Business & Finance: Caterers’ Capers

¶ “The average diner-out will pick the dish with the fancy colors every time.”

¶ “The younger generation is not trained in the art of eating. Nor drinking either.”

¶ “Americans are now a predominantly meat and potato eating people.”

Such resigned generalities as these filled the air in Philadelphia’s elegant Bellevue-Stratford Hotel last week as 1,000 restaurateurs gathered for the annual convention of the International Stewards & Caterers Association. The delegates listened appreciatively when a representative of Tested Selling, Inc. hissed: ”Don’t sell the steak; sell the sizzle.”* For president they re-elected genial William A. Heaman, who is steward of the Harvard Union (freshman dining hall) and is regarded by Harvardmen as no heir to Brillat-Savarin.

Including both steward dietitians like Mr. Heaman, feeders of groups (undergraduates, the employes of big corporations, etc.), and the traditionalists of the industry, old-line French, German and Alsatian “kitchen men,” Association members buy upwards of $500,000,000 worth of food every year. Since Repeal they have handled nearly that much liquor business. Typical was the Roosevelt-Du Pont wedding last July when caterers offered what was, for them, a skimpy repast of hors d’oeuvres, ice cream and cakes, but made up for it with champagne. Even thicker than sample-passers from food companies at the convention last week were wine and liquor salesmen, whose stocks of courtesy cocktails ran out fast. Budweiser was served free on the hotel roof. A waiters’ champagne race down Broad Street made staid Philadelphians stare.

No. 1 spectacle of the meeting was the annual culinary and confectionery art show. Among its exhibits: Independence Hall in spun sugar; hams made up as mandolins; a prize wicker work cake by the chef of Philadelphia’s Ritz-Carlton; a prize 18-lb. mousse de foie gras which cost Chef Fernand Gspann four days’ labor and $20 to build of sliced truffles, tongue and egg white. Spectacle No. 2 was a beauty contest for local waitresses on “National Distillers Night,” which turned rowdy when merrymaking stewards acclaimed their favorites by direct action. In the afternoon that day a special party of gourmets entered another world by visiting the Philadelphia Zoo at feeding time.

More serious matters were broached on the convention floor. Menus, it was declared, are becoming larger, less cluttered with items, often illustrated, because “what the eye sees the mind may want.” Deploring “leakage at the bar,” Restaurant Accountant James E. McNamara observed that ‘”in the first place it is easier to waste a liquid than a solid; in the second place there is much more temptation to employes in a bottle than in a box. . . .” Sales Manager A. A. Schipke of International Silver Co. besought the stewards to screen their garbage cans and buy genuine silver. “In Massachusetts,” said he, “we recovered two tons of silver from restaurant garbage in one month, proving that losses which you blame on the poor public are usually due to careless help.”

Pieman. Biggest audience of all was attracted by the one speaker who was paid to appear, a redhaired, modest young man named Monroe “‘Boston” Strause, the current sensation of the pastry world. Son of a Los Angeles flour miller named Boston Monroe Strause, he uses his middle name as a kind of trademark. First in partnership with his Uncle Mike in the M. & M. Pie Co. of Los Angeles, “Boston” carried on when Mike quit. A friendly restaurateur helped him design cylindrical aluminum carrying racks for his pies, mahogany-trimmed pie trucks. “They were simply beautiful,” Pieman Strause remembers, “just like Pullman cars.”

Just “fooling around,” Pieman Strause one day invented chiffon pie. This and his beautiful pie trucks soon made him famed all along the West Coast. In 1924, when he was 23, he sold his business for $48,000 to two New Yorkers and became a pie consultant in Los Angeles. He now has an office in Manhattan and 38 permanent clients, ranging from a New York bakery which pays him $6,000 a year for three visits of at least three days each to smaller bakeries which pay $300 a year. Married to a pretty girl who has never baked a pie, “Boston” Strause lives in hotels, annoys his wife by ordering pie and taking it apart instead of eating it. He writes regular columns for Bakers Weekly, American Restaurant Magazine, International Stewards’ and Caterers’ Magazine. Between his rare flights of genius he settles down to adaptations, claims he can make 150 kinds of pie from cherries alone.

For the caterers last week ‘”Boston” Strause, aided by six assistants and a blackboard, demonstrated a method of making fresh apple pie by draining off the apple juice and sugar through a colander and pouring it back into the pie through holes in the crust while baking. He did not demonstrate his fresh strawberry pie, which he says “has never been revealed to the housewife.” Recipe: use frozen fresh strawberries, freeze again immediately after cooking. The strawberries remain whole.

* “Sizzling platters” are made of an aluminum alloy. The hotter they are kept before being used the longer and more madly they will sizzle on contact with melted butter.