Fannie's Last Supper (13 page)

Pierce was also an early adopter of canned goods; its first recorded sale of canned corn was in 1848. It should be noted that in the nineteenth century, this new method of preservation was considered a marvel, and foods sold in this manner were not necessarily looked down upon, as most canned foods are today. One happy customer wrote to S. S. Pierce noting that his grandfather’s homegrown fruits and vegetables were always a source of great pride at his table, but that the canned variety sold by Pierce compared favorably to his own fresh produce. The heart and soul of S. S. Pierce was its catalog, which was entitled
The Epicure.
It contained food writing, recipes, and, of course, a description of items, including prices.

And what was for sale at S. S. Pierce in 1896? There were twenty-three pages of listings, with about 180 items per page, including tea; coffee at 40 cents a pound; maple and fruit syrups; a long list of sugars, including loaf, granulated, crushed, cut loaf, golden yellow, confectioner’s, German beet sugar, maple sugar, rock candy crystals, and red frosting sugar; a range of flours, including three brands we still recognize today, Pillsbury, Hecker’s, and Swan’s Down; a wide selection of oats, including McCann’s Irish and Quaker rolled; Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix; Graham flour (the brainchild of Sylvester Graham, a health-food advocate and founder of the first health-food store); infant foods, including malted milk; condensed milk; beef extracts for making stocks and sauces; spices (Penang cloves, Java cassia, Jamaica ginger, Tellicherry, Nepaul, curry powder); herbs, including Bell’s poultry dressing; chocolate and cocoa (the better brands ran up to 90 cents per pound); dried, crystallized, and glacéed fruits; nuts; crackers and biscuits, as well as American and foreign cheeses. American cheese was rather inexpensive—25 cents a pound or less—whereas the imports cost up to $1 a pound. Corn included hominy, samp, white cornmeal, and cornstarch. There were copious listings for pantry staples such as pickles; macaroni (they were only selling lasagna, spaghetti, vermicelli, and noodles at this point); catsups and sauces (including catsup made from walnuts and mushrooms, soy sauce, and A1 and Tabasco sauces); vinegars; olive oil from Italy at 65 cents per quart and labeled under the house brand; and imported vegetables, including a wide assortment of truffles, as well as Brussels sprouts, artichokes, and cepes. There were loads of pâtés; all sorts of canned meats, including potted ham, chicken, tongue, and turkey; canned soups; and American canned vegetables and fruits, many of them imported from California. Fresh fruits were put up in jars with a light syrup, and preserved fruits were sold separately in airtight glass jars, including six kinds of cherries (maraschino, canned, crystallized, fresh in glass jars, preserved, and sweet pickled). And in a nod to locally sourced foods, a Quaker community out in Harvard was contracted to raise herbs for the Boston store.

As for household supplies, there was wax, candles, soaps (Dobbins electric soap and Hoxie’s mineral soap), polishes (Kimball’s liquid polish and Burnishine), blacking, sardine knives, matches, twine, brooms, clothespins, and five different brands of toilet paper, medicated with aloe or witch hazel. One could find imported whiskies, including Jameson’s and Canadian Club, as well as domestic bourbon, brandy, beer, rum, and gin. Nonalcoholic beverages ran the gamut from squashes (citrus juice and soda water), to lemonades, ginger champagne, ginger ales, fruit syrups, shrubs (fruit, vinegar, and water, although some were alcoholic, since they were allowed to ferment), and sarsaparillas, as well as a full range of bottled waters, including Poland, Hygeia, Manitou, Schweppes, Vichy, Saratoga, and Bethesda.

With the growth of S. S. Pierce, smaller grocery stores emerged to service local neighborhoods, the goods being mostly packaged foods, imported teas and coffees, and staples such as flour and sugar. Larger retailers were also starting or expanding their grocery sections; one such store, Bailey’s, often undercut S. S. Pierce with lower prices. In time, these larger establishments put the fresh-air markets out of business, since they delivered, they were clean and orderly, they were usually closer to home, and they had larger inventories.

Back in Boston in the 1890s, most of the food shopping was done in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, where almost 1 million people came to market. However, by 1899, the market was so overcrowded that proposals were afoot to build new markets, such as the one suggested for the former railway depot site at Park Square. Unlike S. S. Pierce, these markets allowed farmers from thirty to forty miles outside of Boston the chance to set up shop and sell directly to consumers.

Shopping was not done just by professional cooks or the middle-class housewife with list in hand. By the 1890s, some upper-class women were also going about doing their own shopping, as described in a November 17, 1895, article in the
Boston Globe.
These “ladies of leisure” would go to market in carriages driven by liveried coachmen, keeping their shopping lists in “leather and gold notebooks.” (Other well-to-do women came by public transportation or walked, of course.)

The experience of shopping for Thanksgiving in 1896 was recorded by one intrepid
Boston Globe
reporter, who wrote about the tremendous last-minute rush for turkeys with “sounds worthy [of] the realms of Beelzebub” as bargain-hunting shoppers descended on Quincy Market to secure the main event in the biggest meal of the year. The streets were lit with both torches and electric lights and the birds formed fences and walls along the lines of the curbstones, hung from their feet by ten-penny nails pounded into improvised wooden scaffolding. As the evening progressed, the prices fell from 20 cents a pound at 8:00 p.m. down to 15 to 17 cents by 9:00 p.m., which was closing time for the market itself. Outside, the vendors kept up their “seductive oratory” until almost midnight. By 11:00 p.m., turkey had dropped to 10 cents per pound and a vendor with just one chicken in inventory hawked it at a mere 5 cents per pound, saying, “Here you go now, ladies and gents. This is the last bird I possess in the world. He’s yours for 12 cents, and if you don’t find him the tenderest chicken in Boston, I’ll give him to you for nothing.”

One of the best accounts of life in Boston in the late nineteenth century appears in
One Boy’s Boston
by Samuel Eliot Morison, who describes the types of stores found on Charles Street. There were two fish markets; a hardware store; a fruit store (Solari & Porcella); Chater’s Bakery, which had a lunch counter where one could purchase a bowl of soup or a ham sandwich for 5 cents; Greer’s Variety Store, which sold green pickles in a large goldfish bowl for 1 cent each; Murphy’s Grocery; John Cotter’s saloon; a shoe repair shop; and a tailor. Morison goes on to talk about food shopping, indicating that the “man from Pierce’s” would show up every morning to take an order. Staples such as flour, sugar, potatoes, and apples were brought by the barrel, and all the breads and cakes (except for parties) were baked in the house. Meat, poultry, eggs, and fish were ordered by his grandfather personally at Faneuil Hall or Quincy Market on Saturday mornings. As it was in Europe, food shopping was a daily affair, in part due to the lack of cold storage space; iceboxes were still rather small in the late 1800s, and many households did not even own one.

Victorian Boston was, all in all, a vastly better and more convenient place to shop than Boston today. The farmer’s market was not a small-time, anything-but-mainstream concept, but the bread and butter of food shopping. And vendors had the benefit of faster and refrigerated transportation, so they could import fruits, vegetables, and even fish from across the country, and also purchase mushrooms, olive oil, pasta, chocolate, and many other delicacies direct from Europe. It was a wonderful time to be a home cook, especially if one had sufficient disposable income.

JUNE 2009. WHILE I WAS WORKING ON THIS PROJECT, A NUMBER
of books and magazine articles had appeared saying, in effect, that cooking was dead. I would inevitably get sucked into reading these diatribes, the virtuous food writer either waxing poetic about the past or launching into a polemic about the evils of fast food or the effect of agribusiness on the American dinner table.

I kept thinking, don’t my Vermont neighbors count? They not only do a lot of cooking but also do a lot of canning and preserving. I also knew that the magazine
Taste of Home
had over 3 million subscribers and its pages were filled with recipes, not long lifestyle pieces. These were mostly midwestern cooks who baked more than their share of cookies, breads, pies, and cakes. So was this the bicoastal food mafia talking—people who ate out at least five nights a week—or was home cooking really dying? And what was I doing cooking a twelve-course, twenty-eight-recipe menu in an age when the media had declared the culinary arts to be purely a spectator sport? What was next, the death of sex?

There is no question that the time spent cooking at home has gone down a lot over the last hundred years. The key driver of this decrease is the movement of women out of the home and into the workplace. In 1900, only 20 percent of women were in the labor force, versus over 60 percent in 2000. For most women, life at home was neither easy nor pleasant. In Fannie’s day, a woman spent on average forty-four hours a week making and cleaning up after meals and another seven hours in general cleaning; and then, on top of that, there was child care. Families were larger—20 percent of American households had seven or more family members—thus more to cook and clean up for. Another big factor in time spent cooking was the availability of electricity. As late as 1930, only 10.4 percent of farms were electrified. A wood cookstove and no electric appliances translated to a great deal more time preparing food.

By 1950, however, this picture had changed dramatically, with over 90 percent of rural areas now having electricity, thanks to the Rural Electrification Administration. Electricity also meant the availability of mechanical refrigerators: by 1950, 80 percent of American households owned one. By midcentury, the typical American cook was spending only twenty hours per week cooking, down from forty-four hours in 1900.

Given the huge technological changes since 1900, much of this reduction in time spent cooking was probably a very good thing indeed. And why the hell don’t food writers ever admit that spending six hours a day cooking and cleaning in the kitchen is not ideal? Hey, I love from-scratch cooking as much as the next cook, but I am extremely grateful for many of the technological wonders of the modern kitchen. For starters, we have gas or electric stoves and ovens, which require a whole lot less time, thought, planning, and maintenance than a wood or coal cookstove. And how about dishwashers for reducing cleanup time?

Food preservation is not an issue at all these days, owing to electric refrigerators and the ability to purchase small portions of almost anything. Cooks in Fannie’s day were still spending a lot of time breaking down or preserving large quantities of seasonal foods for use later. Much of our food has already been sorted out, cleaned, and packaged; for example, turkeys no longer require plucking. We can purchase foods that reduce cooking time enormously—who among us would really like to spend half an hour shucking peas for dinner? Or beating egg whites by hand or even with a mechanical, hand-turned Dover eggbeater? And that is not even considering what the food processor, the microwave, electric knife sharpeners, blenders, pressure cookers, bread machines, and electric deep fryers have done for us in terms of reducing preparation and cooking time.

So unless one believes that six hours a day in the kitchen inevitably leads to moral superiority—it needs to be said that the Victorians were absolutely thrilled to spend less time in the kitchen—then using technology to cut down on drudgery should be a plus, not a minus. Is washing dishes by hand innately more virtuous than using a dishwasher? (I do admit, however, to an irrational belief in the moral superiority of those who take time to prepare their own food as opposed to eating out all the time—but I am still not going to use a wood cookstove on a daily basis, and am deeply grateful for hot water out of the tap.)

Perhaps of even more importance is the fact that the cost of food has dropped enormously since 1900. Back then, the average household was spending about 30 percent of its total annual income on food, 20 percent in 1960, and about 10 percent today. When food is cheap, you spend less time preserving and reusing it—it is no longer a scarce resource. (This does have a curious dark side, however. From 1985 to 2000, the price of fruits and vegetables rose 118 percent, whereas sugar and sweets have risen just 46 percent, fats and oils, 35 percent, and carbonated soft drinks just 20 percent. For households that are watching their food dollar, the cost of fresh produce is outpacing the cost of fats and sugars, the foundation for most convenience foods.)

Another common yardstick for decrying the lack of home cooking is the amount of money spent on dining out. Fifty years ago, 25 percent of the food dollar was spent outside the home; today, just under 50 percent. So one can claim that expenditures on eating outside the home have increased 100 percent! Conversely, one might say, over half of all food dollars are still spent inside the home. That sounds better. Americans are still spending slightly more on food consumed at home than at restaurants.

Drilling down into the statistics, one finds that of the expenditures outside of the home, 22 percent goes to food purchased at snack bars, movie theaters, amusement parks, and sports arenas. These are hardly replacements for meals. In fact, one might note that we are simply eating a lot more food outside of the regular three meals per day. The point is simple: although the percentage of the food dollar spent at home is dropping, the distribution of those expenditures is over a larger number of choices, snacking being a major category. That means that the percentage of food dollars spent on food consumed at home may not paint as disastrous a picture as we think.

Other trends further queer the statistics. Let’s take midday dinner, which, in the late nineteenth century, was still the big meal of the day (as it still is in some parts of Europe). With women moving quickly into the workforce and the rise of industrialization, the midday dinner disappeared; folks were now eating at lunch counters and food carts. This was not a matter of Americans choosing to cook less; it was simply a matter of fewer women left at home to do the cooking during the day. Commuting also destroyed the midday meal, since it became increasingly difficult to go home for lunch. So the time spent cooking may have dropped considerably since 1900, but with absolutely no loss in quality or pleasure in terms of the one large meal of the day.