Fannie's Last Supper (22 page)

GRUYÈRE VIEUX:
Fribourg, Switzerland

Slightly spicy flavor with a few stray crystalline bits. It’s on the sweet side, with a nice bit of earthiness and a finish that is dusky and complex; not overly sharp or rich.

MONTGOMERY FARMHOUSE CHEDDAR:
Manor Farm, North Cadbury, Somerset, England

A classic Cheddar with strong overtones of green pepper; even an undercurrent of unripe vegetable.

PARMIGIANO-REGGIANO CRAVERO:
Emilia-Romagna, Italy

This Parmesan has a sweetness to it. We could taste an undercurrent of pineapple, and it shows a good balance of salt. Unlike lesser Parmesans, the flavors almost explode in the mouth and the texture is neither too dry nor too soft.

ROQUEFORT GABRIEL COULET:
Mayran, Midi-Pyrénées, France

Rich and particularly soft and creamy, not harsh or overpowering, with lots of limestone minerality and nice spice, good salt, and an up-front citrusy quality, an oystery brininess, then a great satiny finish.

FROMAGE DE MEAUX:
Meaux, Ile-de-France, France

Very buttery and light, not strong-flavored in any way; must be served at room temperature—any colder and it loses much of its subtle qualities. It has a bit of lactic tang, a hint of olive, and then a slight bitterness at the finish.

TARENTAISE, SPRING BROOK FARM:
North Pomfret, Vermont

A bit milder and more buttery than the equivalent French version, this cheese hints at green olives, a slight undercurrent of anchovies, and also mushrooms.

Wine

In the early days of our country, America was not in love with wine, unlike the French and other Europeans. Beer and ale were much more common, and when Americans did drink wines, they were usually fortified wines such as sherry, port, or Madeira. Madeira was the most sought after; it was collected in private cellars, some bottles costing the absurd amount of $40 each, a month’s wages for the average blue-collar worker. This was the state of affairs in the first half of the nineteenth century, but by Fannie Farmer’s time, a great deal of wine was being imported and also grown in this country.

By the 1890s, S. S. Pierce in Boston was selling a wide assortment of wines, purchased either in bottles or in barrels, including selections from the great châteaux of the period, some slightly lower-quality wines, fortified wines, and a few American sparkling and still wines. In 1896, one could purchase the following: champagnes, clarets, sauternes, sherries, hock, sweet wines, Madeira, Tokay, Beaune, Pommard, Beaujolais, Macon, Volnay, and American wines.

Local American wines were also produced with some success in North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, New York, and Missouri, from native grapes such as the Scuppernong, Delaware, and Catawba. Wine from native grapes was generally considered too “foxy” and not of good quality, with few exceptions.

Sparkling wines and champagnes were very popular in the late 1800s, almost always served with oysters and as a palate cleanser between courses. American sparkling wines were available in Fannie’s era, one such producer being the Pleasant Valley Wine Company, located in the Finger Lakes region of New York and founded in 1860. Occasional homegrown attempts were made to produce a local American champagne from ingredients such as cider or “a mixture of turnip juice, brandy, and honey,” which was referred to as “Newark’s champagne.”

Claret was a generic term used to describe red wines from the Bordeaux region. The term
claret
came from a medieval French practice of short fermentation, which produced pale, rosé-colored wines that were known in export as
vinum clarum, vin clar,
or
clairet
. By the late seventeenth century, however, these clarets were much improved, and considerably deeper and richer, and were referred to as New French Clarets.

Sweeter wines, sauternes for example, were preferred over the drier whites of the time—white Bordeaux and Chablis—probably because fortified wines, port and sherry, had been consumed for generations with dinner. The generic term for these sweeter wines was
hock,
named after the town of Hochheim on the river Main in Germany.

Sherry is a fortified wine, a practice that was begun to protect wines shipped over long distances, where heat and motion would ruin a regular burgundy, for example. The additional alcohol—some sherries were over 20 percent alcohol by volume—killed off remaining yeast cells, thus providing stability during transportation.

Based on our historical research (and many, many happy tastings), here is the final list of wines for the dinner. A complete annotated description of the wines and after-dinner liqueurs may be found at www.fannieslastsupper.com.

THE WINE LIST

OYSTERS:
1990 Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame

MOCK TURTLE SOUP:
Lustau Rare Amontillado Escuadrilla Sherry

RISSOLES:
1996 Heimbourg Pinot Gris, Domaine Zind Humbrecht

LOBSTER À L’AMÉRICAINE:
2005 Saint Joseph Blanc Lyseras, Yves Cuilleron

SADDLE OF VENISON:
1986 Château la Mission Haut Brion

WOOD-GRILLED SALMON AND FRIED ARTICHOKES:
Reichsrat von Buhl Riesling Spätlese Trocken Pfalz Forster Ungeheuer

ROAST STUFFED GOOSE:
2002 Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé, Chambolle-Musigny

MANDARIN CAKE:
1988 Château Guiraud 1er Grand Cru Classé

AFTER-DINNER LIQUEURS

Absinthe Superiéure, Lucid

Bénédictine

Belle de Brillet

Crème de Menthe

Martell XO Supreme (Extra Old)

Trimbach Framboise Grand Reserve

Chartreuse VEP Green

Chapter 15
The Dinner Party

Amy Shakes Her Jelly and José Andrés Falls in Love with a Mermaid

T
he final attendee list of twelve included Harry Smith (CBS), Renee Montagne (NPR), José Andrés (chef/owner Think Food Group), Mark and Kelly Bittman (
New York Times
), Amy and Bruno Dickinson (
Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!
), Gordon and Fiona Hamersley (proprietors, Hamersley’s Bistro, Boston), Brian Jones (former musical director for Trinity Church in Boston), Adrienne, and myself. Both Peter Gomes and Maggie Rodriguez from CBS had last-minute health problems. Renee was flying in on Friday evening from Los Angeles and spending the weekend. Mark, Kelly, Harry, and José (he was flying in from Spain) were arriving Saturday afternoon and staying at the house.

Cooking started on Tuesday, November 3. This was a day for stocks—a fumet, the calf’s-head stock, chicken stock, etc. When preparing the calf’s head, we remembered a note from a nineteenth-century recipe that suggested cleaning out the nostrils with a wire brush. We dismissed this as both unnecessary and rather primitive—after all, today’s calf’s heads were sold perfectly clean and well prepared, right? Well, one of the nostrils was plugged with a dark substance that turned out to be a compacted bit of hay. Hay? So, yes, we had to ream out the nostrils with a baby-bottle brush. This was the ultimate experience in locally sourced foodstuffs. In fact, Kate Kelly, the photographer recording the event, lost her appetite one evening while reviewing her photos of the making of the calf’s-head stock—she recalled the toothy grin of the calf’s mouth as it bobbed upward in the broth.

We decided to ramp up the oyster display, so we hired a company to carve a four-foot-high ice sculpture of a mermaid, the base of which would hold the Island Creek oysters. I reviewed a number of sketches, but it all came down to a simple choice: bikini-clad top or not? Well, the naked version sported spectacular breasts, somewhere on a continuum between the Little Mermaid and Annie Sprinkle, so I decided to let it all hang out. Of course, bare breasts would have been totally out of place in the Victorian era. They didn’t even like topless statues, having banned the nude figure of Bacchante from the Boston Public Library in 1897.

As we got closer to the big evening, we descended deeper and deeper into puff pastry hell. We had by now mastered making the puff pastry, but we were having considerable problems with it when it was rolled out, cut, filled, and fried. Some of the rissoles broke apart at the seams and others would not puff properly, even when we tried freezing them first. By early Saturday morning, we were still having only mixed success. We would fry up four rissoles; three would come out fine and one would fail. Finally, by midafternoon, Erin, our test kitchen director, seemed to have things under control. After hundreds of tests and days of failures, she finally realized that the puff had to be kept very cold—it warms up quickly when rolled and cut, especially in a kitchen with a large wood cookstove. The edges had to be pinched and sealed extremely carefully, then checked once more before frying. This was the ultimate fussy recipe and required a great deal of last-minute attention. José Andrés, who had arrived midday on Saturday, watched the testing process and commented, “What’s the problem? They’re beautiful! They’re delicious!” to which Andrea responded, “But they’re not
perfect,
” and then stamped her foot for emphasis. Finally, my favorite detail of the preparation: the brains were poached and left in a bowl in the refrigerator marked “Abnormal.”

Meanwhile, the kitchen, front parlor, and dining room were lit by Jim Hirsch, whose company High Output also handles Hollywood movies. It took about six hours to install the metal scaffolding from which were hung a series of lights, including two large pillow-shaped soft lights over the dining room table. Jim explained that light levels are expressed in foot-candles, and a small handheld meter was used to check the output. With the cameras wide open at the largest iris setting, we would still need about eight foot-candles, which was a lot more than I wanted. Instead of a dark, romantic room, this was bright Hollywood lighting. So the food and the conversation (not to mention our makeup artist) were going to have to pull us through, not romantic ambiance.

By Thursday, we had a crew of five cooking full-time: Andrea was handling the gelatins, Yvonne was in charge of the mandarin cake, and Erin, Keith, and Dan were prepping most everything else. In another last-minute complication, the calf’s-foot jelly was not setting up properly, although it had performed admirably in a dozen previous tries. We tried various strengths, and Andrea rode home at night on her bicycle, a forty-minute trip, with the gelatin packed in saddlebags for further testing. We finally found it necessary to combine three different concentrations of homemade gelatin with the lemon syrup to see which one would hold up while also providing the least rubbery texture. We finally realized that the problem was that all calf’s feet are not created equal—younger animals have more gelatin in their feet than older calves. What? We had gone to all the trouble of making homemade gelatin by boiling calf’s feet and now we had to worry about how old the feet were? A small packet of Knox was looking rather attractive.

Suddenly it was Saturday morning, the day of the party. I made breakfast for the crew—buttermilk waffles made from a mixture of four flours plus cornmeal, a recipe inspired by the original 1890s Aunt Jemima pancake mix. We were almost out of wood for the stove, so we had a half cord delivered the day before as backup. However, it was not completely dry and therefore did not burn as well. We decided to use this greener oak until late afternoon, when we would have to crank up the cookstove, and then use up the last bit of our well-seasoned wood.

The camera crew showed up in the late morning to set up the control room, install hidden microphones in the flower arrangements on the dining room table, and run the various cables between the cameras and the monitors. Michael, our maitre d’, and his crew (his wife, Cindy, Jake, Debbie, Emile, and Melissa) arrived midafternoon and ran through the order of the courses—which menu items had sauce and might be difficult to transport upstairs, for example. They were briefed on the cheese course, the cordials, and the timing; dishes were to be served every twenty minutes.

As the afternoon progressed, the pace started to increase. Renee Montagne and José Andrés were already in-house. Mark Bittman and his wife, Kelly, turned up later in the afternoon, as did Harry Smith. Meanwhile, the kitchen was literally heating up, since meats had to be roasted and a good bed of coals would be necessary for grilling the salmon later in the evening. Brenda Coffey, our makeup artist, set up shop in the library. Showers were taken, suits and dresses donned, and then suddenly, after over two years of research, recipe testing, and intense planning, it was showtime.

The front parlor of our Victorian brownstone is fourteen feet wide by twenty-nine feet long, with a curved front wall featuring two high windows. These overlook a small oval English-style square populated by the few remaining four-story-high chestnut trees and a fountain with a center sculpture featuring dancing children. A fireplace with an ornate carved white marble mantel is on one wall; opposite are two richly varnished nine-foot-high walnut doors leading to the front hall. My great-grandfather, Harper Pennington, was a portrait artist and contemporary of Whistler, and two of his paintings are on the wall flanking the doors—one a standard-issue military portrait and the other, smaller but nicer, of my great-aunt Kid as a child in a white Victorian-style frock. A long, rather primitive landscape adorns the opposite wall, a second-rate painting of an early settler gazing on the Schenectady Stockade and the Mohawk River. The back of the room is framed by two pocket doors with etched glass that open up into the dining room, which itself has a large bay window and a fireplace that used to burn coal (and now burns wood).

The ice mermaid was standing on a well-lit table between the two front windows, replete with oysters. The sculpture was spectacular—her thick hair drifted back as if through water, her tail swooped up and around, and every scale was minutely carved. Champagne bottles stood askew in a large bucket of ice as if slightly tipsy. The silver 1880s punch bowl, resplendent on the center table, was kept chilled by a floating ring of ice. A hint of smoke came from the burning logs in the fireplace, the flue not yet heated sufficiently to stop a curl or two from escaping from the black iron inset in the marble surround.

The room started to fill. Oysters were splashed with mignonette and slurped down. The champagne corks were popped and punch was poured. The conversation grew louder. Newcomers stood and admired the mermaid, while others were deep into the politics of Afghanistan or anecdotes from their professional lives in radio or television. Finally, it was time to move into the dining room and be seated.

The dining table seated twelve, with the fireplace on one end and a shallow butler’s pantry with folding doors on the other. There was a grandfather clock on one side of the fireplace, and a small table for staging the food next to it, plus a large mahogany crockery cabinet along one wall. The bay window was filled with a mustard gold upholstered settee, with sprouting ferns as bookends. Hand-inscribed placecards held by silver calla lilly bud–shaped holders were at each setting. Three small arrangements of red roses were set in the middle, surrounded by fern. The chandelier was bedecked with copious greenery. The silver candlesticks rose from a circle of flowers sprouting hand-dipped gold candles; a gold-rimmed charger was set at every place; and the tablecloth, custom-made for the evening, matched the pewter and gold pattern of the wallpaper with an acanthus leaf ribbon pattern and gold trim with tassels around the hanging perimeter. To my left were Renee, Harry, Brian, Amy, and Gordon; Adrienne was seated at the opposite end. To my right were Fiona, José, Bruno, Kelly, and Mark. The candles and fireplace were lit, the parlor doors partially closed, and we were seated.

Ever since college I have had the same dream once a month like clockwork. It is the “I am sitting naked in front of the queen” dream—the one in which my humiliation is so profound that I am frozen into inaction. Well, here I was, with chairs filled with our distinguished guests, some of them having traveled thousands of miles, and now I had to announce that they were about to be served a soup made from a boiled calf’s head with garnishes made from the poached brains of said calf. I quickly regained the use of my voice and explained the nature of the first seated course. Amy, our resident humorist, responded cheerfully, “Well, that is good to know.” While trying to maintain my share of amiable chatter, I discreetly looked about to see how the brain balls were selling. The clear soup was a winner, but most guests left one or two floaters behind. Had I invited the wrong guests to dinner?

Things picked up when José Andrés got into gear. Proving that he knew something about almost everything, he noted that the Amontillado Sherry served with the soup was made in his wife’s hometown in Spain. (Later on, however, when he was singing the praises of a can of fresh clams sold for the princely price of $80, his enthusiasm for all things culinary seemed to lurch out of control.) Then I was rescued by the rissoles, which were served piping hot, salty, crisp, and filled with chicken with three variations: duxelles, blue cheese with dried cherries, and chicken liver with caramelized onion. With the 1996 Heimbourg Pinot Gris, it was a stunner, and everyone was back onboard with the food. Just like a rock band, I thought, never start with your best song. (I discovered later that evening that since we were short on long-handled spoons, Yvonne and Andrea’s hands had been frequently splashed with hot oil when frying the rissoles.)

Perhaps the best course was up next, the lobster à l’Américaine. Once again, our Spanish chef opined on the origin of the term
l’Américaine.
His claim was that this was a common dish in the south of France but also in the Mediterranean, including on Minorca, and hence the term
l’Américaine
a long-shot bastardization. Other theories claim that the original dish came from Brittany, which, at one time was called Amorica (hence,
Américaine
).

Regardless of nomenclature, one mouthful of the rich tarragon-scented sauce would be sufficient to convince even Rachael Ray that making homemade fish stock and then combining it with pan-sautéed lobster shells to forge a deeply resonant sauce was worth every second and dollar of expense. “This is why we cook,” I thought, “to transform the ordinary ingredients of our trade—fennel, peppercorns, brandy, white wine, and leek—into something extraordinary, a combination that hints at a more perfect state of being.”

All of a sudden, the kitchen ran into serious trouble and almost burned down the house. A wood cookstove is not hard to heat up—you add wood, open the vents underneath the firebox, open the flue all the way, and let it crank. Once you get up to temperature, you close the vent and shut the flue until it is just barely open, in an effort to retain the heat instead of allowing it to disappear up the chimney. The venison had been larded with salt pork and required a very hot oven indeed—we were using 600 degrees.

In a burst of enthusiasm, however, Keith, our sous-chef, had cranked the oven so high that the oven thermometer had rotated off the scale, well past 600 degrees—creating, in effect, a pizza oven. (A few days later, it occurred to me that twelve hundred pounds of red-hot iron surrounded by wood, 150-year-old lathing, and plaster was probably a near-miss in terms of spontaneous combustion.) After ten minutes of roasting, Erin discovered that the ends of the salt pork had actually charred. So there they were, snipping off the burned ends of the salt pork and using a pastry brush to wipe them away. Then they had to finish roasting the venison with the oven door open to cool things down.

But, oh, the venison once again reminded me that we live in lackluster times, an era without appreciation for the exalted role of the French sauce. For the saddle of venison, we had turned back the clock and roasted venison bones, made homemade currant jelly, and simmered our own veal stock, all in an effort to transform two thin slices of roasted venison loin with a currant jelly sauce that was sweet yet bracing; a sauce that made one shut one’s eyes just for a second in order to appreciate the rich colors of taste.