Italian feeds
, must have been musing upon its pure derivation from the Anglo Saxon
fedan
, meaning feast. For certainly Barre’s Italian feeds are feasts.

A fragrant, piquant scent excites the nostrils as you enter Maria Stefani’s neat, unpretentious little house. The dining room with its piano, or perhaps a Victrola, is yours for the evening. Maria’s daughter of high school age, or maybe the oldest daughter, Elena, who is a stenographer at the State Capitol six miles away, assists at the table.

Baskets of bread are the sole table adornments; long golden Italian loaves, sliced, and revealing generous centers of spongy white for those who like their bread soft; crisp rolls; and small crunchy buns shaped like starfishes, and which are best described as knobs of tender crust. These last for those who like to hear their bread crackle between their teeth.

The array of appetizers leaves the novitiate agape. Paper thin slices of
prosciutto
, a ham processed in pepper and spices. Large, red wafers of tasty
salami
. Pickled veal. Celery. Ripe olives, the dark, succulent meats falling away easily from their pits. Then there is the favorite
antipasto
, a savory achievement incorporating mushrooms, pearl onions, tuna, anchovies, broccoli—all permeated and tinctured with a tangy red sauce.

Maria Stefani beamingly assures you that you may have spaghetti or
ravioli
, or both. The platter is weighted with a mountain of white spaghetti, quivering under a dusky tomato sauce, and capped with grated Parmesan cheese. Maria scoffs at the packaged cheese already grated. “It’s dry,” she declares. “Its spirit is gone!” She grates her own cheese, and sprinkles it fresh, moist, and full bodied on the spaghetti.
Ravioli
, most popular of Italian dishes, are diminutive derbies of pastry, the crowns stuffed with a well-seasoned meat paste. Like the spaghetti, these are boiled, drained, and served under rich sauce and Parmesan cheese.

The food looks good; it tastes better. Geniality expands. Stomachs gorge in leisurely contentment. Belts loosen. Maria’s daughter, in horror lest glutted appetites fail to appreciate the joys yet to come, hints subtly to novices, “Will you have the salad with your meat? And will you have fried chicken, or chicken
alla cacciatore
?”

Maria Stefani is not licensed to sell alcohol. But these diners are her guests, she claims; and in hospitality, as well as to whet anew their surfeiting appetites, she pours them gratis a glass of sour, ruby red wine made last fall in Angelo Boni’s press down the street. Or each may sip a cup of hot coffee potently spirited with grappa, that transparent liquor distilled from Angelo Boni’s grape mash.

Fried chicken is browned in spiced olive oil. A touch of the fork punctures the crisp coating; delectable juices drip from the tender inside. Chicken
alla cacciatore
(hunter’s style) resembles a stew; the faint, but distinctively pert aroma of cooked wine rises from the meat, smothered though it is under a steaming sauce of tomatoes, peppers, onions and herbs.

At this stage of the feast the insalata arrives, offering a sharp and pleasant contrast to the early rich dishes. Strenuously exercised gustatory nerves carry new and delightful impulses from tongue to brain. The insalata is a light, aromatic salad of lettuce, endive, tomatoes, green peppers, onion—all tossed in chilled vinegar (usually a wine vinegar) and olive oil, and served from a bowl the sides of which have been rubbed to delicate fragrance with garlic. Contrary to common belief, the cook who prepares a true Italian feed uses that pungent bulb, garlic, with no lavish hand, but with light epicurean artistry; she allows only a delicate breath of it to imbue the food, thus teasing the appetite, and transforming a dull mouthful into a tasty smack.

Maria Stefani justifiably frowns at dessert. But, if you wish, she will serve you
spumoni
, an Italian ice cream. Then Maria nods her head towards the piano, her earrings bobbing, “Enjoy yourselves, eh? The room is yours until midnight.”

I
n the late fall of the year and early winter when game season opens on Long Island we first anticipate a rarity in food that only royalty used to enjoy. To sink one’s teeth into a properly prepared snack of Hasenpfeffer is a pleasure long to be remembered and can be participated in through the winter until the end of the hunting season.

Hasenpfeffer, although generally made of rabbits, can also be made of venison. The following is the way it is prepared by that cook of cooks, Mrs. Margarite Gross, Greene Ave., Sayville, N.Y., both for her private trade and for large group gatherings, as church suppers, Hasenpfeffer dinners, etc.:

Remove the pelt, head and feet of two rabbits. Draw them and quarter them, and place in brine made as follows:

Brine is best made in a stone crock and the pieces of rabbit should be covered with the brine. Leave in brine 3 days.

Remove rabbits from crock and wipe dry with towel. Place rabbits in pan with hot beef drippings in it and allow the meat to brown. Then add spice and allow to simmer for about 1½ hours. Brown flour and make gravy. Serve hot, with Kartoffel Klösze.

Boil 15 large potatoes in jackets. When done peel and rice them, letting them cool about 5 minutes, then add 2 eggs, 1½ cups of flour, 1 teaspoon salt and roll into balls and roll balls in flour. Have a pot of boiling water on the fire, place the dumplings in the water that has been salted and boil for 10 minutes, remove and serve.

Hasenpfeffer and Kartoffel Klösze are generally served together but either can be served separate or with other food.

DONALD McCORMICK

E
ach year in mid-October a public supper unusual in the state and in New England is served in the grange hall of the little town of Whitefield, Maine, some ten miles west of the Kennebec River near the town of Gardiner. Having once attended, there are several things that one remembers besides the extraordinary food. One of these is your determination to come earlier next year.

Unless you arrive well before serving is begun, you find the vicinity of the little hall lined with cars and the vestibule packed with people awaiting admittance. Over the heads of the throng you can see the crowded tables and the waitresses hurrying back and forth with laden trays, a view that is not gratifying to one who has travelled a number of miles in the brisk fall air and is ready to eat anytime.

When your turn comes, you are ushered to a seat at one of the long, portable tables and given a menu. The menu is only a conventionality, you soon learn, for the waitresses approach your table in turn and announce their wares. First comes one with squirrel pie, and you try an experimental helping. The meat is tender, something like chicken, but the small bones are a hazard. Another girl arrives with a dish of stewed partridge. You have a generous portion of this, and it is delicious. Before you actually start eating, you have an amazing assortment of wild life on your plate: squirrel, wild duck, coon, and a small, resilient segment of bear.

It is a hectic meal, what with your experimentation and with wrapping bits of whatever is at all portable in your paper napkin to try on your friends next day. The array of pies would ordinarily be intriguing: apple, pumpkin, squash, lemon, pineapple, chocolate, but your occupation with the meat dishes has made all this an anticlimax. Your mind is on the cooking processes that produce such tender game dishes.

The cooking, you learn at the dance that follows, is done by the relatives and friends of the North Whitefield Fish and Game Club, which sponsors this annual feast and produces the varieties of game. Not so many people know how to prepare game properly. It seems that one of the secrets is to get rid of the “wild” flavor. If you’ve ever experienced it, you know what they mean by this “taste sensation”: it’s difficult to describe but something like the flavor of pickled herring. One way to eliminate it is to parboil the game in soda and water. Venison is seldom served, the reason evidently being that the supper doesn’t coincide with the local open season. Chicken and pork dishes are usually provided for those who don’t care for the wild fare.

The supper is little publicized, but there is small need to solicit patronage. Tidings of the repast, which is unique in Maine as far as can be discerned, has spread throughout the state, and the hungry and the curious descend on North Whitefield from miles around. The usual price, by the way, is a dollar. However, with shot and shell up front on the OPM list, it’s probably a dollar and a quarter from now on.