Read Fannie's Last Supper Online
Authors: Christopher Kimball
Applesauce
Our farm in Vermont includes an orchard that we planted over fifteen years ago: mostly apple varieties, but also plum, cherry, and pears, as well as raspberry, currant, and blueberry bushes. Here’s the deal. Apples are incredibly difficult to grow unless one is willing to dump a fair amount of poison on the trees (and, in turn, your backyard) to prevent apple maggots, powdery mildew, apple rust, coddling moth, aphids, mites, plum circulio beetle, scab—the list just goes on and on. It is, indeed, much like trying to control terrorists—they just keep reappearing in different forms.
The basic drill is as follows: start with a spray of dormant oil in the early spring to control insects that have overwintered in the bark of the trees. Then, once the leaves have appeared, spray a copper sulfate mixture in an effort to control fungi. After the blossoms have dropped and the bees are done with their work, the trees are supposed to be sprayed regularly, every two weeks or so, with a poison, usually something with foul-smelling malathion in it.
Given that many of our trees are next door to the farmhouse, we use only dormant oil and copper sulfate, which are nontoxic or pretty close. Then we discovered a product called Surround, a white powder made from kaolin clay that is dissolved in water and sprayed on the trees weekly, turning them white and providing protective covering, both from insects and sun damage. So, how did we do?
Are you kidding me? With about forty fruit trees, we produced no more than a few bushels of mostly scarred, misshapen fruit. If we had not wrapped the bottom of the trees with tape, animals would have eaten the bark, ringed the trees, and killed them. If we did not prune properly, the inside of the canopy would be too dark, the fruit wouldn’t grow well, and the trees would spend all their energy growing more shoots, not producing fruit. Then, unless the young trees were properly fenced, the deer would show, acting like greedy New Yorkers at the annual James Beard gala buffet, pushing each other aside to snag yet another handful of Michel Richard’s fried shrimp.
Finally, we got rid of all toxic sprays, simply using dormant oil and the Surround, which, truth be told, did not seem to be helping all that much. Oh, and did I mention the $4,000 irrigation system we had to install? Every time we weed-whacked around the trees, the hoses would get split and the water would simply shoot up into the air. And then, to top it off, we pressed most of the apples for cider, froze the containers, and promptly forgot about them until next year. And the bushel or two of apples that we placed in the root cellar? Well, they lasted about a month or so before turning black and soft. So, to complete the great circle of apple production, we dumped them outside for the deer.
As a result of this experience, I have great respect for anyone who grows apples, especially if they go down the organic road. Until the midnineteenth century, farmers were 100 percent organic, used plowing, washed the growing fruit with soap or ashes, or coated the trees with tar in an effort to combat pests. By the 1870s, farmers were experimenting with arsenic, pyrethrum (organic insecticide made from dried, ground chrysanthemum flowers), carbolic acid, hellebore (made from hellebore plants), petroleum, kerosene, whale oil, soap, hydrocyanic acid gas (extremely deadly), and lead arsenate. Gas engine–powered spray pumps came along in the 1890s, and by 1908, things had gotten so out of hand that a bill was introduced into Congress to supervise the use and sale of agricultural poisons.
Hand in hand with the development of insecticides came commercial fruit operations, and farms near large populations began selling excess fruit in local markets. The particular problem with apples, however, was that most of these varieties did not lend themselves to shipping or storage, so growers started to focus on varieties that made commercial sense, but not much culinary sense. In addition, apples grown without modern herbicides were often scarred, bug-infested, or otherwise unsuitable for sale. This meant that the bulk of an apple crop was destined to be pressed and turned into cider, this noncommercial fruit being referred to as “cider apples.”
The two leading commercial apple varieties of Fannie’s era were the Ben Davis and the Baldwin. Over time, of course, the demands of the marketplace reduced the diversity of apple varieties from thousands to a few dozen. By the late twentieth century, fewer than a dozen varieties were generally distributed and available at supermarkets. As one wag supermarket employee once told me, “We offer three apple varieties: red, green, and yellow.”
FANNIE’S APPLESAUCETO ACCOMPANY ROASTED GOOSE
This recipe is a bit unusual since it begins by making a sugar syrup that is flavored with ginger and lemon rind. Then the cored, quartered apples are added to the pot and cooked quickly, about 6 minutes. This is a relatively small recipe designed for our dinner party. You can increase it easily, although you will want to use the widest possible pot so that the apples can be cooked in one layer if possible. If not, stir them a bit during cooking. To double this recipe, cook the first batch of apples, remove them with a slotted spoon, and then cook a second batch in the same syrup. To quadruple the recipe, double the sugar syrup, use four times the amount of apples, and cook them in two batches. If you cannot find Rhode Island Greenings or Northern Spy, simply use one pound of crisp, tart apples.
1 cup granulated sugar
1 piece lemon rind, ½ inch by 2 inches
2 slices ginger, each about the size of a nickel and 1/8-inch thick
1 pound McIntosh
8 ounces Rhode Island Greening
8 ounces Northern Spy
1. Place the sugar, lemon rind, ginger, and 2½ cups water in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a lively simmer, stirring occasionally until the sugar is dissolved, about 3 minutes. Cover and simmer for an additional 3 minutes to allow ginger to flavor the sugar syrup.
2. Meanwhile, wash the apples, cut them into quarters, and remove the seeds and cores. When the sugar syrup is ready, add the apple quarters, cover, and cook until tender, about 6 minutes.
3. Using a slotted spoon, remove apple pieces and place into a food mill set over a medium-sized bowl. Remove and discard ginger and lemon pieces. Pass apples through food mill until only skins remain. Add cooking liquid to applesauce in small increments until desired consistency is achieved.
Makes about 1½ cups.
The Science of Cooking, According to Fannie
T
oday, food science has traveled all the way from the laboratory to popular television. One might easily make the mistake of thinking that this is a purely modern phenomenon—that the Victorians were cooks, not scientists, and were not particularly interested in or knowledgeable about the whys of their profession. Of course, this is nonsense. Fannie Farmer and Mary Lincoln both wrote cookbooks full of food science, some of it wildly inaccurate, but some was right on the money. They were curious, and it was an age when scientific principles were being applied to everything, including the domestic arts.
The field of culinary science got its start with food preservation. In 1809, a Frenchman named Nicolas Appert was the first person to seal foods (cooked meat, vegetables, and milk) in glass bottles and heat them to preserve the food in response to a request from Napoleon. Breakable bottles were replaced by cans in 1812 by Brian Donkin in England. Most of this technology was developed without a knowledge of the science of food, although in 1860 Louis Pasteur did pioneer the discovery that bacteria caused the spoilage of wine and milk. The first studies of the science of food preservation were published by Samuel Cate Prescott at MIT in 1896. His work ultimately led to the establishment of one of the first food science departments in the the United States. Others followed at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California (1913). Prior to the establishment of these departments, there was little real study of the science of food. Ella Eaton Kellogg did publish
Science in the Kitchen
in 1893. Her approach to cooking was very precise, but not truly scientific. (Her husband founded the Kellogg Cereal Company in Battle Creek, Michigan.)
There was a broader cultural backdrop to the movement of science into the culinary arts. Simply put, many women found their lives boring, tedious, and thoroughly unfulfilling. This, combined with the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of a wealthy middle class, meant that women were desperately seeking a new role for themselves in society. Science and technology would be the tools to free them from their bondage and provide new opportunities to express themselves in more creative and compelling ways. In the best-selling 1888 utopian novel,
Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887,
Edward Bellamy predicts a desirable future for housework: “Our washing is all done at public laundries at excessively cheap rates, and our cooking at public shops. Electricity, of course, takes the place of all fires and lighting. We choose houses no larger than we need, and furnish them so as to involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in order. We have no use for domestic servants. ‘What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!’ [the fictitious heroine] exclaimed.” This sentiment was just one of many movements in the late nineteenth century to remove the vast burden of home cooking and cleaning off the backs of women.
As a result, in Victorian times the kitchen was often viewed as a laboratory. A good example was to be had at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. At the Massachusetts Pavilion, two home economists, Mary Abel and Ellen Richards (the latter the first woman to graduate from MIT and join the faculty) displayed a kitchen as scientific laboratory in order to “extract the maximum amount of nutrition from food substances and the maximum heat from fuel.” Yet another example was the New England Kitchen, which was built in Boston in 1890. It was promoted as a public kitchen to teach American workers to cook more scientifically.
So it is no wonder that the cooking process itself was subject to scientific principle, with the goal to provide better and more nourishing foods. These principles are easily found in many books of the era, two of the best examples being those of Lincoln and Farmer. Having investigated the scientific principles of the Victorians and compared them to modern kitchen science, we found that their understanding of how foods cooked was about half right. Their most common mistake was to think that rapid boiling of foods would quickly harden the exterior, thus keeping the juices trapped inside. Fannie Farmer was correct about the effects of cooking in hard versus soft water: the former is more likely to keep vegetables firm and bright-colored, whereas the latter is best for extracting flavors, in tea or coffee, for example.
Fannie believed that frying was healthier than sautéing and that bacon fat was easier to digest than butter or cream. She also suggested adding cold water halfway through boiling potatoes (to prevent overcooking the outer layers), but this had no effect when tested. Victorian cooks finished baking bread at a lower temperature than the one they started with, a technique that did not seem to matter when tested in our kitchens. They did know how to extract the maximum flavor and nourishment when making stocks (cut the meat into small pieces and cook gently), but when it came to making tea, their advice about never using “twice-boiled” water turned out to be demonstrably true when we did a blind taste test. And, as we have also found, it is best to add the sugar to cream before whipping so that it dissolves properly. All in all, not a bad showing, considering that food science was still a nascent discipline.
SEPTEMBER 2009. IN 1898, THE TOWLE COMPANY’S GEORGIAN
pattern had 131 different pieces for one setting, 1,572 pieces for twelve settings—which would have cost a small fortune. This excess, which implied as well a rigorous ritual surrounding the serving of food, grew out of rather humble beginnings. Most homes did not have formal dining rooms until after 1850; people ate in the kitchen, especially if they lived on a farm. In the city, only the rich actually owned an entire house; most city dwellers were living in boardinghouses of one sort or another. (Half of Americans, even in the late nineteenth century, did not own property.)
As the Industrial Revolution elevated the upper middle class in terms of wealth, the dining room became the domestic showcase. It was a semipublic room, one that could be displayed to one’s peers. This was quite different from the period prior to 1880, when the dining room’s primary purpose was to reinforce the sanctity of family life. Some dining rooms featured stained glass and an organ: it was a place for a Christian family to reassert its bonds and its faith.
In fact, the notion of allowing the public—one’s friends—into the family dining room was debated vigorously for some time, and was not common in midcentury. It was the existence of new money, of created wealth, that turned the dining room from a refuge from the world into a place of self-expression and creativity. Women, in particular, were interested in being perceived as artists, not just housewives, and thus the home became a blank canvas on which to paint their sensibilities and notions of personal artistry. Of course, architects and designers wanted the dining room to reflect modernity and practicality, hence the pass-through pantry and the sideboard for convenient storage and buffets. In terms of decoration, ferns and trailing ivy were often used in the bay window, paintings of hunting dogs on the walls, fruit on the sideboard, and partially closed blinds on a south-facing window. Many classical motifs were incorporated as well, whether in the wallpaper or through the use of pedestal urns.
Flatware also changed with the times, and so did its use. Forks originally had but two very sharp tines. The food was speared, elevated, and then pushed into the mouth with the aid of the flat side of a knife. Forks slowly added more tines, and the convention of cutting food—switching the fork from the left to the right hand, putting down the knife, and then using the fork to lift a piece of food to the mouth—came into vogue. Silverplated tableware, which became available in the 1840s, was the first step in bringing the Victorian notion of elegant dining to the middle classes. It started in and around Sheffield, England, but electroplating was being done in the United States by that time as well.
In addition, the Comstock silver lode was discovered in Nevada in 1859, and this provided much of the materials for the silverware industry. At first, mass-produced flatware was rather crude, but eventually shaped dies and better machinery created deeper impressions, so handles became elaborately decorated, even to the point of reproducing actual figures. Tea sets were quite popular, including a coffeepot, teapot, and a hot-water pot, as well as a sugar bowl, a creamer, and a waste bowl. By the late nineteenth century, these sets came in myriad styles, including neoclassical, Persian, Elizabethan, Jacobean, Japanese, Etruscan, and even Moorish. Things soon got out of hand. Castors containing condiments and seasonings made sense, but then these sets started to include egg cups, bells, and bouquet holders.
Once commercially produced butter was available (until the mid-1800s most butter was made at home), then one could purchase silver butter dishes, many of them quite elaborate, as well as cake baskets that held cakes or cookies for tea and desserts. Napkins in the Middle Ages used to be quite large and were frequently washed, since food was eaten with the fingers. They were soon downsized, and then, of course, the napkin ring became popular. Reed & Barton had 129 styles of napkin rings by 1885, 43 of them figural, including animals, playing children, and so on. Ornate ice-water pitchers were being sold with two walls for insulation (some of them were constructed on hinged stands so they could be tilted forward for pouring), although refrigeration made these items less popular after 1900.
An important part of our dinner party would be authentic Victorian table settings. The first item on our shopping list was a silver punch bowl. After months of searching, Adrienne found a stunning example dated November 21, 1894, and made by the firm of Hennegan, Bates of Baltimore. It was pure sterling silver and decorated using repoussé, a form of relief decoration produced by hammering on one side so that the decoration appears on the other. The pattern was elaborate, in high Victorian style, and the motif was floral, including leaves, tendrils, and blossoms. It was completely over the top and perfect for the occasion.
Adrienne also purchased sterling silver placecard holders shaped like upright flower blossoms, which held a small flower for each guest. We assembled a vast army of bowls, main-course plates, and chargers, made or sold by a variety of firms, including Higgins & Seiter of New York, and many Limoges items from William Guerin & Co., Theo. Haviland, and M. Redon, among others. Dessert plates, also used for the salmon course, were made by Adderley’s of England, and I had inherited a mother-of-pearl fish fork and knife set from my mother’s side of the family. We purchased gold-rimmed glass bowls for the sorbet.
We were also on the lookout for a few key kitchen and dining room accessories, including jelly molds, in particular one with a pineapple design on the bottom. After scanning eBay and similar sites, we discovered that antique jelly molds were generally small. The reason for this soon became apparent during testing. Larger molds required excessive amounts of gelatin to maintain the proper shape during and after unmolding. A series of taste tests made it clear that the less gelatin used, the better the flavor. So we were going to have to make a series of jellies, each of them of modest size, instead of one large centerpiece.
We very quickly fell in love with this course. It turned out that the jellies were highly elaborate, multicolored, multiflavored, and often filled with Bavarian cream, fruit, and other items. The simpler recipes had vertical layers of colors, all based on a simple lemon jelly. Others used special molds to produce layers within layers. One recipe instructed the cook to cut strips of different jellies and then line a mold with alternating colors, binding these strips with a fresh batch of warm jelly. This was edible sculpture; sadly, Jell-O had replaced one of the most creative and interesting features of the Victorian table. The first step, however, was to go back in time and make gelatin using calf’s feet. First, we had to find them.
SO HOW, EXACTLY, DOES ONE CALL UP THE LOCAL MEAT MARKET
and order a box of calf’s feet? Well, we did just that, although we had a lot of trouble locating them. Watching the pointy pink feet sticking up out of a tall stockpot, busily simmering away for hours, did make one think that a modern culinary education is a bit lacking in terms of breadth. Now we were really getting into the meat of it, heading back into time like the good culinary pioneers that we thought we were. And, thankfully, the result was pretty good—a clear, strong, bouncy gelatin that would be much too firm to eat as it was, but would make a good base for a flavored gelatin. In the end, the flavor was sweet and lemony, with a texture reminiscent of Jell-O, just firm enough to hold its shape. So, yes, one can make one’s own homemade gelatin. Like all things Victorian, it’s just a matter of time.
Speaking of time in the kitchen, cooking prior to 1850 required a prodigious amount of labor because food was not just being cooked, it was also being preserved. Some of it—for example, gelatin—was transformed into basic cooking ingredients used for a myriad of recipes. They also had to make their own vinegar, soaps, sugar syrups, stocks, jams, jellies, potted meats, pickled vegetables, and corned beef. All this, however, had changed radically by 1900.
Gelatin is probably the best example of the time-saving trend offered by commercial food producers. After homemade calf’s-foot gelatin went out of style, home cooks could turn to either isinglass or Irish moss. Lower-quality isinglass was often dyed and sold in various colors, including red, green, and blue. The term
sheet gelatin
came from the process of extracting gelatin from animal skins; it was dried on nets into thin sheets.
Leaf gelatin
was made from sturgeon bladders; it was an accurate description of what was left once the outer and inner membranes of the swim bladders were scraped away. Irish moss was made from a form of seaweed called carageen, making it more economical, and was so named because it was harvested off Ireland’s southern and western shores. By the 1860s, Irish moss was produced locally—a half-million pounds of Irish moss was pulled annually off of Scituate, Massachusetts.