Gourmet Gifts--You Say Potato, I Say ‘Merry Christmas’ : Holidays: For those with upscale taste, mail-order vegetables, fruit, steaks and cheeses make life a little easier.

It’s not cheap, this gift food in the Christmas catalogues. T-bone steaks are $21 a pound. Pears go for $2 or $3 apiece. A one-pound loaf of plain bread can cost $4, and five pounds of potatoes, $19.50.

But it’s sure easy. “You don’t have to get in the car, go shopping, fight the crowds. You don’t even have to wrap it and mail it,” says K.C. Cole, a magazine editor in Los Angeles. “They’re charging you for not having to do all that.”

To some people it seems too easy, even dangerous, because they’re buying blind, trusting in a catalogue blurb and a promise.

“I ordered smoked turkey for my son for Thanksgiving last year,” says New York art historian Aimee Price, “but it came after Thanksgiving and then wasn’t the weight it was supposed to be. I complained and they sent another. But if you place a lot of orders, do you call all the people to see if everything got there?”

Indeed, the catalogue companies are well aware that mail-order gift-giving involves a leap of faith, and they spend a lot of time and effort selling not just their product but their service.

They have to, says John Crawford, a partner in the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Tex., which has been making fruitcakes since 1896. “It’s vitally important in a day when you can buy anything, anywhere, anytime.”

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For many gift food companies, mail order started as a side venture. They were family businesses, producing specialty foods on a regional basis. Harry and David (the fruit-of-the-month people) sold pears out of their Oregon orchards to hotels and restaurants before the Depression. Louis Wolferman (breads and muffins “from the heartland”) began baking oversized English muffins in his Kansas City grocery store in 1888. Omaha Steaks International (gourmet meats) started 75 years ago selling Nebraska’s grain-fed, corn-finished beef products to hotels and restaurants.

The Harringtons (smoked meats) ran a country restaurant in Richmond, Vt., featuring meat smoked over corn cobs and maple wood. But “people would say, ‘I love that ham. Can you mail one to me?’ ” says Jean White, Harrington’s marketing director, and Harrington’s went into mail order.

The 1970s and ‘80s were boom years for the gift food catalogues, as for catalogue sales in general. Working women with little spare time liked catalogue shopping. So did the new yuppie market--high income and two-income families with frenetic schedules, the wherewithal to buy upscale, high-quality, brand-label goods, and the inclination to become foodies.

More important, with the explosion in credit cards, 800 numbers and telemarketing, “mail order” became a simple matter of phoning in an order and charging it. Indeed, Harry and David’s orders are now 74% phone, 22% mail and--preview of coming attractions--4% fax.

By last year, the catalogue industry had $51.5 billion in sales, and some real big businesses in the food end of it. In little more than a dozen years, Harry and David doubled to $150 million in sales. So did Collin Street Bakery, now selling $24 million worth of fruitcakes yearly.

Clearly a “growth business,” some companies attracted big corporate buyers. Harry and David was bought by R.J. Reynolds and then by Shaklee Corp. Wolferman’s--now minus both family and store--is part of Sara Lee Corp. Figi’s (cheese, sausage and snacks) was bought by W.R. Grace in 1968, by Metromedia in 1978 and by Fingerhut in 1981.

“Everybody tries to buy us every day,” chortles Collin Street’s Crawford, “probably saying to themselves, ‘We’ll buy those country suckers.’ And we always listen to everybody.”

Big business doesn’t exactly inspire a consumer’s leap of faith, of course, so all this growth is a delicate subject with catalogue companies. In fact, most emphasize their family ties, humble origins and homey goodness. At Harrington’s, says Jean White, “we take pride in the fact that our company hasn’t changed much over the years.”

Harrington’s brochures emphasize its “unhurried, old-fashioned” curing methods, and the catalogue bears greetings not from an executive but from Vern Richburg, “Smokemaster.” Harry and David catalogues included notes from the two fruit farmers for years after their deaths. Wolferman’s catalogue (remember Sara Lee?) takes a knock at “typical mass-produced supermarket” products.

Collin Street Bakery owns a pecan-shelling facility, a computer company and a plantation in Costa Rica. Still, everything the company sends out carries an invitation to come visit the McNutt family’s bakery in Corsicana (last year, 272,000 people did). “It makes us more creditable,” says Crawford.

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Some pretty select products serve this upscale market: Special taste treats are for people who have enough food and more than enough money. It’s the “highly educated, dual-income” consumer, says Wolferman’s mail-order market manager Jennifer Super, who’s inclined to order crumpets, “toasting bread” and low-fat, low-cholesterol muffins from across a country.

It’s no meat-and-potatoes type who’ll spring for Potato of the Month ($136 for eight months of Carolas, Kerry Blues, Yukon Golds, etc., each with a brochure describing its “culinary characteristics”) from New Penny Farm in Presque Isle, Me. Indeed, owner Chris Holmes “used to grow ordinary potatoes on a very small farm for the ordinary market,” but business wasn’t good until he decided four years ago “to get real small and add more value to the unit.”

It’s the foodie, in pursuit of the perfect or the unusual. Barbara Haber, a culinary history expert and curator of books at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger library in Cambridge, Mass., sends special people olive oil from Ratto’s international grocery in Oakland. Gloria Johnston, a Los Angeles marketing consultant, sends Starbucks coffee from Seattle, because “I feel I’m introducing people to something wonderful.”

The cachet catalogues advertise in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Lear’s and Bon Appetit most heavily in the months before Christmas.

“If you’re going to hunt bear,” says Crawford, “you have to go to bear territory.”

It’s not all upscale. The Wisconsin cheese-and-sausage catalogues like Figi’s (“Gifts in Good Taste”) and Swiss Colony (“Gifts of Perfect Taste”) are more mass market. Along with their teeny tiny cheeses, they have candies, cookies, snacks, fruit--often arranged in painfully cute gift containers. Both take payment in monthly installments.

The most moneyed buyers are corporations, buoyed by tax advantages. For them, food of almost any kind is the perfect gift. It’s not too personal, it’s always acceptable, it can be shared or given to charity. No business has to worry about having its name on food.

“How do you know what to buy somebody who gives you a million dollars worth of business?” says Los Angeles restaurant designer Michael Blackman, who has sent fruit-of-the month packs for years. “I’m not buying future business, just thanking them for past business. And it doesn’t hurt that every month they get a gift with my name on it.”

For individuals, too, food is a safe gift “because they don’t have to worry about size or color or if the person has one,” says Marilyn Pred, spokeswoman for Omaha Steaks. “A nice steak dinner is always good.”

Even if it’s not the perfect choice, says UC San Diego administrator Barbara Bry, “ some body in the house will eat it.”

And that’s another advantage, says Haber: “It’s not a gift that hangs around, that you have to put on the mantel. Of course, the fruit does come dead ripe and you have to eat an entire box in a day.”

Best of all, food gifts are “an easy way to take care of obligations,” says George Douma, Figi’s vice president of merchandising. Obviously that category doesn’t include everybody: “For a significant other,” he says, “you go and shop.”