Fannie's Last Supper (11 page)

It was hard to perfectly regulate an oven in a coal cookstove, so cakes were not the easiest item to prepare. One solution was to design a cake tin with a metal cone projecting up from the bottom, a design that came into fashion in the 1880s. This conducted heat through the center of the cake to promote even cooking, much like a tube pan. One way to check if your cake was done was to take out a slice, check it for doneness, brush each side with egg white, and then slide it back into place.

The
hot closet
was a screen on one side with shelves on the other, and was used to keep cooked foods or serving plates warm. (The screen was placed near the cookstove or fireplace.) The
American oven
was an open-fronted metal box, its floor inclined to reflect heat. This box was placed with the open front facing the coal fire; the meat, smaller cuts such as chops, was positioned on a shelf halfway up the box. The oven was often stood on a chair and pushed up to the range. (One would have to open the door covering the firebox on my oven to use this device.) One could also purchase a
bottle jack
for an American oven, a small spring-loaded vertical rotisserie from which a small roast could be hung, rotating slowly in front of the fire. This was consistent with how the English roasted their meats using coal cookstoves, since they favored the notion of hanging a joint in front of the open coal box using a three-part metal screen that had a hinged opening in the middle in order to baste the meat as it roasted, with a pan beneath to catch the drippings. This was probably done for a number of reasons: that’s how they used to do it when they cooked in a fireplace; they had only two ovens, so they were at a premium; and a large joint of beef simply wouldn’t fit into most ovens.

What other cookware, appliances, and tools would have made up a true Victorian
batterie de cuisine
? For starters, a Victorian kitchen would include an ice chest: ice wrapped in sacking was placed in the top, and foods could be put above or below on perforated shelves. Maids would have to drain off the water from a tap from time to time. Although there is some dispute about whether ice chests were common household items by the 1890s—ice was expensive—there is no question that any upper-middle-class home in Boston would have had one. This resulted in the popularity of ice creams; crude ice-cream machines were patented as early as 1840. Ice-cream molds became extremely popular as well, wealthy households having them made to order, often with the family crest.

I wasn’t going to install a true ice chest, but Adrienne did find a fully restored four-door electric Kelvinator “icebox” from a firm out in California, and we had it shipped in and installed. At least it looked the part. We also purchased a manual ice-cream machine from White Mountain—quite similar, I suspect, to the original manufactured in Fannie’s era.

Cast iron had been around forever, but enameled cast iron made its debut in 1874, followed in 1892 by enameled sheet steel, which was lighter and easier to clean and maintain. This graniteware was used for tea and coffeepots, as well as for stew pans, although egg beaters and even waffle irons were eventually fashioned from it. Vollrath Ware, an American-made line of this enameled cookware, was known for its speckled or mottled blue, black, brown, or gray enamel. Of course, bread graters were everywhere, since using up stale bread was the basis for hundreds of recipes, from rissoles to puddings, from stuffings to croquettes. Other common kitchen items would have included jelly molds, patty pans (pie pans), and tartlet pans, a corned beef pan, cast-iron gem pans, muffin rings, and square biscuit pans. And, with the twentieth century right around the corner, the late Victorians were being introduced to the cookware of the future, such as the electric skillet, which was marketed in Britain as early as 1898.

MAY 2009. RESEARCHING HISTORY IS A TERRIFIC WAY TO CURE
oneself of taking anything for granted. Fannie wasn’t really the “mother of level measurements,” FDR’s New Deal didn’t really fix the American economy (unemployment jumped up to 19 percent in 1938 and the market had taken another header), and Salem wasn’t much of a town for witches. What? It turns out that Salem deserves a solid gold Chamber of Commerce medal for taking a very short and undeniably sordid historical period, one that most normal folks would like to quietly forget, and transforming it into a year-long bonanza of tourism, ersatz Wiccan memorabilia, and huge crowds on Halloween, not to mention crappy T-shirts and greasy sausages.

First, let’s get a few facts straight. Witch hunting was all the rage in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Germans, in particular, were thorough professionals, although the French also deserve an honorable mention. During this bloody period, one hundred thousand witches were put to death in Germany and seventy-five thousand in France. How did New England fare in comparison? Bloody amateurs! Only thirty-two witches were ever put to death in our part of the world, and just four of them in Boston. And the whole fervor only lasted a few years—the first witch, a Margaret Jones, was hung in 1684. By 1693, the fervor had abated. So, once again, hats off to the folks up in Salem.

The history of food is equally misleading, because how the average Joe cooked and ate is less likely to be reported than how the rich and famous dined. The Victorian dinner that we were re-creating would have been as alien to the average resident of New England in 1896 as it is to us today. The rich had refrigeration, domestic servants, silverware, access to expensive foods, a kitchen large enough to prepare a multicourse meal, and a dining room, still a rarity for most Americans at the time. We were taking a thin slice of the culinary pie here, and doing so on purpose, since I would rather research and prepare a twelve-course high Victorian menu than a plate of baked beans and brown bread.

So to come to any ready conclusions about the food of the late nineteenth century is fraught with danger. Okay, I scanned all the recipes in the
Boston Globe
of 1896, but do recipes in a newspaper really tell the whole story of the typical home cook of the era? Maybe, maybe not. Do the food pages of the
New York Times
truly reflect what New Yorkers are cooking for dinner? Most of them probably eat out five nights a week.

However, I have learned something about the Victorians after two years of cooking their food. They had one foot in the past and one in the future. They had grown up in parsimony and were now headed toward abundance. Fannie was teaching them how to make hoe cakes (a cheap form of cornbread) as well as endless recipes wrapped in puff pastry and finished with béchamel. More than in any other period in American history, the Victorians were a bipolar mix of old-fashioned and modern, and their food exemplified the coexistence of these two very different lifestyles.

In 1900, for example, one could purchase Jell-O manufactured by the Genesee Pure Food Company; or make one’s own jellies using any number of thickeners, including powdered gelatin, Irish moss, or isinglass; or boil calf’s feet to make homemade gelatin, as we did for our jelly course. Unlike modern times, the gap between how various New Englanders lived was extraordinarily broad, from the technology they used in their everyday life (many New Yorkers and Bostonians already had access to gas for lighting and cooking, whereas in rural areas farm wives were still cooking over inefficient wood cookstoves) to where their food came from (Château Lafite for the urban rich and cheap ale for the poor). Today, there is, for the most part, a homogenous culture; in the 1890s it was a cultural hodgepodge.

The Boston Cooking
-
School Cook Book
reflected this disparity, from its preachiness regarding the science of nutrition, to the inclusion of basic American staples such as Indian pudding, blanc mange, or even water bread (stale bread dipped in water to refresh it and then buttered), all the way to the ersatz French concoctions like vol-au-vent, birds in potato cases, and gâteau de Princesse Louise. Cooking in the Victorian age was nothing in particular; it was everything all at once.

This mixed-up approach to preparing food was particularly true when it came to Fannie’s recipes for fish cookery. As far as I could tell, Fannie was not a great lover of fish, since most of her preparations were rather pedestrian. To be fair, her instructions for broiling seemed fine, but a four-pound bluefish was to be baked in a hot oven for forty-five minutes, a three-pound halibut was baked a full hour, and one is sometimes instructed to throw a lobster sauce onto fish that turns out to be nothing more than hollandaise with a bit of chopped lobster meat added. One also finds many references to “white sauce I,” which is a classic medium béchamel (two tablespoons each butter and flour, a cup of milk, salt and pepper). This would be a rather grim blanket, although it was not at all uncommon in Fannie’s time as an accompaniment to a nice piece of fresh cod or halibut. There was also a basic recipe for fish stuffing—nothing more than cracker crumbs, stale bread crumbs, melted butter, hot water, salt, pepper, and a few drops of onion juice.

Fannie also suggested broiling salmon, so I decided to head in that direction: a simple preparation that would let the flavor of the salmon shine through.

MY GRANDFATHER, CHARLES STANLEY WHITE, WAS A GREAT
salmon fisherman, and that is probably why I have spent quite a bit of time fishing the Matapedia River in Quebec, as well as the Restigouche and Miramichi rivers in New Brunswick. The first run of Atlantic salmon starts in April or early May, when the ice lets out, and the fish that have spent the winter upstream swim down to the ocean. Then, beginning from June to July, the main run of salmon begins, the fish swimming upstream to their place of birth, where the cycle begins all over again. Fly-fishing for salmon has always been a popular sport. The rich and powerful took trains up from Boston and New York, even in the late nineteenth century, and then took up residence on small houseboats floated on rafts that were pulled upstream by teams of horses or oxen onshore toward the camps where “sports” might spend a few weeks during the season. Fishing was done, before the use of outboard engines, in wide-bottomed canoes that were poled up and down the river from one “pool” to the next.

Anyone who has been to a hunting or fishing camp knows the drill. On the evening of your arrival, you immediately inquire about your prospects. How many fish were caught last week? What is the weather report? Have the salmon started running? The answer, given by the head guide, is always hopeful but murky, something like, “There is a full moon tonight and the water should be rising and I expect a good run in the next day or two.” Translation? Nobody is catching fish, but we hope to shortly.

My first salmon fishing trip to Cold Spring Camp on the Matapedia in Quebec involved ten sports and, oh, about ten thousand casts between us. The only woman among us caught the only fish, a twenty-six-pounder, on the fourth day. Other than an excursion to the local strip joint in Campbellton, the highlight of that outing was a taste of that lone salmon. The flesh was almost white, not orange, incredibly firm and light, not at all oily. It was vastly better than even the expensive wild salmon one can buy at the best fish markets.

As for cooking the salmon, I was surprised that our Victorian cookstove could be used for indoor grilling. David Erickson, the gentleman who restored our cookstove, made up an oblong grill insert that can quickly replace two of the burners and the surrounding cast-iron pieces. The beauty of this design, and what makes me think that the world is moving backward in terms of technology, is that the draft from the chimney is so strong that any smoke from the grilling is sucked downward and up through the flue. So, there we are, indoor grilled salmon.

I began by seasoning the grill with a dozen different coats of oil as it heated on the cooktop. Then we took four salmon fillets, two to three ounces each, seasoned them with oil, salt, and pepper and, over a hot fire, grilled them skin-side down until the skin was brown and crisp. We flipped the fish to finish. I found that by adjusting both the draft in front of the firebox and also the main flue, I could immediately change the heat level. Unlike a Weber or most other charcoal grills, it was much like cooking over gas—there was a high degree of control. We served them with a caper vinaigrette and an additional garnish of fried capers. This was the best grilled salmon I’d ever had, and it was cooked indoors to boot.

GRILLED SALMON WITH CAPER VINAIGRETTE

It is true that Fannie did not offer any grilled fish recipes—they were mostly boiled, roasted, or poached—and the cooking times were ridiculously long. In addition, canned salmon was available at this time and was often used in cold salads. However, a few contemporary cookbooks did offer grilling salmon as a common preparation method, so we followed that advice. We used our wood-burning cookstove with a grill insert to cook the salmon indoors, not a charcoal grill. When grilling salmon, we find that ten separate coats of oil on the hot grill will create a nonstick surface. Brush the oil using tongs and a wad of paper towels.

Vinaigrette:

¼ cup lemon juice

¼ teaspoon Dijon mustard

½ teaspoon whole-grain mustard

1 tablespoon minced shallots

2 teaspoons capers, rinsed, dried, roughly chopped

1 teaspoon caper juice

¼ teaspoon thyme, minced

Salt and pepper

6 tablespoons canola oil

6 tablespoons high-quality extra-virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

2 lemons, cut into wedges

Salmon:

12 3-ounce salmon fillets, cut into rectangles

1 to 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Salt and pepper

1.
For the vinaigrette:
Combine lemon juice, mustards, shallots, capers, caper juice, thyme, and salt and pepper to taste in small nonreactive bowl. Whisk until thoroughly combined. Combine oils in small measuring cup so that they are easy to pour. Whisking constantly, very slowly drizzle oil into lemon mixture. If pools of oil are gathering on surface as you whisk, stop addition of oil and whisk mixture well to combine, then resume whisking in oil in slow stream. Stir in parsley. Vinaigrette should be glossy and lightly thickened, with no pools of oil on its surface.