Fannie's Last Supper (8 page)

That meant that we needed a different approach to the stock, one that would take minutes, not hours. We searched our cookbook library and came up with Gordon Ramsay’s quick lobster stock base. Unfortunately, this provided a rather grim experience, even for those who have removed the brains and eyes from fresh calf’s heads and field-dressed rabbits. His approach was to freeze the lobsters for thirty minutes to “make them sleepy,” and then plunge them into boiling water for a mere one minute. After cooling them briefly, he rips into them with savage abandon, removing the head and claws and extracting the meat with scissors or poultry shears to “cut through.”

Let me provide you with our firsthand testing notes: “We have to say that is a horrendous way to cook/kill a lobster. We boiled lobsters for 1 minute and began to remove them, but they were like burn victims, still writhing in choppy, halting movements, so we immediately dropped them for another minute, hoping they would die, but no such luck.” Clearly, if heartless test cooks such as ourselves were becoming queasy, this was not going to fly in the typical American kitchen.

We started with three 1½-pound lobsters, then boiled the claws and knuckles separately in heavily salted water and removed and reserved the meat. The remaining carcass was chopped into pieces; the tails were reserved and refrigerated. We also reserved the tomalley and the roe for the sauce. Then we made the lobster stock using the chopped shells, pretty much following Ramsay’s guidelines, a method that is done very quickly in a skillet. The reserved tails were then sautéed quickly and flambéed, and the sauce was reduced and seasoned. The result? By far the best lobster dish you will ever eat if you have the will and the wherewithal. This is not a recipe for the casual cook.

LOBSTER À L’AMÉRICAINE

This recipe was printed in Fannie’s original cookbook in 1896, along with more pedestrian recipes for lobster. It featured a heavy, floury tomato sauce, which is typical of much of her cooking. We wanted a lighter, fresher version and looked to Escoffier, Julia Child, and even Gordon Ramsay for inspiration. Although not a quick Tuesday night dinner, this method of preparing lobster is spectacular, if we do say so ourselves. The claws and knuckles are boiled in water as a first step, but the tail meat is separated and left raw, stored in the refrigerator no longer than one hour. It is important to make sure that your butter is at 70 degrees before mixing with the tomalley to ensure that it gets fully combined. The recipe for fish stock can be found at www.fannieslastsupper.com.

3 female lobsters, 1¼ pounds each

4 tablespoons butter, softened (70 degrees)

Vegetable oil

1 small carrot, finely diced, ½ cup

1 small leek, finely diced, ¾ cup

1 small celery stalk, finely diced, ½ cup

1 small bulb fennel, finely diced, 1½ cups

1 28-ounce can whole tomatoes, drained, liquid discarded, tomatoes broken into large pieces

1 tablespoon tomato paste

Pinch cayenne

3 sprigs fresh tarragon, plus 1 tablespoon chopped

¼ cup brandy, plus 2 tablespoons

½ cup dry white wine

2 cups fish stock

1 bay leaf

8 peppercorns

Salt and pepper

1 lemon

6 sprigs chervil (for garnish)

1. Split lobsters in half lengthwise. Remove claws and knuckles and boil them in heavily salted water until cooked, about 5 minutes. Remove cooked meat from shells, reserving meat and discarding cooked shells. Cut each lobster in half crosswise, separating the body from the tail. Remove intestinal tract from each tailpiece and discard. Refrigerate tails (meat should still be in the shells). From the body halves, remove tomalley and roe and reserve separately. Roughly chop legs and body (these will be used to make the sauce base). Make tomalley butter: pass 4 tablespoons softened butter and 2 tablespoons of reserved tomalley through fine mesh strainer, stir to combine, and chill.

2. For the sauce base:
Heat 2 to 3 tablespoons vegetable oil in 12-inch sauté pan over medium-high heat and sauté shells until bright red. Stir in carrot, leek, celery, and fennel, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 9 to 12 minutes, until nicely caramelized. Add drained tomatoes, tomato paste, cayenne, and tarragon sprigs (reserving chopped tarragon) and stir well to combine. Cook, stirring occasionally, 4 to 6 minutes until contents are sticky and well caramelized. Add ¼ cup brandy (reserving the 2 tablespoons), flambé, and cook until it evaporates; add wine and cook until syrupy, about 2 minutes. Add fish stock, bay leaf, and peppercorns, and simmer until it reduces by half, about 6 to 8 minutes. Remove pan from heat and allow to cool for 10 minutes. Strain through china cap or large sieve or fine colander, squeezing and gently pressing solids with tongs to remove all liquid and until shells are dry—you should have 2 cups liquid. Whisk to combine; reserve.

3. For the lobster:
Heat 2 tablespoons vegetable oil in 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Season tails with salt and pepper, add to pan, shell side down, for about 3 minutes until bright red. Flip each piece and cook about 30 seconds; add remaining 2 tablespoons brandy and flambé, cooking and swirling pan until liquid cooks off, about 5 to 10 seconds. Add reserved sauce, bring to gentle simmer, cover, and cook until lobster is cooked through, about 2 to 4 minutes. Transfer lobster tails to platter, cover with foil. Reduce sauce to ½ cup, about 2 minutes. Add cooked claws and knuckles and heat through, about 1 minute; transfer to plate and cover. Whisk in chopped tarragon, chilled tomalley butter, and lobster roe. Season with salt and pepper. Add a couple of drops of lemon for brightness. Spoon sauce over lobster. Garnish each plate with chervil sprig. Serve.

Serves 6 as a first course.

Chapter 7
Saddle of Venison

The Old Boston, the New Boston, and Social Nudism

M
y favorite Boston anecdote dates from the 1920s, when a Chicago banking house asked for a reference from the Boston investment firm of Lee, Higginson & Company with regard to a young Bostonian it was considering hiring. The young man was vouched for in a letter, noting that his father was a Cabot, his mother a Lowell, and his extended family included Saltonstalls, Appletons, Peabodys, etc. Several days later, a curt acknowledgment arrived stating, “We were not contemplating using the young gentleman for breeding purposes.”

Although Fannie Farmer did represent change in Boston’s culinary world, the city itself had resisted change for more than two centuries, and had done so rather effectively. In fact, the very essence of the Boston character remained well into the twentieth century. Simply put, there was a proper way to behave and everyone else be damned. In one story, a tall girl was passing by the house of Mrs. Jack Gardner. She heard a tapping on the pane and saw a beckoning finger. She knocked on the door and was admitted to find the mistress of the house facing her in a dark room. Mrs. Gardner noted that the girl was not carrying herself properly and stated flatly, “Walk erect,” then rang for the maid to have the girl ushered out. Life was a series of rules and habits that had been refined over the centuries, and woe to those who thought otherwise.

This worldview is not unique to Boston but is very much part, I think, of the Pilgrim culture. My maternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Blanche White, was not much different from Mrs. Gardner. At the tender age of ten, I was summoned upstairs to her daffodil yellow sitting room, located in a stately brick home on Kalorama Road in the nation’s capital, and given “the talk.” This was to be a succinct transfer of wisdom from one generation to another, a summation of what she had learned in over seventy years of living. She looked me in the eye and said, “Now, Christopher, always remember—wash your fruit!” Well, I admit to having been quite taken aback. Until that time, I had no reason to suspect my fruit but, I can assure you, I took her advice to heart, and have repeated her mantra to each of our four children.

But Boston did change, at least a bit, from its original staid provenance to something slightly more modern, although still steeped in the past. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge once remarked, “The year 1850 stood on the edge of a new time, but the old time was still visible from it, and indeed prevailed about it.”

The reasons for this move into a new century were both population—the 1840s saw a huge influx of immigrants, many of them Irish—and the growth of transportation, which opened up Boston to a much wider swath of New England. In 1847, there was not even one “horse car line” in Boston, just stagecoaches. Lower Chestnut Street on Beacon Hill had so many stables that it was once named “Horse-Chestnut Street.” But things were starting to change. There were eight railroad stations in town, most of them opening in the 1830s and 1840s. One sure way to check the modernity of a city is to track the introduction of natural gas. The Boston Gaslight Company was established in 1827 and built in the North End. In 1828, the price of gas was $54 per thousand feet, but it had dropped to a mere $1.80 by later in the century.

Throughout this tumultuous age, however, Boston was to retain its unique character, one forged by its religious beginnings and married to its wildly successful run in the nineteenth century as America’s busiest port. It might be summed up as a reverence for the family name, old money (money was to be gathered, not spent), and old ways. And custom was all-powerful, as this story about Judge John Lowell portrays. One morning when he was at home in suburban Chestnut Hill around 1900, seated at the breakfast table, his wife and a nervous maid arrived and Mrs. Lowell confided nervously, “There isn’t going to be any oatmeal this morning, John.” The maid had burned it, and there was none left. He responded, lifting his head out of the paper, “Frankly, my dear, I never did care for it.”

Being placed in the public eye, especially for commercial purposes, was to be avoided at all costs. In 1933, when Mrs. Powell Cabot and Mrs. John Gardner Coolidge II agreed to promote Camel cigarettes in the press, Boston society regarded it as an act of “social nudism.” (One of the print ads showed Mrs. Cabot lounging on a yellow sofa with a modest décolletage, saying, “Flavor is just as important in tobacco as it is in food, don’t you think?”)

Given its emphasis upon and love of custom, Boston was still far from cosmopolitan. Speaking of the Cabot family, a historian declared they were “a strange dynasty, with customs but no manners.” One’s word was indeed gold in Boston, since the best families used few written agreements, even when a large amount of business was at stake. Boston’s Russell & Company and the famous Chinese merchant Houqua had no written agreements other than one small slip of rice paper that was discovered many years later. It said, “Forty thousand dollars. Houqua.” Perhaps the most concise definition of what it meant to be a gentleman in Boston was this: “A Boston gentleman never takes a drink before 3:00 or east of Park Street.” Translated, this means that one did not drink before the close of the stock market or anywhere in the business district. When Oscar Wilde visited in 1899 and attended a debutante ball, he commented that the lack of feminine pulchritude was so overwhelming that he understood why Boston artists were reduced to painting “only Niagara Falls and millionaires.” Charlie McCarthy had similarly unkind words for the Boston debutante, whom he compared to a groundhog in spring “who comes out, sees her shadow, and goes back in again.”

Boston culture might not have been changing with the times, but by the end of the nineteenth century, gas stoves were being introduced in many Victorian kitchens, replacing coal stoves, which took considerable time to heat up and clean, and required much advance planning for cooking. However, most cooking in Boston was still done on the coal cookstove. If I was going to turn back the kitchen clock for our own Victorian feast, I would have to find and install an authentic stove.

Fortunately, in the early 1990s, I had joined the St. Botolph Club on Boston’s famous boulevard, Commonwealth Avenue. It was there that I finally—almost fifteen years later—discovered the perfect Victorian cookstove, a massive sixty-three-inch-wide affair, one that had been sitting in the basement of the club unused for decades.

APRIL 2009. THE HISTORY OF FOOD TEACHES US MANY THINGS,
but first and foremost, it teaches us that what we eat is based on supply and demand, and, second, that no matter how silly or odd the demand, someone will quickly find a way to supply it. One of the strangest examples of the marketplace at work is cockscombs, a garnish for vol-au-vents and other classic French preparations, as well as a delicacy that is eaten on its own, battered and fried.

Since cockscombs were in much demand as a nineteenth-century garnish, there was a large discrepancy between the supply and the actual inventory. An 1878 book entitled
Wholesome Fare
by Edmund and Ellen Delamere took a sharp look at this problem. “Some years ago it was calculated that not less than five and twenty thousand chicken entered Paris every morning. Ten thousand of these appeared on the tables of private families; the other fifteen thousand fell into the hands of restaurateurs, pastry cooks, rotisseurs, and their colleagues.” The authors go on to make the point that a much larger number of cockscombs were being served daily in Parisian restaurants and therefore, the question was, where did they come from?

It turns out that someone had invented a method for making artificial cockscombs by taking the flesh from the palate of a cow, cooking it, and then, using a custom-made stamp, punching out ersatz cockscombs. One could tell the difference, however: “Nature’s cocks’-combs are studded on both sides with papillae, or little warts; Lecoq’s, and his imitators’, on only one.” If one could not obtain a beef palate, one could also use the “white parts of a calf’s pluck.” (Pluck usually referred to the lungs, but it could also mean the heart, windpipe, or liver.) It was also noted that any blacksmith could fashion a decent stamp and then one would be in business. So even ersatz cockscombs were being invented to satisfy the strange desires of the consuming public.

This process of supplying the needs of consumers tends to start benignly enough, as in the case of the late nineteenth century. By 1896, there was already talk about homemade versus store-bought. Some items were considered better when purchased at a store, including water crackers. As one correspondent to the
Globe
commented, “Don’t waste your strength in making water crackers when you can buy them so easily and so much nicer than homemade.” And who would disagree? Industry can make life better and easier. But even a casual glance at the S. S. Pierce catalog from that era gives one a taste of what is to come, whether it is something as seemingly harmless as Bell’s poultry seasoning or Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix, or harbingers of future foods, like canned soups and vegetables, potted meats, and bottled sodas such as ginger ales and lemonades. Convenience always starts out as a good idea.

The perfect, and most egregious, example of commercialized food production is the promotion of margarine, a product that turned out to be substantially less healthy than the product it was replacing. It was invented in France in response to a challenge by Napoleon to create an inexpensive butter substitute. Original recipes included cow’s udders, sheep stomachs, and beef suet, but by the late nineteenth century, French margarine was using imported animal fats, cheap by-products of the Chicago meatpacking industry. Meanwhile, in 1910, American scientists had perfected the hydrogenation of vegetable oils—the process of turning them into a solid at room temperature. Even as early as the 1870s, margarine manufacturers made their product look more like butter by adding a yellow dye. (The dairy lobby pressured Washington to tax dyed margarine; as a result, many manufacturers sold the yellow dye separately to avoid surcharges.) The watershed moment came in the 1960s, when margarine was promoted as healthier than butter, a claim that turns out to be absolute nonsense. (This claim was based on butter’s seven grams of saturated fat per tablespoon, versus two grams for margarine; but margarine has three grams of trans fats per tablespoon, an ingredient that is highly suspect.)

OCTOBER BRINGS NOVEMBER, WHICH IS KNOWN IN NEW ENGLAND
less for Thanksgiving than for deer season, when the .306s, .308s, and .32 specials get cleaned and sighted in once again. Gear is checked, including thermoses, walkie-talkies, four-wheelers, the supply of Doe-In-Rut Lures, and cold-weather garb. We look for and then test out our Buck Roar deer calls and hunting hats with the built-in flashlight under the cap. We spend half days here and there up in the woods looking for scrapings and hookings, hoping to find the perfect spot to place a deer stand—not too close to a deer run and with a good range of view over a hollow or field. And then we plan to meet, that first morning, at 5:15 a.m., down at my neighbor Tom’s garage—he’s the one with the 1950s style hat festooned with orange hunter’s tape—where he makes the coffee and fires up the kerosene heater. By 5:45 a.m. we are off, headed up to the top of the mountain. In the predawn darkness, you can hear four-wheelers climbing the sides of mountains and see pinpricks of headlights worming their way slowly uphill. Then we sit in our stands, cold but excited, hoping that this year will bring us the big buck that we dreamed about during the off-season.

Last year, a large buck with a spreading rack and thick, muscled shoulders did walk up under my stand while I was facing the other way, photographing a flock of wild turkeys. I heard a soft crunch, turned slowly, and almost—well, let’s just say that it is a good thing that I have a strong sphincter muscle. Life offers a few defining moments, crises that require clear thought and strong action. What was my response? I did nothing for five seconds and then, stunned, slowly put the camera away in my bright orange hunting vest, then silently reached for my gun, which was straddling my lap. Meanwhile, the buck had gotten a good snoutful of my scent. He pivoted and took off like a freight train, straight behind my tree. I stood, twenty-five feet up in the air, turned, and unloaded all five shells in my .308, hitting the odd birch and poplar and doing no damage whatsoever to the once-in-a-lifetime trophy deer. I did, however, get some nice photographs of a flock of wild turkeys. My two hunting buddies, Tom and Nate, heard the shots and came running, expecting to see a carcass. When I related what happened (leaving out the camera part), Tom said with an almost straight face, “Well, maybe you should have invited him up into the stand next to you!”

Hunters like Tom and Nate always think that the glory days are behind us; that a hundred years ago, there was plenty of game to be had. Well, think again. In 1897, Vermont had the first open season it had had for twenty years. Massachusetts had had restrictive hunting laws in place since 1693, when John Winthrop first forbade deer hunting between January and July. By 1898, killing deer was completely illegal in Massachusetts as well as in Connecticut at
any time of year
. Deer farms were starting to pop up in Connecticut, Georgia, and other New England states. Another proposal, this one from 1895, suggested that watersheds near large cities, used for supporting the urban water supply, be used as breeding grounds for deer, in essence becoming municipal game farms. According to an 1896 article in the
Boston Globe,
venison was selling for a very expensive 35 to 40 cents per pound (turkey and beef were roughly half this price), and the supply was scarcer than it had been in forty to fifty years. In Faneuil Hall around 1888, there were 128 stalls for vendors, and only two of them sold venison; whereas there were nineteen stalls for pork, forty-five for beef, and twenty for fish. One might also find bear, selling for up to 30 cents per pound, as well as raccoon and woodcock. Much of the venison supply, such as it was, was derived from illegal sourcing.

One promising note was that the deer were, generally speaking, larger than the animals running around the woods of New England today. Females were 90 to 200 pounds, and males weighed in at 150 to up to 300 pounds. (Today, a buck weighing over 200 pounds is rare, while just two deer shot in the 1897 season in Maine weighed in for a combined total of 700 pounds.) Much of the venison sold at Faneuil Hall was probably provided by individual hunters, mostly from Maine—in 1897, a local Maine guide estimated that there were 150,000 deer “waiting to be shot” (but this was probably just local boosterism). Maine was clearly a major source of the wild venison supply for Boston, New York, and other large New England markets. We know this since the
Boston Globe
published articles detailing the shipments of venison and listing the names of the hunters along with the number of deer that they provided for the shipment, which was never more than two.