In the Media

Stress Relief? This Catalog Transports You to Quaint Vermont

The Vermont Country Store catalog has conjured up a simpler, sunnier world for 75 years—and its products have never appealed more.

It’s a trip down memory lane so masterfully paved I don’t even care whose memories I’m remembering.

People from all over the united States who would not go out of their way to visit a grocery store are eager to travel enormous distances to see an old-fashioned country store in Weston, Vermont, a charming hill village of 500 persons. The Vermont Country Store, with its dimly lit interior and pervading odors of kerosene, Vermont cheese, leather goods is not only a mecca for tourists but a forum for discussion…Above all The Vermont Country Store is keeping bright a picture of an American way of years past.

… the most picturesque place in town is The Vermont Country Store. Inside hangs that tangy wholesome smell of one hundred and one different products that mark a real general store…

The Vermont Country Store's load of mail orders and the beaten path to its door is the result of the unique and colorful catalog which was first published some years ago. I am fortunate in having a copy of the catalog and I highly recommend it as an entertaining bit of reading. It will also tease the taste buds, activate the gastric juices, and stimulate the mind. Not only is the catalog filled with new, choice delicacies of which some are very hard to find but it also includes delightful illustrations, grass-root editorials, recipes, letters from happy customers, friendly admonitions, colorful descriptive text of the merchandise and a clever pictorial showing how to get to the store. The store's catalog entitled Voice of the Mountains was no doubt inspired in part by the beautiful terrain of Vermont.

Your ticket to a sentimental journey at Sunday morning breakfast is all packaged for you by The Vermont Country Store. Their own ground wholegrain pancake meal, Vermont maple syrup, and homemade strawberry jam make this the kind of meal grandmother might have served.

When la haute cuisine flowered in France over 200 years ago, one basic ingredient was good, wholesome stoneground flour. Today great cooking is still based on the same rich wholegrain stoneground flour. Mrs. Vrest Orton has written a basic cookbook entitled Cooking With Wholegrains that contains many recipes of how one can cook with these virginal flours to make not only the predictable bread and rolls, but also the more unexpected pies, cakes, puddings, brioches, muffins and pancakes.

If humans were powered by batteries, then The Vermont Country Store would be the ideal charging station.

The combination of the homey, personal catalogue—one woman wrote that it was just like getting a letter from the homefolks—and the old-time store gave his customers something they had not had since they were young: contact with the past that was alive instead of dead, and the real flavor of rural America that was rapidly vanishing.