Read Fannie's Last Supper Online
Authors: Christopher Kimball
2.
For the fish:
Prepare a hot fire for grilling. Pat salmon dry with paper towels. Make two or three shallow slashes along the skin side of each piece of fish, being careful not to cut into the flesh. Brush both sides of fish with thin coat of oil and season with salt and pepper. Place fish skin-side down on grill diagonal to grate, and cook without moving until skin side is brown, well marked, and crisp, 3 to 5 minutes. Flip fish to second side and cook, until centers of fillets are still translucent when cut into with a paring knife, or register 125 degrees on instant-read thermometer, 2 to 4 minutes longer.
3. Serve fish skin side up, and drizzle vinaigrette around and over each piece of fish, with 2 to 3 teaspoons vinaigrette. Serve with lemon wedges.
It’s 1896: Let’s Go Shopping
T
he year Fannie published her cookbook, 1896, was a shopper’s paradise. One could walk through the doors of S. S. Pierce, the preeminent grocer of the day, and purchase Formosa oolong, Penang cloves, authentic Parmesan from Italy, a bottle of Château Lafite or Château Margaux (they would set you back $20 to $30 per case, roughly $1,000 to $1,500 in today’s dollars), six types of preserved cherries, green turtle soup, Jamaican ginger, California peaches, hothouse cucumbers, potted ham, medicated toilet paper, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Havana cigars, cherry blossom toothpaste, truffles, jarred French peas, and Tanglefoot sticky fly paper.
But this bounty, all neatly displayed and offered for immediate home delivery, was a far cry from Boston’s beginnings—a time before Faneuil Hall and Quincy Markets, before the railroads brought oranges from Florida and canned fruit from California, before ships were unloading mushrooms from Paris and olive oil from Italy. The most venerable method of purchasing foodstuffs was through vendors—butchers, fishmongers, and farmers—who went door to door. This old English custom endured well into the eighteenth century, and many Bostonians opposed the building of central markets, since it meant the inconvenience of a shopping trip and an end to unregulated commerce. What is so vile and detestable about something so simple as a public place to sell meat, vegetables, fish, and fruit? The answer is one that explains the American Revolution, or at least the enthusiasm many wealthy colonists felt for risking their life, liberty, and possessions against overwhelming odds and the most powerful navy in the world. It is simply this: The colonists hated any notion of taxation, regulation, or central authority if these interfered with their daily lives. They came to America to be left alone.
By 1634, the city of Boston decided that it was indeed time for a central, city-funded marketplace, and the perfect spot was down at the docks. The original market in Boston was called, of course, Dock Square market, although it was also referred to as the corn market. At first, it was open only on Thursdays. It was established on the site of the old state house by order of the court, and it was not much more than an open field—it was not until the eighteenth century that Boston markets had indoor facilities as well. Fishermen could sell cod and mackerel; farmers came down the Charles River in boats with vegetables; and the farmers from Roxbury and Dorchester could transport their goods by wagon over the thin strip of land that connected Boston with the mainland.
As many of the early colonists feared, there was soon a need for a court to settle market disputes. Thus the Pie Powder Court was founded, named after the baking flour covering the feet of its members. By midcentury, however, two clerks of the market were appointed in place of the court—Jeremy Houchin and James Penn—and their job was to inspect the market for cleanliness, regulate weights and measures, and settle disputes. They were paid “one third part of all forfeit” for their efforts, with the remainder paid to the poor. By 1658, a two-story Town House was erected. It was used for public business—a court, a library, and a meeting place for an artillery company—but the ground floor was open and used for the merchant exchange. It soon became the home of the first formal New England town meeting at which officials were elected. (They used the old Anglo-Saxon term for
sheriff,
which is a contraction of “shire reeve,”
reeve
meaning “peace.” They kept the peace in the shire or town.)
By the end of the century, the market was open three days a week. A bell was rung at its opening, 6:00 a.m. in the summer and 9:00 a.m. in the winter months. The practices of freewheeling peddlers and door-to-door salesmen continued, since the public markets scared off many vendors because of the need for licenses, fees, rents, and fines. And consumers enjoyed the convenience of this early colonial form of the Home Shopping Network.
Over the next few decades, a series of fires closed the market, and other markets were built in the downtown area, but, all in all, Bostonians did not cater to centralized, regulated markets. In fact, in 1736, a mob disguised as clergymen (mobs in colonial Boston had a penchant for disguising themselves) destroyed the central Dock Square market. Enter Peter Faneuil.
In 1738, Peter Faneuil, a Boston merchant whose wealthy family had emigrated in 1691 from France, came into a great deal of money through his uncle Andrew, including holdings in Great Britain, France, and Holland. The will stipulated that the family fortune only pass through to someone who worked for the uncle and never married. (A brother, Benjamin, fell in love, so Peter stepped up to the plate.) In 1740, Faneuil offered to fund a market at Dock Square as long as the city agreed to authorize and maintain it. Without his knowledge, his offer was quickly written up as a petition and signed by scores of prominent citizens. Nevertheless, the proposal passed by just seven votes—a testament to the forces that supported unregulated commerce—and a petition was circulated and passed noting that peddlers were still allowed to sell their goods wherever they pleased. (Faneuil also complained bitterly that nobody could properly pronounce his family name, a problem that persists to this day. It is correctly pronounced “Fan-nel,” with the accent on the first syllable.)
Faneuil attached conditions to his offer. He demanded that the hall be built of masonry to help withstand fire, and that the site be maintained forever as a market, to avoid the fate of South Market, which had been converted into a storehouse and rented. The architect was a Scottish artist, John Smibert, a friend of the Faneuil family. He designed a classic English Renaissance structure forty feet wide by one hundred long, with an arcade on the lower floor to serve as the market and a large hall above. The latter became the new public meeting room for Boston, the old Town Hall being too small for the growing seaport. It was located at Dock Square, and was therefore on the waterfront. (Visitors to modern Boston will note that Faneuil Hall is no longer on the water, due to the expansion of Boston’s footprint into the harbor over the years.)
Faneuil Hall was topped with a domed cupola that housed a bell for signaling the start and end of the market day as well as a thirty-eight-pound grasshopper weather vane, modeled after a similar creature that sat atop London’s Royal Exchange. The weather vane was built by Deacon Shem Drowne out of hammered copper and gold leaf; the eyes were green glass doorknobs, and it also had long metal antennae. It soon became the most famous weather vane in the country.
What is often lost in all of this grand history is that Faneuil Hall was pretty much a disaster. It took three months to rent the first stall. Finally, it was rented to Anthony Hodgson, who sold butter, cheese, and flour (the butter was from Ireland and Cheshire cheese from England). The market was actually closed twice for a year or so in its early history, owing to lack of interest from both sellers and buyers. The anti-market faction, which referred to Faneuil Hall as the “Grasshopper Market,” seemed to be winning the battle against a centralized shopping center.
To add insult to injury, the hall burned in 1761, even though it was made mostly of masonry. In 1762, the new Faneuil Hall was erected and, in 1805, doubled in size by architect Charles Bullfinch. By the early nineteenth century, the market had finally come into its own. Inside the hall on the first floor, one contemporary writer described the scene. “Here are sausages in festoons; roasting pig that would have made Charles Lamb’s mouth water; vegetables in parterres, and fruits from every clime. Here one may have fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring.” Outside, around the hall, there were vendors with wagons and pushcarts, sometimes as many as three hundred teams converging around the market. (The horses were sent to nearby stables while the market was open.) They paid no rent, so the colonists’ vision of an unregulated marketplace had really come to life even though Faneuil Hall was a success. Actually, there was more to buy outside the hall than inside. (Some farmers, however, simply sold their goods at wholesale prices to the merchants within the hall instead of spending the day by their wagons selling to the retail trade.)
With the success of Faneuil Hall, Boston soon needed additional market space and so, in 1826, Quincy Market, named after former mayor Josiah Quincy, was erected, built of granite, two stories high and 535 feet long. Vendor stalls were installed downstairs on each side of the grand corridor (leased from the city), and on the second floor was Quincy Hall, for meetings. The entire project, including new streets around the market as well as the North and South Market Street warehouses, and stores flanking the new hall, cost the city over $1 million. At first, these surrounding establishments were more likely to sell dry goods and nonperishable items such as clothing, leather goods, hats, cigars, stoves, and snuff; sail and awning makers also rented space on the top floors of these buildings. Produce vendors appeared in the warehouses later in the century.
By 1880, Quincy Market was a huge success, one of the few public commercial enterprises in Boston that could make that claim. Produce merchants in the halls had annual sales of $20 million from cheese, poultry, meat, fish, seafood, vegetables, and fruit. Fifty to a hundred carcasses of beef, mutton, and veal were sold every day, and goods were imported from Florida and the Pacific Coast. One could purchase “a pound or a hundred quarters of beef; a pound of sausage or a thousand dressed hogs; a peck or a thousand barrels of apples; a pound or a ton of butter; a dozen oranges or a hundred boxes; a pound or a cargo of fish, fresh or salted.” By the 1880s, refrigerated storage (no longer ice, but a cold brine system of refrigeration) was available at a facility near the market, and Boston vendors were shipping goods across the Atlantic and to the West Coast. Over time, other smaller markets opened up as well.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the fruits, vegetables, meats, and poultry sold at these markets were mostly local. Small establishments and the city markets offered everything from poultry (chicken, partridge, quail, woodcock, snipe), seasonal fruit (peaches, pears, melons, “morocco” grapes), confectionary products (cream cakes, mince pie, Washington pie, vanilla jumbles, harlequin, éclairs, charlotte russe), and seafood (scallops, smelt, clams, whitefish, salt cod, haddock, shad roe, mackerel). But in the period after the Civil War, the railroads opened up the Midwest, a more fertile area than New England, and this was the beginning of a long decline for New England farmers. From 1850 to 1914, the number of farms in the New England states had not increased, nor had the number of people working on them. In fact, the amount of acreage under cultivation actually decreased.
One good example of the growth of nonlocal foods is the turkey business. By 1890, very few Vermont turkeys were showing up in Boston markets, although they were supposedly of the highest quality. By this time, the birds were being shipped in from “out west,” which meant Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Iowa. The reason? Corn was cheaper in the Midwest, and the turkey farms were bigger. Fannie Farmer noted a similar trend in terms of produce: “A few years ago native vegetables were alone sold; but now our markets are largely supplied from the Southern States and California.” By the late nineteenth century, however, foods were not just coming from the Midwest; they were coming from all over the world.
The preeminent Boston grocer, the founder of the original gourmet market, was Samuel S. Pierce. The year was 1831, and the location was Court and Tremont streets. Samuel Pierce thought that this was a good location for a food market, since it was equidistant from the West End, the Bullfinch mansions (which were torn down to make way for, among other things, the ugliest building in the world, Boston City Hall), the residential district around Summer Street and Church Green, and the growing Beacon Hill. This same building had housed the headquarters of General Washington, and one of Mr. Pierce’s early customers was Daniel Webster, whose law office was located in the same building.
The term
grocer
is a derivation of the French
groser
, referring to someone who purchases items in “gross,” or wholesale. As the trade monopoly of the East India Company came to a close in the late nineteenth century, this opened up the market for local entrepreneurs—wholesalers who bought in bulk, measuring out small household units of flour, meal, molasses, tea, and spices for their customers. However, two things really set S. S. Pierce apart. The first was home delivery of groceries, originally by wheelbarrow, then by horse and cart, and finally, by teams of six matched grays that were imported from Ohio. The second was an eye toward gourmet products, since Boston was becoming a much more sophisticated and wealthy town as the twentieth century approached.
By 1896, S. S. Pierce had outgrown its original location and had to move its headquarters down Tremont Street to a spot across from the Parker House and King’s Chapel. Many might suppose that this was nothing more than a small storefront, but Pierce had to employ ninety horses and two hundred men to move the four thousand types of items in his inventory. By that time, one could purchase the expected: grapes, lemons, vermicelli, vinegar, molasses, almonds, prunes, Moxie soda (Moxie was first marketed as a “nerve food” in the 1870s and was quickly transformed into a soda favored by Calvin Coolidge; it is still made today), pickles, and biscuits. But the list of available items also included the first pick of mushrooms grown in caves in old quarries near Paris, and isinglass, the precursor to modern gelatin (originally made from the bladders of Russian sturgeon, and later made more cheaply from cod). When this extremely expensive import (up to $18 per pound) was temporarily unavailable, Pierce sent his own agents to Russia for a new supply, dragging it on dogsleds through the “frozen forests” before it could be shipped back to Boston.
The extraordinary effort that S. S. Pierce spent in sourcing its products was also evidenced in its approach to customer service. The Bon Voyage Basket was a famous offering that was delivered to a ship’s passenger just prior to sailing. In one famous case, however, the basket did not, in fact, reach the ship before departure. The first port of call was Bombay, where the basket was finally delivered to the customer by a representative of the company as soon as the ship reached port. A similar story involves a shipment of green turtle soup that had not arrived on the morning of a dinner party in Poughkeepsie. A Pierce employee was immediately dispatched, and he arrived with the soup in hand one hour before the party started.