Read Fannie's Last Supper Online
Authors: Christopher Kimball
And speaking of work, cooking over a coal stove that is only twenty-five inches high and blistering hot reinvested the process of cooking with a sense of very hard work indeed. (This made us wonder why the stovetop was so low. Okay, the Victorians were about four inches shorter on average, but even if one was a modest five feet tall, a two-foot-high cookstove is still on the low side. One answer is that if one were used to cooking over a fireplace, any elevated stovetop was a huge improvement. The other, more compelling reason, is that tall stockpots are much easier to look into, and lift up and off, when sitting on a low cooktop. Some stockpots were so large and heavy that it took two people to move them.) It was also bloody hot—so hot that when the ovens were cranked up for roasting meat, the cook could get a nice sunburn just by standing next to the stove and stirring a pot. And burning oneself was a frequent occurrence: when the wood was added, when hot handles were grabbed without a pot holder, when one brushed up against twelve hundred pounds of blistering cast iron or picked up the lid lifter that had been sitting on the warming shelf.
The lesson of the Victorians and the Victorian kitchen is that they were at a midpoint—industrialization was creating wealth and convenience, yet they still had one foot in the day-to-day routines of the past. They were at the very beginning of a period in which refrigerators and gas stoves were coming into use, and Jell-O would make the fabulous Victorian jellies obsolete; yet foods were still mostly local, and the family sat down to dinner each day at noon. It was a bit of this and that, a hands-on life free from the horrors of survival (at least among the wealthier Victorians) and not yet severely diminished by the soul-sucking horrors of industrial food and mass-market entertainment.
There is no tomorrow. Time cannot be saved and spent. There is only today and how we choose to live it. The future is unknowable and unpredictable; it offers no clear path to happiness. Science will not save us. Each of us, then, needs to cobble together a daily routine filled with basic human pleasures, wedded, to be sure, to the best that modernity has to offer. It is a life of compromise rather than extremes. It is a touch of the old and a taste of the new. And cooking, it seems to me, offers the most direct way back into the very heart of the good life. It is useful, it is necessary, it is social, and it offers immediate pleasure and satisfaction. It connects with the past and ensures the future. Standing in front of a hot oven, we remind ourselves of who we are, of what we are capable of and how we might stumble back to the center of happiness. Effort and pleasure go hand in hand.
At the end of the evening, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, there was a warm glow in the kitchen, and not just from the stove. We were hot, tired, and sweat-soaked, our legs drained of energy, having been on them all day, but blissful as well. The kitchen had the forest scent of oak, of wood smoke and hot iron, of roasted larded venison, of rich, all-day veal stock and the lingering taste of grilled salmon and the sharp memory of frosty ginger sorbet, mixed with the almost sexual melting on the tongue of Spätlese jelly freckled with small bursts of sun-ripened port.
Something had happened to us cooks—we became fellow travelers, saddle-sore to be sure, but closely joined as well, like pieces of our massive cookstove. We were in the midst of a long, exhausting journey to a place where the modern kitchen no longer travels. We realized, when we were in for both a penny and a pound, that cooking transcends dinner—it is a thing unto itself, a distant shore that is worth every mile, every bead of sweat. Those who take the journey are transformed along with the pursuit of an idea that has no purpose other than the satisfaction of imagination and a fleeting moment when we share with others our food, our hard work, and our invitation to supper.
Fannie’s Last Word
F
rom 1905 to 1910, Fannie directed the cooking section of the
Women’s Home Companion
. She also started to travel more widely, visiting the West Coast, St. Louis, and Texas. Fannie suffered two strokes in later years and was confined to a wheelchair, but she was still lecturing in the last weeks of her life, both at her cooking school and at women’s clubs. She even spoke at Harvard, where she focused on the relationship between diet and health (and was also the first woman lecturer at the medical school); she was especially interested in controlling diabetes. Her last book,
Food and Cooking for the Sick and Convalescent,
sold poorly and soon went out of print. She died in January 1915 of Bright’s disease, although some said that she died of arteriosclerosis, an ironic coincidence since she was considered an expert on the subject of a healthy diet.
Her ashes are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, in very good company with many of the great families of Boston. After her death, Alice Bradley, a cooking-school teacher herself, purchased the school from Fannie’s sister Cora and became its principal. She soon added classes for professionals who wanted to open tearooms or restaurants and, in 1916, also became cooking editor for the
Woman’s Home Companion.
In 1944, she sold the school to Dr. Dana Wallace and died two years later, in 1946. Fannie’s sister Cora took over the editing of the
The Boston Cooking
-
School Cookbook
until 1929, at which point Wilma Lord Perkins (wife of Fannie’s nephew, Dexter Perkins), with “no background in cooking whatsoever,” assumed control and went on to revise the cookbook seven more times, as well as authoring
The Fannie Farmer Junior Cookbook
in 1940. The cookbook went on to sell over 4 million copies by the 1960s.
Fannie’s estate came to close to $200,000, a vast sum at the time. She had invested in utilities and railroads and also owned real estate, including a parcel of land out in Harvard, where she had started construction on a country home just before her death. It was completed in 1916, and two of her descendants, her nephew Dexter Perkins and his wife Wilma, spent much time there in the summers and later named it Weldon. (The house has nine bedrooms and formal gardens; much of the furniture came from Fannie’s home in Boston.)
Much later, Frank Benson, the president of Fanny Farmer Candy Shops, bought the rights to the book and sold the idea of an entirely new revision to Alfred A. Knopf. (Oddly enough, Fanny Farmer candies had nothing to do with Fannie herself. Frank O’Connor, a Canadian candy maker, founded his company in 1919 and named it after Fannie Farmer as a marketing ploy, changing the name slightly, one would assume, to avoid legal troubles. The first Fanny Farmer shop was opened in Rochester, New York, although it soon specialized in mail-order delivery.) James Beard recommended Marion Cunningham, an associate, who spent four years working on a complete revision, which was published in 1979.
Just two months before her death, on November 18, 1914, Fannie demonstrated the cooking of Thanksgiving dinner. An extant copy of the printed lesson from the day, printed with the heading “Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery,” offered ten recipes in paragraph form, including Thanksgiving Cocktail (parboiled oysters served in the shell with seasoned oyster liquor), Roast Turkey, Giblet Stuffing, Scalloped Salsify, Toasted Crackled Corn Bread, Cranberry Fluff (cooked, sweetened cranberries folded into beaten egg whites and briefly baked), Cider Frappé (a cider jelly), Newport Salad, Plum Pudding, and Brandy Sauce. The margins of the menu are packed with a student’s corrections and notations, the printed recipe offering 1½ cups flour rather than the correct ½ cup bread flour penned in the margin. In addition, there are notes filling in information that was not included in the recipe itself, such as how much poultry seasoning to use, the specific recipe for a French dressing, or a small drawing indicating how to assemble a Newport salad. Up until the very end, Fannie Farmer was a dedicated, enthusiastic teacher.
Fannie was not a food lover in the modern sense. Health trumped pleasure; science overrode taste. She admitted that she was first and foremost a businesswoman and a lecturer, rather than an inspired cook. And yet, no other figure from the nineteenth century helped shaped the landscape of American cooking so dramatically in the next. She combined scientific method married to a keen eye for what would sell, for what the public wanted. In other words, Fannie was businesslike both in her approach to recipe development and in her approach to selling herself to the public. This, then, is the enduring legacy of our culinary past: a keen sense of the marketplace, the science of food overriding the passion and pleasure of dining, and the entire package neatly wrapped in a public persona who perfectly captivated the attention of her age. This is the story of America, of our success and also our fatal weakness, seeing the shape of a thing rather than its ephemeral center, ignoring the soul for how the bones fit together, marching forward with our eyes wide open rather than closing them a moment to savor the pure pleasure of a first bite. Fannie always asked about a recipe, “Could it be better?” One wonders if she ever took a spoonful of blanc mange or bisque, sat back, smiled, and said happily, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”
IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE QUIRKY NATURE OF BOSTONIANS
, good gossip, and writing that is light and chatty, I highly recommend George F. Weston’s
Boston Ways: High, By and Folk
as well as Cleveland Amory’s
The Proper Bostonians
. For anyone interested in the Victorian table, customs, silverware, and decorations, Kathryn Grover’s
Dining in America, 1850–1900
is a great read.
The Victorian Book of Cakes
contains drop-dead gorgeous illustrations of high Victorian cakes, although from England. The BBC ran a series entitled
The Victorian Kitchen
and published a companion book. The series is hosted by a cook who grew up working in a large, English Victorian-style kitchen. On our side of the Atlantic,
The American Kitchen
is a terrific resource.
Charles Ranhofer’s
The Epicure
is perhaps the most interesting, thorough cookbook ever published. Original copies are quite expensive (and huge) but worth it. I also put my hands on a copy of Urbain-Dubois’s
Patisserie d’Aujourd’hui
, which makes modern pastry chefs appear singularly unimaginative.
King’s Hand-Book of Boston
is one of those odd finds that is packed with useful and fascinating Boston history. It is also well illustrated with detailed drawings of no-longer-extant Boston buildings. I also reviewed the food columns of the
Boston Daily Globe
for 1896, the “Housekeeper’s Column” in particular, a treasure trove of information about how Bostonians actually cooked and dined. Earlier columns were also helpful: the “Our Cooking School,” which ran from 1894 to 1895 and the “Boston Cooking School” columns, which ran from 1885 to 1889.
Finally, I read
Oystering from New York to Boston
cover to cover, since I could not get enough about oyster boats, oyster sex, and oyster farming. Fascinating stuff.
A Culinary Time Machine
Page 1:
Kathryn Grover’s
Dining in America, 1850–1900
provides an excellent description of the customs of dining in Victorian America.
Page 4:
Descriptions of the Boston Food Fair found in the
Boston Evening Transcript
, Monday, October 5, 1896: “World’s Food Fair” and in the
Boston Daily Globe
of October 6, 1896: “Food Fair Opened.”
Page 15:
Details of the Pie Girl Party are provided in Michael Macdonald Mooney’s
Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White: Love and Death in the Gilded Age
.
Oysters
Page 23:
Reporting on the original Boston Cooking School was based on the
First Annual Report, The Boston Cooking School
.
Page 25:
Quotes about the Farmer family come from Dexter Perkins’s
Yield of the Years
.
Page 35:
Information about oystering taken from John Kochiss’s
Oystering from New York to Boston
.
Mock Turtle Soup
Page 59:
Fannie’s revelation regarding inexact measurements was reported in Laura Shapiro’s
Perfection Salad
. This epiphany was widely reported in later years and, to my ears, sounds apocryphal.
Lobster à L’Américaine
Page 72:
Information about French restaurants in Victorian Boston as well as “cat pies” were found in George F. Weston Jr.’s
Boston Ways: High, By and Folk
.
Page 73:
Boston clubs were full of original Boston characters as described in Alexander W. Williams’s
A Social History of the Greater Boston Clubs
.
Page 74:
The Tavern Club, which still exists, is home to some of the best Boston stories, as described in M. A. DeWolfe Howe’s
A Partial (and not impartial) Semi-Centennial History of The Tavern Club
. This book includes two photos of Curtis Guild Jr., who filled in for Dr. Stanley, the explorer, after he had refused an invitation to speak at the club. The first photo shows Guild dressed in white duck, blackface, and carrying both an umbrella and a native shield, and then, in the next frame, he “gravely took off all his clothes and delivered his lecture as a savage, in black tights with a yellow codpiece and a necklace of leaves.”
Page 75:
The full quote, as found in M. A. DeWolfe Howe’s
A Partial (and not impartial) Semi-Centennial History of The Tavern Club,
regarding the Cambridge don is: “An ideal is a principle of conduct carried to its abstract absolute and therefore useless expression, and charm . . . like the Cambridge don who invented an ingenious mathematical theorem and 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.”
Saddle of Venison
Page 84:
Cleveland Amory’s
The Proper Bostonians
pretty much cornered the market on stories regarding the Boston character, including two of my favorites, the one about the investment banker moving to Chicago and the comment about the lack of oatmeal. Amory also provided the quote from Henry Cabot Lodge and the example of social nudism referring to the appearance of a Cabot and a Coolidge in a series of Camel ads. Here is one story that did not make it into the book, and is a good example of the brutal frankness of the Boston character. “Richard Cabot was once asked to dinner and he replied, ‘Really I have so many people I should like to dine with but never get around to, I should not pretend that I ever would do it.’ ”
Page 111:
The history of gas ranges and cookery is discussed in Ellen M. Plante’s
The American Kitchen
. She was also the source of much of the information regarding American cookware, although newspaper advertisements from the period were also helpful, as were “trade cards,” colored handouts that advertised ice cream machines, stoves, appliances, and gadgets.
Fried Artichokes
Page 124:
The history of markets in Boston was found in many places but particularly useful was Moses King’s
King’s Handbook of Boston
. Also of great value was
Quincy’s Market
by John Quincy, Jr.
Page 130:
The history of S. S. Pierce is covered in many books, but its own publication,
The Epicure
, contained a history in the 1931 anniversary issue by Mary Crawford entitled “One Hundred Years of Boston Hospitality.”
Canton Punch
Page 145:
A good, if romanticized, description of the old-time Thanksgiving is found in the
Boston Daily Globe,
November 29, 1894, entitled “King of Fall Festivals.”
Page 164.
Boston’s waterfront was covered in William S. Rossiter’s
Days and Ways in Old Boston
.
Page 165:
The 1912
Farmer’s Cyclopedia
detailed the processing of ginger in China.
Roast Stuffed Goose
Page 167:
The history of linoleum and other kitchen history was found in Ellen M. Plante’s
The American Kitchen.
Page 170:
Faye E. Dudden’s
Serving Women
was the best source of information we found about immigration and household servants. The details of household dos and don’ts were found in Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood’s
Manners and Social Usages
.
Page 172–173:
Kathryn Grover’s
Dining in America: 1850–1900
has a chapter entitled “Technology and the Ideal,” which describes how American manufacturing changed dramatically as the nineteenth century progressed. The key moment was the introduction of the Brown and Sharpe sliding caliper gauge that went on sale in 1851.
Page 177:
The source of the information on raising geese was
Ducks and Geese,
U. S. Department of Agriculture, Standard Varieties of Management, Farmer’s Bulletin, Number 64, George Howard.
Wine Jelly
Page 190:
Towle Company pattern information was taken from Kathryn Grover’s
Dining in America, 1850–1900.
Page 204–205:
Information about how sugar was refined comes from a number of sources, including
The Story of Sugar
by George Thomas Surface; “Sugar: Its History, Production and Manufacture,” by Jacob A. Dresser, found in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s
Abstract of the Proceedings of the Society of Arts for the Nineteenth Year, 1880–1881, Meetings 256 to 270 Inclusive;
and
Something About Sugar
by George Morrison Rolph.
Page 213:
Quotes about Victorian dining and eating taken from Kathryn Grover’s
Dining in America
, including the fact that the number of etiquette books published in America had risen substantially after the Civil War.
Page 225:
The story about the coffee/buffalo robe trade comes from Mark Pendergast’s
Uncommon Grounds
, as does most of the other history of coffee, although William H. Ukers’s
All About Coffee
was also very helpful.