Read Fannie's Last Supper Online
Authors: Christopher Kimball
Now that we were singularly unimpressed with the real thing, we moved on to the mock version, which required a calf’s head. Two cups of brown stock are thickened with large amounts of butter and flour; the head stock is then added, with tomatoes, the face meat, and lemon juice. Madeira is used to finish. (A word about Fannie’s penchant for massive amounts of flour and butter for thickening sauces: she thickens six cups of stock with one-quarter cup butter and a whopping half cup of flour. We found a similar attraction to pasty sauces when researching other Fannie recipes. I checked Escoffier to see if it was merely the prevailing method of her era or Fannie herself. In this case, Ms. Farmer is to take the blame. Escoffier’s rule of thumb—his book was first published in 1902, just six years after Fannie’s cookbook—was three ounces of roux to thicken four and a half cups of liquid so, in this recipe, one would use about half the amount of flour that Fannie calls for. Did she actually test these recipes?)
The problem, in retrospect, was the definition of “clean and wash calf’s head.” For Victorians, this may have been common knowledge, but for the modern cook, the directive is a bit vague. Almost nobody said, “Take out the goddamn brains, you idiot!” since this would be like saying, “Before logging on to Facebook, be sure to turn on your computer.” Well, I was in need of remedial calf’s-head preparation training, which I finally found in the pages of
The Complete Cook,
authored by J. M. Sanderson in 1846. In it, we finally achieve specificity: “Get the calf’s head with the skin on [another query of mine], the fresher the better,
take out the brains
[italics mine] and wash the head several times in cold water. Let it soak in spring water for an hour.” Thanks—now my computer is on! (As I continued my research, the refrain “take out the brains” kept appearing—a mantra of sorts to my abject stupidity. But it was noted that the brains must be removed “without breaking them,” a warning that implied a memorable scene from
Young Frankenstein
.) The tongue, however, was to remain in the water during cooking and then “cut into mouthfuls, or rather make a side dish of the tongue and brains.” Well, whatever. Then the head was cut into tiny pieces, five pounds of knuckle of veal were added, “and as much of beef,” and then a stock was made by boiling for five hours. Other recipes, I noted, also added salt pork, ham hocks, trotters, anchovies, smoked tongue, or bacon.
As my research continued, mock turtle soup took on a life of its own, being an all-purpose starting point to which one added all sorts of culinary backflips and flourishes. My favorite was the following, which appeared in
Jennie June’s Cookbook
. “Brain-balls or cakes are a very elegant addition, and are made by boiling the brains for ten minutes.” A recipe from the 1877
Buckeye Cookery
suggested that the brains be removed to a saucer. They are used later to make forcemeat balls (that would be brain balls to you), which started with a paste of hard-cooked egg yolks, to which the brains are added “to moisten.”
As I started piling up recipes for mock turtle soup, other details came to light. The butcher was to remove the hair by scalding and scraping. The teeth and the eyes were also goners. One was also supposed to scrape “the interior of the nasal passage and the mouth.” The tongue was supposed to be removed as soon as it was tender, and the skin “stripped off.” The brains were to soak separately in salted water and then the outer membrane was to be removed, “being careful not to break the substance of the brain.” In other words, “Listen, you ham-handed oaf—handle the brains gently or they will turn into custard!” Then you boil the brains gently for ten to fifteen minutes, allow to cool wrapped in a wet cloth, and keep in a cool place. You bet I will! I’m not leaving gently simmered room-temperature brains right next to my 700-degree pizza oven!
Now I had some idea of what the original recipe was like, as well as being up to speed on what to do with a calf’s head without feeling like some twenty-first-century culinary nincompoop. So we ordered another batch of calf’s heads, cut into large pieces, the brains reserved, presumably for brain balls. They were delivered in a large cardboard box, somewhat bloody at the bottom, and wrapped with two bands of thick plastic strapping. The first dilemma was the eyes. Since they had not been removed, I was forced to perform an eye-ectomy. Remembering the final scene of
Kill Bill,
I thought that a well-performed plucking might do the trick, but sadly that was not to be. In case you have ever worried about your eyes inadvertently falling out or perhaps being popped into midair if you were given a sharp blow to the side of the head, you may now relax. Eyeballs—at least those of male calves—are sturdily attached. I next grabbed an oyster knife, but this was hopeless for attacking the thick, rubbery connective tissue that lined the socket and kept the eye firmly in place. Only ten minutes’ sawing with a very sharp paring knife did the trick, and that was just for one eye. (Don’t ask which one; the head was already in pieces.) We let the head rinse in cold salted water for an hour, and then we began cooking.
With plenty of water to cover, a ham hock, five pounds of beef round, a few vegetables such as carrot and celery, and the odd spice, including bay leaves, cloves, allspice berries, and peppercorns, we simmered the pot all through the day on the cookstove, strained it, and then let it sit overnight before we defatted the stock and moved on to make the soup. This was more like a traditional Escoffier stock, and it looked a whole lot better too. At least the liquid was thin, not goopy with melted brains, and it had a pleasant French stock odor. We reheated the stock after first cooking onions in butter, and then adding a julienne of carrots and turnips as garnish. The taste? Remarkably, the flavor reminded me of the turtle soups I had made a few weeks before, but substantially more delicious. How and why a calf’s-head stock would produce a flavor similar to turtle meat simmered in water is one of the culinary questions that is probably best not asked.
Thinking that we were now done, I was rudely awakened to the fact that I had forgotten about the garnish, the aforementioned brain balls. (How many authors have had the pleasure of using the phrase “aforementioned brain balls”?) To see how the standard forcemeat balls (meat loaf mix, bread crumbs, salt pork, egg white, salt, and pepper) would turn out, we tested a recipe from the 1831 cookbook,
The Cook Not Mad
. (The title of this anonymously authored cookbook refers to a rational, rather than a helter-skelter, approach to the culinary arts.) The resulting balls were coarse, rough, and tough. They also lacked flavor and interest. So, thinking that we might as well go whole hog, as it were, and use the brains, we turned to a recipe from
The Good Housekeeper
(1839). We simmered the brains for ten minutes in a court bouillon (the Victorian cookbooks were correct on this point—brains must be handled
very
gently lest they dissolve like broken custard) and then mixed them with dried bread crumbs, nutmeg, thyme, two eggs, salt, and pepper. Since the brains were still a bit warm, they turned to mush when chopped, so we took the remaining cooked brains and let them cool under a damp towel to firm up the texture. (We thought that soaking in cold water might make them looser and more watery.) When shallow-fried in a skillet, the crisp exterior retained its texture even when floating in the soup and the inside was uniform and tender. Brain balls were a success! (The final adjustments included allowing the brains to rest in the refrigerator to really firm up, and frying the brain balls in 350-degree oil, not in butter.)
MOCK TURTLE SOUP
The “mock” in mock turtle soup is a calf’s head, which is simmered to make a stock for the soup. Be sure to remove the brains first (and the eyeballs), and have the head cut into pieces. Preferably, this is done by your butcher, not you. (Eyeballs are firmly attached—they won’t just pop out!) The recipe for Crispy Brain Balls can be found at www.fannieslastsupper.com.
STOCK
1 calf’s head
1 cup white wine
1 smoked ham hock
5 pounds beef round, cut into 2-inch pieces
2 bay leaves
5 cloves
6 allspice berries
24 peppercorns
4 onions, chopped rough
4 carrots, chopped rough
4 ribs celery, chopped rough
1 head garlic, halved across the equator
8 sprigs parsley
4 sprigs thyme
1. Split calf’s head in half, remove the brains (reserve for the Crispy Brain Balls recipe) and eyes (discard), cut out the tongue, and clean well, including the nostrils. Cut the head into pieces, soak for one hour in a 20-quart stock pot in slightly salted water.
2. Drain, cover with 6 quarts cold water, and add wine, ham hock, beef, bay leaves, cloves, allspice berries, peppercorns, onions, carrots, and celery, garlic, and herbs. Simmer for 3 to 4 hours or until the calf’s-head meat is tender, skimming foam as necessary.
3. Transfer bones, meat, and vegetables to colander set in large bowl. Pour broth through fine mesh strainer (adding any liquid given off through colander), let sit for 10 minutes, skim off fat, and use as needed (or cool quickly to room temperature and refrigerate until needed, removing fat from top before using). Yields about 4 quarts. Reserve the meat from the head along with the ham hock and tongue; shred into small pieces; this should yield about 3 cups. Discard pieces of beef round.
SOUP
4 tablespoons butter
2 large onions, diced medium (about 3 cups)
2 tablespoons sage, chopped fine
3 tablespoons flour
2 quarts calf’s-head broth
¼ cup dry white wine
1 bay leaf
Salt and pepper
1 medium carrot, 2-inch julienned (about ¾ cup)
½ turnip, 2-inch julienned (about ¾ cup)
1 medium leek, white only, cut into 2-inch lengths, cut in half lengthwise, and julienned (about ¾ cups)
1 tablespoon sherry
¼ cup chopped chives
1. Heat butter in large heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat; when foaming subsides, add onions and sage and cook, stirring frequently, until softened, about 8 to 12 minutes. Add flour and cook for 1 to 2 minutes. Whisking constantly, gradually add broth and wine; bring to boil, skimming off any foam that forms on surface. Reduce heat to medium-low, add bay leaf, partially cover, and simmer, stirring occasionally, until flavors meld, about 20 to 25 minutes. Strain through fine-mesh strainer. Season to taste.
2. In two batches, blanch julienned vegetables in 2 quarts seasoned stock, 1 to 2 minutes each. Shock in ice water. Reserve.
3. To serve: Reheat soup base and finish with sherry. Prepare Crispy Brain Balls. To each bowl add equal portions of room-temperature vegetables, 1 to 2 tablespoons pulled meat. Pour hot soup over garnish. Finish with 2 to 3 brain balls per serving and chopped chives.
Fannie Farmer Sexes up Her Food: Was She Really the “Mother of Level Measurements”?
T
he Boston Cooking School at 174 Tremont Street had four kitchens and a staff of ten teachers, the students being either young women planning to marry or older women running their own homes. There was also a big draw from cooks in private homes—there were often over one hundred career cooks each week in these demonstrations. You could take how-to-shop courses, including visits to Faneuil Hall, and there was a crash course—daily lessons for a month—for folks who wanted to get up to speed fast. For the most part, these classes were designed for a family of six with no more than one servant; the recipes were, at least in the beginner’s classes, easy to follow. Farmer knew her audience and packaged courses to suit their needs.
A friend of ours, Bob Brooks, had a grandmother, Mary Brooks, who came to Boston from County Galway in 1910 and then took courses from Fannie herself at her new school. According to her diary, the tuition was $125, a huge sum for that time, but there were just eight students and these private classes were held one day per week in the mornings, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Fannie also gave two weekly demonstration classes, one for homemakers and one for professional cooks, which attracted audiences of between one hundred and two hundred students. She often employed a screen around the teaching platform to conceal the fact that she was teaching from a seated position. According to the diary, “Fannie Farmer . . . was confined to a wheelchair for more than seven years,” and died while Mary was still a student there. Mary always regretted that Miss Farmer died before she learned to make candy. An odd requiem for the departed.
We know a great deal about Fannie’s original set of courses, since they were printed in her
Original 1896 Boston Cooking
-
School Cook Book.
Farmer offered three sets of cooking courses as a promotional gambit from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. for the plain cooking (evidently what Mary Brooks had signed up for), and at 2:00 p.m. on Friday for the second and third course of instruction.
She began with how to manage the fire (the school did have gas stoves as well, but one assumes that most of her students were still dealing with coal). The plain-cooking basics include the obvious choices: bread baking, mashed and boiled potatoes, soup stock, boiled eggs, beef stew, frying fish and potatoes, apple pie, roast beef, macaroni, and plain lobster. Other staples of nineteenth-century cooking were included as well: clarifying fat, bread pudding, Indian pudding, hoe cake, and wine jelly. Of more interest, although rather mundane, are the following items, since they paint a good picture of the everyday late Victorian menu: water bread (stale bread dipped in water and buttered), blanc mange (a very plain milk-based pudding made with Irish moss, a thickener made from seaweed), and snow pudding (gelatin, water, and sugar with beaten egg whites, usually served with a boiled custard). This penchant for puddings was clearly middle-class English in origin. Even today, on many menus in London restaurants, the dessert section is usually labeled “Puddings.”
The “richer-cooking” courses covered an odd mix of items from French (Charlotte Russe and Lyonnaise Potatoes) to English (Stuffed Leg of Mutton) to classic American (Parker House Rolls, Chicken Croquettes, Cream Pies) to a few rather odd choices, including Curried Lobster and Apple Snowballs. Finally, the “fancy-cooking” classes were where the recipe names became longer, the food felt continental, and Fannie started to pull out all the stops. In the French classics department, one got Veal Birds, Potage à la Reine, Vol-au-Vent, Gâteau St. Honoré, Birds in Potato Cases, macaroons, floating island, Bombe Glacée, Sweetbreads with Peas, and Gâteau de Princesse Louise. But, look out—you also got Pigs in Blankets and Cabinet Pudding (a molded mishmash of gelatin-thickened custard, lady fingers, and macaroons, served with a cream sauce and candied cherries). This seemed as if middle-class suburban Boston women were trying to be sophisticated without having spent any time eating the food on location, in Paris, for example. If that sounds a tad condescending, well, Boston was still rather provincial in 1896, and Fannie’s cooking classes reflected that limitation.
Fannie also understood that home cooks wanted impressive food, restaurant food, continental food—anything that she could dress up, sex up, rename, or make tantalizing. She knew that the larger audience were middle-class and upper-middle-class women who had sufficient time and income to make their dinner table a place of distant locales, of experimentation, of the new and progressive. This meant puff paste, lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska, and any recipe with the word
Delmonico
or
Reine
in it, rather than Boston baked beans and gingerbread. It is quite telling, however, that Fannie could teach the basics of making a cake at one moment while in the next she might be explaining the finer points of preparing charlotte russe. If anyone needs confirmation of America as the ultimate melting pot or Fannie’s keen ability to give her students whatever the hell they would pay for, this was it.
When Fannie got too cute with her food, she ran into culinary trouble. Butterfly Tea was a puff paste cookie in the shape of a butterfly and decorated with chopped nuts, glacéed cherries, angelica, cinnamon, and sugar. Russian Eggs were boiled, peeled, set into puff paste cases, and then covered with a creamed mushroom sauce. A Valentine’s Day menu was pink and white: Lover’s Sandwiches (salmon) and the Heart’s-Ache Pudding, both in the shape of hearts, with an addition of cream cheese-and-olive-stuffed walnut halves for Cupid’s Deceits. For St. Patrick’s Day, she tied popcorn balls with green ribbons, upon which were glued the words “St. Patrick” in letters made of macaroni dyed sauterne green. She was, in some way, a budding Martha Stewart, but lacking the benefit of good taste and sophistication. As Laura Shapiro aptly stated in
Perfection Salad,
this was “socially ambitious cookery.” Fannie had put “high-class food within the reach of ordinary housekeepers and made up-to-date novelties accessible as well—all in the context of progress.”
This was all going on at the same time that Auguste Escoffier was doing the exact opposite, trimming back the excess frivolity of classic French cooking to focus on the foundations of a higher, more refined culinary experience; everything on the plate must serve the purpose of good taste and good sense without elaborate garnishes and unnecessary complexity. Just for a moment, consider the level of culinary training the best chefs acquired in France, compared to the handful of years Fannie spent as a student at the Boston Cooking School. Escoffier had served a six-year apprenticeship starting at age twelve at his uncle’s restaurant in Nice and then worked five years at Le Petit Moulin in Paris. After a stint in the army, he returned to Le Petit Moulin, and then was asked by César Ritz to become chef at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, a partnership that was to become instrumental in the development of his career. They took over the Savoy Hotel in London in 1889, opened a hotel in the Place Vendôme in Paris in 1896, and then the Carlton Hotel in London in 1896. There was simply no comparison between the culinary worlds of the United States and France in the 1890s. Fannie Farmer could not have held a candle to Auguste Escoffier.
But the news is not all bad; some of her culinary advice, information, and recipes seem more than reasonable. Fannie stated that a modest 68 degrees Fahrenheit was the proper temperature for bread fermentation. Bone marrow was often used for browning meat, especially when making soups. Beef was supposed to be best when it was from a steer that was four or five years old. (Today’s beef is from animals no more than two years old.) The Victorians let it ripen for two to three weeks in the winter for best flavor. Onion juice was a common flavoring ingredient, one that we often use today. Poultry was roasted with a flour coating, which created a nice crust and helped to keep in the juices. (We tested this recipe, and it actually worked; see page 141.) Several vegetables in a salad ought to be marinated before serving. (This is something that we thought we had discovered in our test kitchen—demonstrating, once again, that there is little that is new in the culinary world.) There were five different types of batters used for frying—Fannie mistakenly thought fried foods were healthy. (Frying was popular, since it could be done on a stovetop without worrying about managing the heat of an oven.) Dissolved gelatin was added to mayonnaise to make it set up when it was used for decorative purposes. All in all, she was a pretty smart cook when it came to the basics, although prone to tarting up the fancier dishes without a deep understanding of the underlying subtlety and technique of the original.
The one claim that is repeated endlessly in books about Fannie Farmer is that she was the “mother of level measurements,” a label that was earned through her devotion to precision. This is the typical one-note tagline that historians love to bandy about. Here is a typical quote: “Her particular innovation was the refinement known as level measurements, which she promoted forcefully with every recipe she published. Previously even the strictest use of measuring implements retained the old notions of a ‘rounded’ spoonful and a ‘heaping’ cupful. . . . To Fannie Farmer, it seemed simpler and more rational to dispense with the imagery entirely and call a tablespoonful a level tablespoon, using a knife to level the surface after the spoon had been filled.”
Reportedly, the great turning point in Fannie’s cooking career, akin to Newton watching a falling apple, was when she was asked by Maggie Murphy, her cook, to define “butter the size of an egg” as well as “a pinch of salt,” leading to the revelation that precise measurement was the key to culinary perfection. Perhaps if we started with Mary Lincoln’s cookbook, first published in 1883, and then referred to Fannie’s work of 1896, we might finally get to the bottom of this claim.
We need to keep in mind that in Mary Lincoln’s time, the cookware industry was just starting to provide standardized measuring spoons and cups for general home use, the silver teaspoons and tablespoons sold at retail being the accepted units of measure. By 1896, when her cookbook was published, Fannie refers to “tin measuring-cups, divided in quarters or thirds, holding one half-pint, and table spoons of regulation sizes—which may be bought at any store where kitchen furnishings are sold.” So, Fannie had the benefit of a cookware industry that had adopted and advertised more precise, standardized measuring cups and spoons. In a May 1887 edition of
Table Talk
magazine, Sarah Tyson Rorer comments: “A small tin kitchen cup has recently made its appearance in our market. They are sold in pairs at various prices; one of the pair is divided into quarters and the other into thirds.” In 1894, Mrs. Rorer included measuring spoons and measuring cups in a list of essential kitchen furnishings. So Fannie showed up at just the right time, whereas Mary Lincoln, writing in 1883, was a bit ahead of the cookware industry.
A close examination of
Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book
(I refer to my 1890 edition; the first edition was 1883) reveals a very different story than the one painted by historians. The first observation is that late-nineteenth-century cookbooks often discussed methods or ingredients that were never actually used in the recipes. This is because the world of home cooking was changing so rapidly that the authors felt they had to cover all their bases, from old-fashioned to modern. So, for starters, Mary Lincoln defines an even teaspoonful the same way Fannie did. She did, it is true, include discussions about heaping teaspoons and butter the size of an egg, but she almost never used those measurements in any of her recipes. Her standard units of measurement, the ones found in 99 percent of her recipes, were a “teaspoonful” and a “tablespoonful,” defined as follows: “Dip into the sifted material, and take up a heaping spoonful, shake it slightly until it is just rounded over, or convex in the same proportion as the spoon is round.” Her other definitions for measurements were also precise. She noted that “most cups are smaller at the bottom,” so her rather ingenious method was to fill one cup full of water and then to pour out enough liquid into another, empty cup so that both stood at the same level. That was a half cup. Clearly, she was doing the best anyone could with the tools available to most home cooks. She was also precise when it came to a “scant cupful,” which she defined as “within a quarter of an inch of the top.” Not bad, considering that even modern recipes refer to a “pinch” or a “scant” half cup.
Fannie, to be fair, did remove everything but level measures from her cookbook. She noted in italics,
“A tablespoonful is measured level. A teaspoon is measured level.”
This is hardly a watershed moment in home cooking, nor is it justification for her moniker, the “mother level of measurements.” This was evolution, not revolution, and Lincoln’s rounded teaspoonfuls were simple enough to use. She was still stuck, as was Mary Lincoln, with measuring spoons that did not have half, quarter, or eighth sizes, so she offered the same solution that Lincoln had used—dividing a tablespoon in half lengthwise for a half, divided once again crosswise for a quarter, and the “quarters crosswise for eighths.” (Cooks in the nineteenth century did not have liquid versus dry measuring cups either. Fannie points out that to measure liquids, “a cupful of liquid is all the cup will hold.”)
Perhaps the most astute comment about the two cookbooks is Laura Shapiro’s observation that “Fannie Farmer did help herself, generously and without acknowledgment, to Mrs. Lincoln’s work; but she stamped the material with her own personality, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that she drained it carefully of Mrs. Lincoln’s.”
As for introducing modern cookery, a fresh wind had already been blowing, and its name was Home Economics. At the 1896 Boston Food Fair, Dr. William T. Harris, the U.S. commissioner of education, proposed elevating the home arts, mostly cooking, into a science—one that could be studied, analyzed, perfected, recorded, presented, and taught. So Fannie was part and parcel of a national movement, with less than stellar culinary skills, but a keen sense of marketing, a forceful personality, and a sharp eye for making money and giving the public what it wanted.