Fannie's Last Supper (21 page)

3. Reserve 5 cups batter and set aside. Spoon remaining batter into prepared cake pan and smooth top with offset spatula. Bake until top is golden and skewer inserted into cake shows moist crumbs, about 40 to 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan on wire rack for 1 hour. Invert onto wire rack to cool completely, about 2 hours. Wrap tightly until ready to cover with marzipan.

4. While first cake is cooling, adjust oven rack to lower-middle position. In standing mixer fitted with whisk attachment, whip whites until frothy using medium speed. Slowly add remaining 2 tablespoons sugar and whip on medium high until whites hold soft peaks. Briefly stir reserved cake batter and then using rubber spatula, fold 1/3 whites into reserved cake batter to lighten. Fold remaining whites into batter until just combined. Fill prepared biscuit mold with batter within ½-inch from top rim. (You may have a little leftover batter.) Place mold on sheet pan and bake until toothpick inserted into center of cake is clean, about 75 to 85 minutes. Let cool on wire rack for 20 minutes, and then carefully invert cake onto wire rack to cool completely, about 3 hours. When cool, carefully hollow out cake to no less than ½ inch from exterior of cake. Allow to dry at room temperature overnight. (Drying out is important so that it is structurally sound when filling with pastry cream.) Reserve a few thin pieces of removed cake (preferably from the bottom of the cake) to use later to seal up hollowed cake after it has been filled with cream.

5.
To cover the bottom cake layer with marzipan (best done on the second day):
Place 12-inch cake on serving platter, bottom side up. Using offset spatula, spread a thin layer of apple jelly over top and sides of cake. Lightly dust work surface with confectioner’s sugar. Using rolling pin, roll out marzipan to 16-inch diameter (about 1/8-inch thick). Using rolling pin, carefully roll up marzipan and then unroll onto cake. Smooth marzipan onto top and sides of cake. With paring knife, trim excess marzipan.

Yield: Enough for one 12-inch cake and one 6-cup molded cake.

GRAND MARNIER PASTRY CREAM

This cream is used to fill the fluted cake that sits on top of the base layer.

½ vanilla bean

1½ cups half-and-half cream

1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon granulated sugar

Pinch table salt

5 yolks

2 tablespoons cornstarch

3 tablespoons Grand Marnier

½ cup heavy cream

1. With paring knife, slice vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape out seeds; reserve seeds. Heat half-and-half cream, 1/3 cup sugar, vanilla bean seeds, and salt in medium heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat until simmering, stirring occasionally to dissolve sugar.

2. Meanwhile, whisk egg yolks and remaining 1 tablespoon sugar in medium bowl until thoroughly combined. Whisk in cornstarch until combined and mixture is pale yellow and thick, about 30 seconds.

3. When half-and-half mixture reaches full simmer, gradually whisk into yolk mixture to temper. (It is important to add hot mixture to yolks slowly to prevent yolks from curdling.) Return mixture to saucepan; return to simmer over medium heat, whisking constantly, until 5 or 6 bubbles burst on surface and mixture is thickened and glossy, about 30 to 60 seconds. Remove from heat and whisk in Grand Marnier. Press wax paper or plastic wrap directly on surface, and refrigerate until cold and set, at least 3 hours, or up to 48 hours until ready to use.

4. Gently stir chilled pastry cream to loosen. In chilled medium bowl, whisk heavy cream to soft peaks, about 2 minutes. Fold whipped cream into pastry cream (this mixture can be make up to 3 hours in advance) and fill hollowed biscuit mold just before serving.

Yield: about 3 cups.

ASSEMBLING THE CAKE

Just before serving, you have to assemble the various components of the cake. We used an ornate silver cake stand—you will want something rather fancy, given all the work you went through to prepare it. Note that recipes for the lemon leaves and the filled tangerines, both the sherbets, and the two jellies, can be found at www.fannieslastsupper.com.

1. Arrange optional lemon leaves around 12-inch Almond Butter Cake base (that has been covered in marzipan), which is positioned on a serving stand.

2. Gently hold hollowed-out cake mold upside down, and carefully fill with lightened pastry cream mixture to about ½-inch from bottom. Seal with reserved pieces of cake. Once cake is filled and sealed, place sealed side down over center of marzipan-covered cake.

3. Slice optional jelly-filled clementines pole to pole into quarters and arrange over lemon leaves, around marzipan-covered cake.

4. Place optional clementine sherbet halves around the molded pastry cream–filled cake and on top of the marzipan base cake.

5. When ready to plate, take a photo first! Then, use serrated knife to slice 1 inch off top of cake to reveal pastry cream filling. Serve slice of marzipan-covered cake with 1 sherbet half, 1 jelly segment, and a dollop of pastry cream. Garnish plate with sugared lemon leaf.

Chapter 14
Coffee, Cheese, and Cordials

The Coffee Industry Awakens America

C
offee drinking was not unknown in America, but it wasn’t until the War of 1812, when both the supply of tea was cut off and French culture became popular, that the French custom of drinking coffee really came into its own. Brazilian coffee was cheaper than tea and geographically closer than the Far East, so Americans increased their daily intake. By 1850, coffee was already a key part of chuck wagon fare, and beans were carried out west by frontiersmen. Many Native Americans also got hooked, among them the Sioux, and in one particular case it was said that a cup of coffee was exchanged for a buffalo robe. Until the midnineteenth century, most coffee was purchased as green beans and then roasted at home, usually in a cast-iron skillet; home roasters were also available, although reportedly not very effective. By the 1840s, commercial coffee roasting had come into vogue; James W. Carter of Boston had invented the Carter pull-out roaster, which had huge perforated cylinders placed into brick ovens. These coffee-roasting houses were smoky places indeed—it was hard, dirty work—and many of the beans burned. Eventually, a better coffee roaster was invented by a Jabez Burns that was self-emptying and moved the beans around an inner chamber as the cylinder turned, making for a more even roast. Oddly enough, the invention that did the most to promote the sale of roasted coffee beans and spur the drinking of coffee was the paper bag that was invented in 1862 for selling peanuts.

The paper bag? John Arbuckle was a partner in a grocery store in Pittsburgh at the outset of the Civil War. He began to sell roasted coffee beans, with an egg and sugar glaze to “prevent staling,” in one-pound paper bags under the brand-name Ariosa. He was also a successful and aggressive marketer, whose advertising campaign featured a frustrated housewife lamenting, “Oh, I have Burnt my Coffee again!” The tagline for his ads was, “You cannot roast Coffee properly yourself,” and he claimed that every grain of his coffee was evenly roasted. Boston also had its hand in the promotion of coffee drinking through the firm of Chase & Sanborn, founded in 1878. Its marketing gimmick was the sale of roasted coffee beans in specially designed sealed tin cans. The factory was on Broad Street, and by 1882, the company was selling one hundred thousand pounds per month. It also used a mammoth sales force—it claimed twenty-five thousand agents, who had exclusive sales territories around the country. This firm was also brilliant at publicity, forgiving debts in 1927 from those involved with the Vermont flood and handing out free materials with its coffee, including cards, blotters, booklets, and store displays. It also sent holiday greeting cards to every one of its customers and even accepted noncash payments from time to time, cotton being one such commodity bartered in the South.

Coffee was perhaps the ultimate consumer item for which marketing and sales techniques made a big difference—after all, few consumers could tell the difference between high and low quality. In fact, a great deal of coffee on the market was either adulterated or not coffee at all. There were ersatz beans made from rye flour, glucose, and water. Other dubious ingredients included baked horse liver, brick dust, burnt rags, coal ashes, dirt, dog biscuits, mesquite, monkey nuts, sawdust, vetch, and wood chips. During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers could not obtain real coffee and were therefore reduced to using substitutes, including acorns, dandelion roots, sugarcane, parched rice, cotton seed, peanuts, wheat, beans, sweet potatoes, corn, rye, okra, and chicory. (Chicory continued as a legitimate additive and was often advertised openly.) Meanwhile, the Union government was levying a 4-cent duty per pound of coffee while, at the same time, purchasing 40 million pounds of green beans in 1864 alone. The price of coffee almost tripled during the Civil War, although it collapsed by 1865. This feast-and-famine cycle continued for decades as the industry would buy up beans during periods of oversupply in an effort to prop up prices. The most serious such collapse occurred in 1880 after the death of a key coffee baron; as a result, in 1881, the New York Coffee Exchange was founded in order to regulate and stabilize the industry.

Hot chocolate was another popular drink of the day, and when made with cocoa shells, it was often referred to as “little coffee.” The shells, which are the thin outer covering of the beans, cost just 7 to 12 cents per pound in 1896, whereas cocoa cost almost ten times that much. Here in the States, the most common method of making little coffee was to boil a few ounces of roasted shells in three pints of water for half an hour, allow it to settle, strain, and then add cream or boiled milk and sugar. Since cocoa shells have less chocolate flavor than the beans themselves, the key was to extract as much flavor as possible without turning the liquid bitter through overextraction. Other home cooks reduced the roasted shells to a fine paste and then used it much like cocoa, dissolving it in hot water, boiling it for twenty minutes, and adding milk or cream and sugar.

OCTOBER 23, 2009. IT WAS LATE OCTOBER; WE WERE JUST TWO
weeks away from the Dinner Party of the Century. A cooking practice session was scheduled for Saturday, October 24, and we ran into a wall of problems starting the previous Monday. We had unexpected puff pastry issues—the butter kept pushing its way out of the rectangle of dough as we rolled it out, even though the air conditioner was on high and we were using the same brands of butter and flour we had used during recipe development. The galangal used for the Canton sorbet was poor quality and provided too little flavor and bite. We tested frozen galangal, which turned the sorbet bitter. We finally increased the amount from 4 to 5 ounces to approximate the original result when galangal was of higher quality.

At the last minute, the supply of Champagne grapes gave out; they were to be used in the Spatlese jelly. After numerous phone calls, Erin found a purveyor in New Market Square who said that he had “a couple” left. After confirming that he meant bunches rather than single grapes, Erin rushed over in the pouring rain only to discover that he had Concord, not Champagne, grapes. We eventually turned to a port jelly, which we cut into small cubes and then layered into a spiral pattern in the Spatlese gelatin.

We also had a long discussion about the tangerine wedges, filled with almond blanc mange and tangerine jelly, for the mandarin cake. Would any of the guests think that the whole thing was edible, rind and all? “No,” I shouted. “Impossible!” A few minutes later, Mike, who was handling the service, popped an entire wedge into his mouth and noted, “The bitterness of the rind complements the sweetness of the jellies!” Well, we would leave this decision to our guests.

Baby artichokes for the fried artichokes course were also a problem—they were just too small. But a few days before the rehearsal dinner, we stumbled upon a good supply of larger specimens. (If the artichokes are too small, the leaves are not big enough to fan out, coat, and fry, so each one has a distinctive crunch.) Geese were also hard to source, since we were cooking before the Thanksgiving holiday, but we did manage to find a high-end supplier (D’Artagnan) who came through at the last minute. Finally, we decided to try three different rums for the punch, a cheap liquor-store variety, a twelve-year-old rum, and then a twenty-year-old rum. The winner, of course, was the older, more expensive brand.

On Friday, we did a dry run grilling the salmon and found that the fire was not hot enough. Someone had added a couple of split logs to the fire just before grilling, thereby insulating the fish from the heat of the coals. We would have to remember to bank the coals, leaving off fresh additions of wood.

By midafternoon on Saturday, things were heating up, literally. The fire alarm, a heat sensor, went off—we had to cover the offending sensor with foil. This resulted in a rather embarrassing visit by the fire department, during which I had to explain that we were attempting to cook a twelve-course dinner on a wood cookstove. They seemed rather confused, as if they had stepped onto the wrong movie set, but after a quick check of the premises, they took off.

In fact, the heat was so terrific in the main kitchen that we had to create a separate staging area for the oysters, the gelatin desserts, and the mandarin cake. It quickly became clear that we needed two full sets of dessert courses: three finished Victorian jellies for display at the table, and two mandarin cakes: one for display, and the other for serving the pastry cream tucked inside the central savoy cake. (Each cake took an entire day to bake and assemble.) In addition, we realized that the sorbet filling in the tangerine halves of the cake would melt quickly while sitting on a sideboard in the dining room; therefore, Yvonne Ruperti, our pastry chef, would have to come up with a fake sorbet, one that was heat-resistant.

We also realized that the rissoles could not be mass-produced, since each one required constant basting in hot oil, limiting the production to a few at a time. Since we would be serving twelve guests, each consuming three rissoles, that was at least a dozen batches. We would have to set up a production line of two, perhaps three Dutch ovens filled with oil, so that we could fry six rissoles at a time. We would also have to find the best way to hold the rissoles so that they would maintain their crispness.

The final test would be the service. With a dozen guests, we would need six servers so that the hot courses could be brought up from the kitchen in just one trip and the plates cleared in the same efficient manner. As the evening progressed, each course was photographed with the proper plate and wineglass, and a rotating scullery system had to be devised so that we could recycle the same plate, bowl, or piece of glassware through multiple courses. As for the cookstove, we used it for roasting the goose and venison, preparing the stocks, and cooking the lobster à l’Américaine (simultaneously, in three separate skillets); the salmon would be grilled directly over the wood fire, and the cooktop would be used to keep sauces and other items warm. The frying would also be done on the wood cookstove, but the mandarin cake would be baked in a conventional oven. Of course the Canton punch would be made in a hand-cranked ice-cream machine, which would take twenty-five to thirty minutes. (I knew this firsthand, since I had been assigned this recipe a half dozen times during the recipe development process.)

TODAY, ALMOST EVERYONE MAKES ELECTRIC DRIP COFFEE AT
home. In 1896, there were a variety of methods and, seemingly, no consensus on the best way to brew it. First off, Americans were still boiling their coffee, although in Europe, the two-tier drip pot, a method that was vastly superior to boiling, was in use as far back as the French Revolution. It was improved in 1809 by an American expatriate living in England, Benjamin Thompson, and a partial vacuum system for making coffee was already in use in France and England by 1850. Once again, the United States was lagging behind Europe in the culinary arts. Prepackaged roasted beans were the most common method of purchasing coffee. Most contemporary cookbooks still contained coffee-roasting instructions, since freshly roasted coffee was still considered to provide the tastiest cup.

So, following our test kitchen methodology, we tested all the recipes we could find using an enamel-covered iron pot, which would have been similar to the graniteware of the late Victorian period. For the coffee, we used Starbucks Verona coffee, a medium blend.

How did Fannie do? Well, she won the competition hands down. The coffee was a bit strong but very clear and clean-tasting. To test whether the egg was truly necessary, we made one recipe without it; the resulting coffee tasted stronger, was not as clear, and was slightly bitter.

FANNIE FARMER’S BOILED COFFEE

We did test this recipe without the egg, and it was indeed helpful in making the coffee clearer and less bitter. Fannie even opined on the right time to add sugar and cream to coffee. She claims that it should be put into the cup before the hot coffee for best flavor, although we could not tell any difference.

1 egg

1 cup cold water

1 cup coffee

6 cups boiling water

Whisk egg with one half cup cold water. Add crushed egg shell and stir in the coffee. Transfer mixture to a coffeepot, add the boiling water, and stir thoroughly. Boil for 3 minutes, stuffing the spout with paper towels to prevent aroma from escaping. Remove towel and pour out a small amount of coffee in order to clean spout; return this coffee to the pot. Add half cup of cold water to the pot “to clarify the coffee.” Place pot back on stove on the lowest possible heat level for 10 minutes. Serve at once.

THIS LAST COURSE ALSO INCLUDED CHEESE AND CRACKERS. IN
the late 1800s, cheese would have been sold through retail establishments called creameries, which offered a fairly broad selection. Up until midcentury, cheese, like most other foodstuffs, was produced on local farms and not widely distributed. Around the time of the Civil War, however, cheese factories came into vogue; New York was an important producer (124 million pounds annually) and so was Wisconsin. These two states produced two-thirds of the total national output, mostly Cheddar, which was sold in sixty-pound wheels a foot or more in diameter. U.S. producers were also imitating Edam from Holland, creating a less than successful Gruyère in Wisconsin, and a Stilton from Maine that did well in a tasting contest (most Stilton, however, was still imported). Brie was being produced in New York and Pennsylvania, although most customers did not enjoy it “runny,” as well as Limburger (American-made Limburger was more popular than the import, since it was aged less and had a much milder flavor) and Neufchâtel, otherwise known as cream cheese. Parmesan was strictly from Italy, making up roughly one-quarter of total cheese imports, and Camembert was also imported.

In general, Americans had no taste for strong, aged cheeses and therefore American varieties of European imports were aged for only brief periods, the Brie only being aged for two to four weeks, thus producing a cheese quite different from, and much inferior to, the real thing.

Today, of course, American cheese production has come a long way. In fact, unlike in Europe, where a particular type of cheese tends to be produced in a uniform style throughout a region, American cheeses tend to be more individual and eclectic; one producer may do something quite different from another producer in the farm down the road. This doesn’t guarantee better cheese, but it does offer more variety and more serendipitous tastings. Here is the list of cheeses that we served after dinner, based in large part on the sorts of cheeses available in the United States in the late 1800s.