Fannie's Last Supper (23 page)

The overheated oven had transformed the kitchen into the boiler room of the
Titanic.
One of the lightbulbs exploded from the heat, the brass pulls on the drawers in the center worktable could not be touched with bare hands, and the soapstone counters in the scullery in the next room were hot to the touch. An instant-read thermometer sitting on the air conditioner that was blasting cold air read an incredible 93 degrees, although it was probably 30 degrees hotter by the stove. Erin was wearing poly-blend chef pants, which started to melt onto her thighs; Keith, Andrea, Dan, and Yvonne had to crouch down by the stovetop while working in order to avoid singing their eyebrows in the rush of heat, especially when frying the rissoles and artichokes.

For service, Debbie, Cindy, and Melissa were wearing long skirts that made it nearly impossible to climb the stairs to the dining room, so they did what many women have done before them—they hiked them up to midthigh, pinning a few folds of material under one arm. (One wonders if Victorian housemaids did the same when nobody was looking.) Meanwhile, upstairs, there was the usual wine-fueled chatter about the order of the dishes on the menu, the fish course appearing after the venison, and then the goose just before the jellies and dessert. Modern chefs, including Gordon Hamersley, thought this was a bit odd, starting light, going heavy, pulling back to a fish course, and then heading into another full-flavored dish before winding down. I had reviewed dozens of menus from the period, and game was, indeed, served after a sorbet and before the fruit or jellies and then dessert.

Here’s the problem: when serving a twelve-course meal, you would not want to start light and then move toward heavier and heavier food in a slow, inexorable march to gastric overload. (“Just one more chocolate, sir?”) As with a Beethoven symphony, one needs pacing, a brisk prestissimo followed by a course of adagio, then largo (think funeral march), and then a slightly faster andante, a quick vivace, and a slow lento before moving onto a lively presto jelly course and a crescendo of cake for dessert. The modern notion of light to heavy is just too streamlined, too one-dimensional, for such a puffed-up culinary undertaking. And we were not suffering from the back-and-forth wine service, from Pinot Gris to Bordeaux, from Riesling to Burgundy. I was starting to feel like some rich, useless Victorian fop.

The trick for grilling the salmon indoors was to create a thick bed of fiery coals, since the addition of fresh wood only insulates the fish from the heat of the fire. Since Keith had almost burned down the house an hour before, the good news was that the coals were perfect for grilling, so two of the “burners,” the round cast-iron inserts, were removed and the oblong grilling insert was put into place, preheated, and oiled frequently to build up a nonstick surface. The salmon turned out rich and moist with a hint of wood smoke and skin that was near black and perfectly crisp; it balanced perfectly with the caper vinaigrette. The fried artichokes were our salad course—hot, crunchy, and fresh-tasting with a bright splash of lemon. (The cooks found that chopsticks were quite useful in the frying process, a notion that would have been quite foreign to Fannie.)

Meanwhile, Harry Smith was wondering what planet José Andrés was born on, given his optimism about the changing food scene. Harry, a hard-news reporter from the Midwest, felt that José was speaking to an elite audience, the sorts of home cooks who know farci from farfalle—whereas Harry was more familiar with what folks were having for dinner at the Kansas City airport. They were, at once, irreconcilable yet well-paired: José brimmed with vast stores of kinetic energy, while Harry tempered his tremendous intellect and held back his coiled wit just enough to keep the conversation pointed but flowing pleasantly.

The Canton sorbet was up next, a simple frozen ginger palate cleanser, admittedly the bane of third-class French restaurants. (This was not one of my favorite dishes—I prefer the Victorian notion of a small glass of champagne to cleanse the palate rather than a fruited ice—but it was well conceived, not too sweet, and with enough bite to dismiss the notion of dessert.)

As for the roast goose, this was the course that was the diciest of all. Let’s face facts: goose is almost impossible to cook well. The breast meat is often tough and livery, and the dark meat is rarely cooked long enough to render it tender. Our final method called for cooking breasts and legs separately, the legs and thighs on top of the bare carcass—using it much like a roasting rack—the breasts sautéed and then finished in the oven. When the oven was opened and the bird was checked, however, it turned out that the legs had slipped to one side, like a tenderfoot off a saddle. This was quickly remedied and the final dish was almost perfect, the breast meat still a tad chewy although the flavor was excellent. However, the dark meat was a triumph, both moist and tender. A gravy based on homemade goose stock worked well, as did the earthy chestnut stuffing and the fresh-tasting, slightly tart applesauce. When cooked properly, it was clear that goose is the epicure’s version of turkey—more complex and deeply flavored, but much harder to cook and sauce.

Next, we were on to the three homemade Victorian jellies. Andrea had made two of each jelly—the multilayered lemon jelly with a pineapple design on top, the rhubarb jelly filled with a strawberry Bavarian cream, and then the Spätlese jelly with a spiral of cubed port jelly. If you have never had a homemade jelly, let me offer you this description. The first thing one notices is the flavor—it is not overly sweet or sharp-tasting like a child’s notion of lemon or rhubarb, too bright and candylike for the grown-up palate. Instead, the flavors are bright but subtle—they change on the tongue as they melt, a slow process of evolution as the first cool bite of jelly slowly transforms, melting across the tongue and slipping across the pebbled surface down into the mouth, the flavors expanding and becoming less certain, less one-dimensional. Then, if the mold has a secondary flavor, one is introduced to the taste of port or the foamy change of pace offered by strawberry Bavarian, to remind us once again that this is a more complex, adult offering. At the same time, the shape and colors of a perfectly conceived jelly mold are intensely childlike and one finds it hard to stop grinning like a four-year-old at a birthday party. Amy Dickinson, with unabashed enthusiasm, grabbed the platter with the lemon jelly and started shaking it playfully. She evidently couldn’t help herself. That started the jellies moving around the table, poked and jiggled, everyone digging in for seconds. The formality of a Victorian meal—a place where any sort of human appetite or uncontrolled behavior was abhorred—was clearly a lost cause.

The final course, the mandarin cake, was the ultimate Victorian fantasy dessert. The center portion, a classic fluted savoy cake, stood almost a foot tall and was filled with pastry cream. The base layer, one large round of almond-orange cake covered with white marzipan, provided the foundation. Around the base of the savoy cake were half-tangerines filled with frozen tangerine sorbet; circling the fluted savoy cake were arranged a series of quartered tangerines filled with alternating layers of tangerine and almond jellies. Sugared lemon leaves were added for decoration. All on one plate, one had a quick tour of the French dessert cart: luxurious warm pastry cream, ice-cold orange sorbet, a perfectly moist almond cake, the intense concentration of almond flavor in the marzipan icing, and then a bright note of clementine jelly and a baseline of almond blanc mange as a partner. The final course—coffee, crackers, cheese, bonbons, and liqueurs—was to be served in the parlor with the rapidly melting ice mermaid. (It was duly and unkindly noted that her figure now resembled that of a naked woman who has had at least two kids.) It was now 11:30 p.m., four and a half hours after we had been seated for dinner.

At midnight, as the guests and the kitchen and waitstaff (who had already been enjoying the leftover punch from the first course) were enjoying the port, Benedictine, Chartreuse, Framboise, etc., the folks from Brookline Ice and Coal showed up to remove the mermaid. The tail had to be removed—hacked off is more like it—so it could be loaded back up on a dolly and stepped down the outside stairs to the street. Then she was summarily tossed into a pile of leaves in the park as José Andrés begged to have this beautiful woman, the woman he “loved,” brought up to his bedroom, “Immediately!” (If you ever want a lively dinner party, all you have to do is invite José.)

Finally, around 1:00 a.m. or so, Brian Jones started playing show tunes and Harry, being a fan of
Oklahoma!
, got Amy Dickinson and myself to sing the theme song, “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” and then a few favorites from
My Fair Lady.
The upstairs and downstairs were joined, the evening was running down, a few guests started to retire upstairs clutching green bottles of Apollinaris water to head off the inevitable hangover, and it was no longer showtime. The Dinner Party of the Century was over.

Was this just a bunch of overprivileged gourmands enjoying ridiculous overconsumption while the rest of the country was stuck in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression? There is an undeniably frivolous notion to this sort of undertaking, given the nature of the menu and the cost of testing and preparing the food. But as the Cambridge don said, “The best thing about it is that no one can make any use for it for anything . . . this uselessness is the highest kind of use. It is kindling and feeding the ideal spark without which life is not worth living.”

One hint that there was, indeed, some deeper meaning in all of this: the kitchen staff, after seventeen hours of cooking over a very hot wood cookstove, said they had loved the experience—the heat, stoking and maintaining the fire, using a large cast-iron work surface to tend stocks, sauté goose breasts and lobster tails, and keep sauces warm. In fact, as I discovered later, they had moved more and more of the preparation from the conventional gas cooktop in the smaller side kitchen to the Victorian cookstove, since they found it both more fun and, oddly enough, more efficient.

The Victorians lived in the most progressive, rapidly changing era in all of human history. In just one generation, they went from local to international, from coal cookstoves to gas, from slow food to fast food, from rural to urban, from family enterprises to factories, from carts to cars, from preservation to refrigeration. The promise was one of change, one of outgrowing the human condition, overcoming our weaknesses—hunger, alcoholism, poverty, poor nutrition—through the application of scientific methods: hence, the creation of domestic science. Technology would help us to outgrow our foibles, move past our baser human instincts, put aside the day-to-day bother and mess of living, including the cooking and the cleaning. Science and improved methods of social organization would allow women to achieve their higher artistic goals, leaving behind the drudgery of daily living. This has always been the promise of science, to alleviate the less desirable aspects of the human condition. The problem, of course, is that technology has taken away too much of what defines humanity, leaving us with little that goes to the heart of being a useful, happy person.

That being said, the notion that advancements in technology may ease the most appalling aspects of the human condition, including disease and hunger, is perfectly sound. But on some level, I suspect that we wish to leave all of the human condition behind because of our modern distaste for what used to be called “daily chores.” By returning to an earlier culinary period and employing their methods, we put this proposition to the test. Has the relentless march toward convenience—from roasting meat over a fire to heating frozen meals in a microwave—allowed us the extra time to explore our artistic selves, thus providing happiness? Or, to put it another way, can time be saved so that it can be better spent? Based on the evidence of the last fifty years, the answer is no. Clearly, what modern civilization has done with those additional six hours per day
not
spent cooking and cleaning has been mostly a waste of time, since over five of those hours are spent watching television. And the hundreds, even thousands, of hours spent on this project were well spent indeed, hard work that brought us to the height of the joy of being human. In other words, given lots of free time, most of us have absolutely no idea what to do with it. The myth of leisure is just that—yet another silly misunderstanding about human nature.

Happiness is derived, I propose, from being useful—from putting one’s oar in the water and helping move the boat forward. This is an entirely unoriginal notion, but it bears repeating. It is also no surprise that happiness is enhanced when work is shared and appreciated by others. Excessive leisure, it might be stated, is a recipe for unhappiness. If you doubt this proposition, just spend some time in a retirement community full of folks who have nothing worthwhile to do other than planned activities. (I note that in our small Vermont town, old-timers want nothing more than to be useful. In his early nineties, Russell Baines was strapped to a riding lawn mower with extra seat belts and allowed to mow on Sunday afternoons when he was rescued by neighbors from the old-age home. They even took a picture of him mowing and left it at his bedside so he could enjoy seeing himself at work during the week.)

Life is not about extremes. We consider civilization as a continuum, always moving forward and getting better. Yet history denies that absurd notion—witness the dark ages after the inestimable glories of Rome. As William Manchester so aptly put it, the twelfth century was a “world lit only by fire.” Just as a backbreaking schedule of cooking and cleaning is not ideal, neither is its opposite, a life with no responsibilities. Our future lies not in the ultimate life of pleasure after climbing out of the mud and squalor of the dark ages; it lies in finding the point along history’s ragged time line that offers the most satisfying life. Much like a pendulum that comes to rest, not at the extremes of the arc but at the center point, as determined by the laws of nature, humans find the greatest happiness when there is still work to be done, when we still have connections to the natural world, when we can balance the joys of physical labor with the pleasures of the mind. Teddy Roosevelt knew this lesson better than anyone: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”