Fannie's Last Supper (4 page)

Always with a keen ear for marketing and publicity, Fannie claimed that when she dined at a famous New York or Boston restaurant and the chef would not provide a recipe, she would secrete a dab of sauce or other victual in a handkerchief and “analyze it at the cooking school.” (This sounds like utter claptrap; it was clear from her attempts to reproduce dishes from, say, Delmonico’s, that the “dab of sauce” wasn’t doing her much good, since her versions fell a mile short of the original. Yet her students felt that they were getting the most cutting-edge food—the secrets of the great chefs of the day.)

MAY 2008. FOR OUR DINNER PARTY OF THE CENTURY, WE HAD
to establish some rules about food preparation. My first thought was to ban the use of appliances, including mixers and food processors. A few months later, however, I was visiting friends in Andover, Maine, at the family “big house,” one of those massive eighteenth-century colonials, with winding passageways, cobbled-together additions, and a huge three-story-high main room. The kitchen was primitive at best, with a wood cookstove, complete with brass water heater. In a nod to the twentieth century, there was also a cheap electric range. There were no electric mixers, so I had to beat twelve egg whites by hand to produce the morning pancakes. That got me thinking—a twelve-course meal without plug-in appliances? This was looking grim.

We had decided to use refrigerators and freezers for food safety as much as anything else, plus hot water out of the tap for cleanup. The management of the cooking process, including how to hold foods until they were served, was going to be one of the biggest obstacles. I only had two ovens plus one cooktop on the coal cookstove. I hoped that modern ovens would not be necessary, but that would depend on the timing and order of the courses. Another large concern was the sheer quantity of food that had to be served perfectly hot, such as the rissoles (fried and filled puff pastry) and the fried baby artichokes. Was I going to have to give in to convenience and use the high-powered commercial wok hiding in my back kitchen, or would we be able to manage the heat of the stovetop and the space available to simultaneously fry enough food for a dinner party of twelve? (I finally decided to do almost all of the cooking on the wood cookstove, other than the baking of cakes; and that electric mixers and food processors would be used only for the baking.)

There were other considerations as well. For our jellies, commercial food colorings were out, so we had to reinvent the art of using natural ingredients to create a range of different-colored layers. And there were to be no shortcuts in making the puff pastry. For starters, we had to make the dough, fashion it into a 6-inch-square flour and butter mixture, and roll it out to 12 inches. This “paste,” as they called it in Fannie’s time, was then rolled into a 24- by 8-inch strip that was folded letterlike and refrigerated. This was repeated four or five times, and then refrigerated overnight before being rolled into a perfect strip one-sixteenth of an inch thick. No store-bought puff pastry here.

In addition, old recipes often call for odd measurements that had to be translated to modern terms. For example, a
gill
is five ounces, the same size as a
teacup.
A
dessert spoon
is half a tablespoon. We also came across a
breakfast cup,
which is half a pint.

The saddle of venison had to be larded on both sides using a larding needle, and we had to make a stock from an actual calf’s head for the soup. The lobster à l’Américaine required both homemade lobster and fish stocks; we would have to master regulating the cookstove in order to perfectly grill the salmon on the grilling insert; a hand-cranked ice-cream machine would be necessary to freeze the Canton punch; and the elaborate Mandarin cake required two separate cakes, a filling of Bavarian cream, a fondant icing, and tangerines filled with ice cream and two different jellies. And how much of this could be prepared ahead of time? We had to test the frozen punch (more or less a sorbet)—would it still be soft and refreshing if made the day ahead, or would it would turn dense and hard? And I knew from experience that jellies tend to stiffen over time: the gelatin keeps on working, so there might be a small window of time when our elaborate, towering jellies had the perfect texture. If they were too loose, we could not serve them properly; if too stiff, they would lose much of their flavor and be unappealing to eat. There were smaller, more finicky issues as well—for instance, how does one cut into a tower of jelly and serve it cleanly?

We also had to consider the issue of service. As in all Victorian households, our kitchen was downstairs and the dining room was upstairs. We had to serve twelve courses, many of them with more than one recipe on the plate, and keep the service well paced to get through the entire dinner in one evening. (One course every twenty minutes would mean a four-hour dinner; Victorian etiquette called for a two-hour time limit on formal dinners, a time frame that appeared impossible to meet.) Given a lack of space and our preference for performing carving and plating out of the view of our guests, we would have to figure out how to warm plates and move quickly to get the food to the table while it was still hot. We would also have to carefully orchestrate the silverware, the wineglasses, and the plates, since we would have to do a large amount of recycling during the dinner. Washing up had to be an ongoing activity, and well paced to provide the cutlery and flatware for upcoming courses.

We had eighteen months to test and refine the recipes, assemble a kitchen and waitstaff, pull together a dozen high Victorian table settings plus period table decorations, create a blue-ribbon guest list, figure out how to use an authentic Victorian cookstove, choose and taste-test the wines, and become experts on the cooking of Boston in the 1890s.

MY FIRST SERIOUS AND MOST EMBARRASSING ENCOUNTER WITH
oysters occurred in the mid-1990s when Julia Child called to invite me over to cook dinner together. This was nothing special for Julia; she invited virtually everyone in the food world in Boston over to her home frequently since she loved company and she loved to cook. For me, it was nerve-wracking and, as it turned out, a near disaster.

I had met Julia a number of times at industry events and had driven to Boston back in the 1980s to interview her and her husband Paul for
Cook’s Magazine.
On that memorable occasion, we had an oyster stew and a warm crisp baguette that was yanked from the oven and ripped into hunks—delicious. And, like most of her viewers, I thought of Julia as a kindly teacher, a patient, accepting educator. What I did not realize until that evening was that Julia was playful and quite competitive, often putting others on the spot to see how well they would respond.

So a few minutes into our evening together, she sidled up to me with a large plastic tub and issued the challenge: “Would you mind shucking a few oysters?” using her inimitable and slightly challenging voice. Ten minutes later, by which time I had two oysters open and one slightly bloody finger, she came back and asked, with more than a hint of pixie humor in her query, “Do you need some help, dearie?” I thought for a moment and then threw caution to the wind. “Just get me the biggest glass of wine you can find, and then you shuck the oysters while I cook the rest of dinner!” We were good friends after that. I guess I failed the cooking test, but had passed the character part of the evening’s entertainment.

Despite this experience, the first course on our elaborate menu was to be, of course, oysters, the reason being that oysters were almost always the first thing served at any feast or serious dinner party. They were easy and abundant and Victorians loved them. Oysters were so popular that the beds at Wellfleet were fished out as early as 1775, so enterprising fishermen dumped oysters from Buzzard’s Bay into Wellfleet in the spring, thus ensuring fat, valuable “Wellfleet” oysters come fall. Eventually, hundreds of tons of oysters were dredged up from the Chesapeake and dumped onto New England beds so that they, too, could be given local names and higher prices. Oystermen also had a clever trick up their sleeve—“floating” oysters, which meant placing them on floats in low-salinity water. The oysters sucked in this fresher water, plumped up, and therefore weighed more, commanding higher prices. This process was banned in 1909, since the floats were often located near large population centers with polluted waters that offered the risk of contamination, resulting in outbreaks of typhoid.

In eighteenth-century Boston, oysters were sold door to door—the oystermen would open the oysters right there, throwing the shells into a large shoulder bag. Later, handcarts came into use, as they did with other food items. The first cooked oysters were sold by Peter B. Brigham at the head of Hanover Street, and he quickly amassed a fortune. Oyster houses soon sprang up—they were most popular between 1810 and 1875—and became a convenient, all-purpose meeting place since there were no lunch counters in Boston or other fast-food establishments. Oysters were cheap, required little to no preparation, and the oyster houses stayed open late at night. All told, there were about a thousand establishments in Boston that served oysters by the mid-nineteenth century.

Early oyster boats were as small as sixteen feet long, no more than dugouts made from white pine. In 1874, the oyster business came into the steam age when a small steam engine was installed in the sloop
Early Bird
owned by Peter Decker of Norwalk, Connecticut. By the early 1900s, the steam-powered oyster boat had started to decline in favor of gasoline engines, which took up less room and so could be used on smaller boats. Dredging an oyster bed in a sailboat required fairly advanced skills. The key was to drift over the bed, starting upwind with the centerboard down, and then to let the wind and tide take you over the prime real estate. The jib was trimmed to just short of luffing, and the main had to be trimmed just enough to keep the bow headed into the wind. Small hand dredges were used by oystermen standing on the side of the boat. The smaller sailboats were often outfitted with a hand-winder dredge (these were eventually run by steam power when steam engines came into use), but that meant one dredge per boat, a less efficient method than having four or five workmen, standing at the gunwales, using hand dredges. Once the industry moved away from sail power, larger boats used bigger hydraulic dredges.

In Fannie’s time, virtually every menu started with a large platter of oysters served on a bed of crushed ice or a large block of ice that had a hollowed-out center trough. Special oyster plates that held four to six oysters and platters that usually held a dozen were also used, with a bed of ice covered with a doily, the rims decorated with holly or fern. Oysters were also fricasséed (served in a slightly thickened cream sauce), creamed, battered and fried as fritters (eggs, milk, and flour were used for the batter), or put into a stew (made from water, oyster liquor, and cream) or stuffing. Fannie also suggested serving oysters with brown bread, so we tested her recipe and made a few minor alterations. It was served in small rounds spread with salted butter.

So our first course, oysters, was simple enough. Our second course, mock turtle soup, would test the limits of our culinary adventurism.

CHAMPAGNE MIGNONETTE

1 cup champagne vinegar

2 tablespoons minced shallot

½ teaspoon coarse ground black pepper

Combine ingredients and serve with oysters.

BROWN BREAD

Since we served this bread with oysters, it is less sweet than many other recipes and, of course, contains no raisins, a common ingredient at the time. You will need two 12-ounce coffee cans for baking.

4 tablespoons melted butter, plus extra for preparing cans

1 cup rye flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup fine ground white cornmeal

2¼ teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

½ cup light molasses

2¼ cups buttermilk

2 12-ounce coffee cans, washed and dried

1. Grease the bottoms of the coffee cans with butter. Line the sides of the coffee cans with parchment paper (cut to fit), and grease with butter. Place a steamer rack on the bottom of a large pot that is tall enough to accommodate the can with the cover on. In a large saucepan, boil enough water to fill the steaming pot about halfway.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk together flours, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt. Stir in the molasses, buttermilk, and butter, and mix until combined. Spoon batter into prepared cans; do not fill cans more than two-thirds full. Cover tightly with aluminum foil. Secure foil to cans with a rubber band or twine. Place can on rack (or on bottom of pot), and pour boiling water to about halfway up the coffee cans. Return water to a boil and lower to a simmer. Cover the pot. Steam for 2 hours, adding more boiling water as needed, until bread is firm and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

3. Place cans on a cooling rack, allow to cool 10 minutes, then unmold. Allow to cool for 1 hour before slicing.

Chapter 4
Mock Turtle Soup

A Walking Tour of Fannie Farmer’s Boston

I
t’s one thing to read about the history of a place from books and quite another to actually live in the same neighborhood as the object of your investigation. My first question was, how much of Fannie Farmer’s Boston was still left a century later? I called up a friend and my researcher for this project, Meg Ragland, and, a few weeks later, we met at the site of Fannie’s former home on Rutland Square to follow her footsteps to the Boston Cooking School, which was located on Tremont Street, right off the Boston Common. Since she had suffered from polio, Fannie probably took the trolley that ran down the center of Columbus Avenue. Could we still see the same sights that she had seen more than a hundred years before?

But first, we examined the ward maps from 1895, which offer detailed accounts of every building in Boston, as well as listings of commercial enterprises they contained. By far the biggest categories included grocers (about 1,200 listings), hotels (700), produce dealers (250), restaurants (500, but these included coffee and oyster houses), confectioners (about 80) and, of course, liquor stores (500). So, Boston was full of people with a taste for liquor and sweets, living in lodging houses and hotels, eating and drinking out a lot. Most of the shopping was done in small, neighborhood grocery and produce stores. More interesting establishments listed in the ward maps of that year include two potato chip companies, a butter color supplier, cold-blast refrigerators, one color photography establishment, four suppliers of counting-room furniture, cracker bakers, and a half dozen manufacturers of grate bars, which pointed to the need for security.

We began at Columbus Avenue and Claremont Park, a spot only a couple of blocks from Fannie’s residence. This part of Columbus included myriad hotels as well as private residences and lodging houses. It was just a block from the railroad, so hotel accommodations were in high demand.

As we moved down Columbus, toward downtown, Meg pointed out that, originally, the South End had few storefronts. As the fortunes of the neighborhood declined, it became more commercial, and street-level storefronts were added onto the brownstones, sticking out like tacked-on shanties. Today, you can see that, architecturally, the ground-floor retail spaces have swallowed up the steps leading to the second-floor parlors, the stores themselves appearing to be nothing more than crude afterthoughts. The experience of walking down Columbus Avenue in Fannie Farmer’s day would have been much grander.

The big difference between Rutland Square today and one hundred years ago is that Fannie’s house would have been adjacent to the Boston and Providence train tracks running into the city. The streets that intersect the railroad line were, for the most part, named for towns that the railroad served along the line: hence street names such as Worcester, Springfield, etc. Of the 169 streets in the South End, 84 were named for cities and towns chiefly in New York and western Massachusetts, all places served by the railroad. Today, because of an urban renewal project, the trains run underground and the area has been turned into green space named the South End Corridor. However, the railroad still provides a barrier between the South End and Back Bay because most of the streets on either side of the corridor are dead ends, with no through traffic, just as it was in Fannie’s day.

By taking a short detour to Copley Plaza, Fannie could have walked into the major food retailer of the day, S. S. Pierce, located across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts, a fabulous, highly ornamented terra-cotta brick Gothic Revival building designed by John Hubbard Sturgis, which was torn down in 1909. A few blocks later, at Clarendon Street, the Albermarle Hotel building still exists and offers a stunning example of Gothic architecture and, like many other Boston hotels at the time, the “French flat,” a continental system also called family hotels in which a tenant would occupy part or all of a floor rather than several floors in a house. Before the areas around Boston were built up, our city was said to have been the most densely populated urban area in America, and therefore these large, high-occupancy hotels were a natural development.

Across the train tracks headed toward South Station, in the next block on the left, there are two buildings of note, the first being the Pope Manufacturing building. Albert A. Pope started his career in the 1870s by exporting bicycles from England. His first bike, and the first model ever made in the United States, was the Columbia in 1881. In the late 1890s, Pope began manufacturing electric cars as well, five hundred of them between 1897 and 1899.

The next block would have been entirely devoted to the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad passenger depot. This large area also contained a freight house, as well as a few small buildings fronting Columbus Avenue. Because of the proximity to the depot, there would have been a run of restaurants. Finally, we walked across Tremont Street and into the Boston Common, past the old cemetery, and then up to the site of the Boston Cooking School, now occupied by a large Loews Multiplex. Fannie lived in a vital, thriving neighborhood, filled with boardinghouses, creameries, fruit sellers, small grocers, butchers, confectioners, and even a good selection of restaurants closer to town.

JANUARY 2009. THE TESTING WAS PROCEEDING SLOWLY. WE DECIDED
to make an authentic turtle soup as a frame of reference for our mock turtle version. Would the ersatz version taste anything like the original, and why would Fannie and other cooks of the period use a calf’s head instead of turtle meat? We finally managed to snag five pounds of frozen turtle meat, but getting hold of a calf’s head was more difficult. After calling around, we finally found a supplier, Previte’s Meats, who charged $9.99 per head (the feet, by the way, were a steal at just $1.99 each). The head had a “hole” in it, presumably a bullet hole. This was getting gruesome. When we picked up the order, we also noted that the employees took quite an interest in who was buying the head, peeking around corners, trying to be inconspicuous. Sort of like picking up one’s custom-made leather bondage suit—you know, the one with the bat ears and cape. The next week, we showed up at the store to pick up an order for two brains and found a huge box waiting for us. I asked, “There are just two brains here, right?” I was assured that this was the case. I opened the box, just to be sure, and found a total of ten brains. This made us think that calf’s heads were nothing out of the ordinary for these guys, since they were selling them in bulk. Was this for some ethnic specialty perhaps, an Ecuadorian feast or a Cambodian stew? Were they being used in some sort of bestial ritual, voodoo or some darker, more sinister rite? Finally, we contacted a butcher who had helped us out with test kitchen orders for years, Scott Brueggeman from DiLuigi Sausage Company. He supplied the rest of our orders, including the calf’s feet for making homemade gelatin.

We were curious, however, as to why the brains that came with the calf’s head purchased from Brueggeman were creamy white, firm, and healthy-looking, whereas the brains that we had purchased separately looked grayer, tinged with darker lines like coral and requiring more delicate handling so they did not dissolve into a puddle. The answer was that the brains purchased separately were probably ten days old and came from an older animal, whereas the calf’s head and brains from Scott were fresh, just twenty-four hours old, and the animal was probably only two to four weeks when slaughtered. So, more proof that the older we get, the more our brains turn to mush.

Brains, as explained in many nineteenth-century cookbooks, require very delicate handling or they quickly turn to custard. On more than one occasion, I was holding a plump, firm mound of brains in my hand only to have it liquefy into a rich goo as I transferred it to a plate. I wondered whether we should inform our celebrity guests of the nature of our soup garnish—we had decided to serve “brain balls,” which were offered in a number of contemporary cookbooks—or simply allow them to consume one or two balls first and then tell them what they had eaten. The true urbane gourmet would hardly flinch at the revelation—after all, brains are not uncommon in many cuisines—but the term
brain balls
has a satisfying ring to it, as if something fat and heavy just plopped from the gullet into the bottom of the stomach, where it promised to dissolve slowly, like cold bacon grease stuck in the S curve of a drain.

THE CALF’S HEAD HAD BEEN STUFFED INGLORIOUSLY INTO A
large stainless stockpot, its bared teeth grinning hideously upward, the tongue slack, lolling out of the mouth into the now opaque broth. It reminded me of the popular glass-fronted carts I had seen in the streets of Istanbul when I had visited as a student in the early 1970s, the ones that held goat’s heads, teeth bared and vicious, the small skulls nestled on a bed of parsley, the Turkish equivalent of roasted chestnuts. I removed the head, reduced the stock, shredded the cheek meat, and placed it back into the pot for serving. A final adjustment of seasonings and then the taste test. The soup was at once gamey and slick with a gelatinous back-of-the-throat scum of fat, exotic but sufficiently off in flavor and texture to produce the first tentative signs of gagging: short bursts of throat clearing followed by deep swallows of ice water. I had just eaten something that was best left still attached to a nervous system. So much for the classic Victorian-era recipe, mock turtle soup.

Weeks later, after further research and to my great horror, I discovered a common but rarely explicitly stated fact about this recipe: the brains had to be removed before cooking. I had spent days tracking down a whole calf’s head, done weeks of research, and then cooked all day to produce nothing more than brain soup. This dish was going to be a lot harder than it had at first appeared.

Mock turtle soup is part of a great tradition of “mock” dishes that began in medieval times and were always a cheap knockoff of the real thing. In this case, that would be a soup made with real turtles, which, in Britain, were initially shipped from the West Indies, and were therefore expensive. And, of course, mock turtle soup was a time-saver; one didn’t have to boil the live beast, slough off skin, remove toenails, etc. Sea turtles could run up to one hundred pounds or more, whereas a diamondback terrapin, the turtle of choice for nineteenth-century American cooks, was tiny by comparison, running just four pounds. (The largest turtle ever eaten weighed 350 pounds, and was baked and served at the King’s Arms Tavern in Pall Mall.) Once it was discovered that sea turtles could be transported in a ship’s hold, the turtle feast became a signifier of wealth and success for the British and American merchant elite.

It took little time for this expensive dish to be mocked. The first recorded recipe for mock turtle soup appeared in 1758, in the fifth edition of Hannah Glasse’s
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy,
just three years after her recipe for an authentic turtle soup was published.

But why turtle meat to begin with? Well, such fare was considered quite the delicacy, and diamondback terrapins were de rigeur as a mainstay of many nineteenth-century menus. Around 1800, taverns served terrapin for supper for a modest two shillings, usually boiled in its shell. Terrapins were so abundant that they were even used as food for pigs. In Philadelphia, they were sold from wheelbarrows, as were oysters. But they were also highly prized around the Chesapeake, especially toward the latter part of the nineteenth century, when they had been overfished. By 1900, the price had risen to a high of $125 per dozen for counts—legal turtles that were at least seven inches wide.

By the 1890s, Fannie Farmer was still suggesting that home cooks prepare and serve terrapin, the directions for which would make even an avid hunter and preparer of wild game slightly queasy. To begin, boil a live turtle for five minutes, remove the skin from the feet and tail by rubbing with a towel, then draw out the head with a skewer and rub off the skin. (One Philadelphia cook, Mrs. Rubicam, suggested that the terrapins be put alive in boiling water, “where they must remain until they are quite dead.” Yes, I think that there would be unanimity of opinion on this point.) This is only the initial preparation. To cook it, Fannie suggests placing it in a kettle and covering it with salted, boiling water plus carrot, onion, and celery. The turtle is cooked until tender—the test was pressing the “feet-meat” between thumb and forefinger—estimated to take up to forty minutes. Then, Fannie instructs, remove the turtle from the water, cool, draw out the nails from the feet, cut the body under the shell close to the upper shell, and remove. Finally, empty the upper shell and remove the gallbladder, sandbags (a remnant from the Triassic period), and the thick, heavy part of the intestines.

Fannie was not offering anything new in the turtle department. Her basic recipe for Terrapin à la Baltimore was well known to any cook of the period and had been published in numerous cookbooks. The terrapin is boiled, the meat and selected entrails are removed and placed in a chafing dish, where it is finished with a roux, egg yolks, and Madeira. Wine, brandy, cream, and sherry were also used to finish the dish.

We finally hunted up some frozen turtle meat, but I wondered about the diamondback terrapins and thought that a fishing trip to the Chesapeake might be in order. I called the Maryland Department of Fisheries to determine when the season opened and what the legal limit was. A hasty return phone call from Diane Samuels made it clear that I had made a terrible gaffe, as if I were inquiring joyfully about the season for clubbing baby seals. After being informed that there was
no
season for the turtles of the Chesapeake—she used the words “strictly prohibited”—I asked how long the ban had been in effect. “Oh, one year,” was the reply. Well, it’s always the last sinner in church who protests the loudest.

To get a better sense of other preparation methods for turtle, I selected two recipes, one from Commander’s Palace and the other from Arnaud’s. They both used a stock—beef or veal—and roux for thickening. The Commander’s Palace recipe reminded me of a traditional terrapin recipe in which the turtle meat is sautéed in butter, seasonings are added, and, in the case of this soup, the stock is then thrown in and simmered for half an hour. The roux is whisked in, the soup thickened, and lemon juice, chopped hard-boiled eggs, and parsley are added. A teaspoon of sherry for each soup plate is the final touch. Arnaud’s recipe is much lighter and, I might add, stranger. In separate pots, three-quarters of a pound each of turtle meat and ground veal are cooked at length—forty-five minutes—and then the meats are chopped and set aside. Veal stock is heated with seasonings along with two halved lemons and, to finish, the meats are added, along with sherry, chopped eggs, and some roux to thicken. Delicious, you ask? The good news is that turtle meat does have a distinctive flavor: slightly gamey, rich, almost as if the meat had been hung for a few days to ripen. It is also varied. Some bits are much like white meat, and other pieces are quite dark, almost like duck. The bad news is that both of these recipes were disappointing: the Commander’s Palace recipe was heavy because of the large amount of roux, and the Arnaud’s soup wasn’t much better: thin, watery, and overwhelmed by the acidity of the lemons.