Fannie's Last Supper (7 page)

4. When ready to fry, heat oil to 375 degrees. Check each rissole to make sure that the seal is secure, pinching gently as necessary. Working two at a time, brush with room-temperature gelatin. Gelatin texture should be the consistency of thin egg whites. If it is too firm, microwave for 2 seconds at a time, until correct consistency. Fry two to three at a time, basting each constantly with hot oil until the rissoles turn light golden brown and puff and blister, about 45 to 60 seconds. Flip until cooked through, about 30 to 45 seconds. Remove with slotted spoon, transfer to paper-towel-lined baking sheet and then to wire rack placed in rimmed baking sheet; hold in warm oven while frying remaining rissoles. Season rissoles with salt. Serve.

   For the Chicken Liver Filling and the Duxelle and Chicken Filling, go to www.fannieslastsupper.com.

ONION-CHERRY CHUTNEY FILLING WITH BLUE CHEESE

Of the three, this is my favorite filling, since the balance of sweet and pungent marries well with the blue cheese. It knocks your socks off when served in a thin, crisp, hot shell of fried puff.

2 teaspoons vegetable oil

1 large onion, diced medium, about 1½ cups

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

1/8 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper

2 teaspoons sugar

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

¼ teaspoon minced fresh thyme

½ cup dried cherries

½ ounce blue cheese, broken into 12 small pieces the size of peas

1. Heat oil in medium saucepan over medium heat until it begins to shimmer; sauté onion until soft, about 3 to 4 minutes. Add salt, pepper, and sugar and cook until bottom of pot begins to brown, about 6 to 8 minutes, then deglaze with vinegar and cook until pan is dry. Add thyme and cherries and cook until softened and fragrant, about 2 minutes. Remove pan from heat. Transfer mixture to a plate. Refrigerate.

2. Once onion mixture is chilled through, finely chop. Check for seasoning. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Chapter 6
Lobster à l’Américaine

Eating out in Boston and Why the Tavern Club Owned a Bear

B
oston has never been, until recent years, a restaurant town. The high and mighty frequented private clubs when they ate out, with the bulk of the dining occurring at home. The 1889 edition of
King’s Hand
-
Book of Boston
noted that the number of restaurants and cafés in Boston numbered “nearly 500” at the time, about the same quantity as in 1800. But commented King, “excepting those connected with hotels, there are not many worthy of particular mention.” One might have dined well at the Parker House Café, or at Frost and Dearborn’s, which opened in 1873.

Boston might not have been in the same league as New York in terms of fine dining, but we did have a lot of coffeehouses. Their appeal was less the quality of the coffee than the other, stronger libations. Apparently, the drinking vessels in the coffeehouses “were not especially adapted to that beverage.” But long before coffeehouses, there were taverns in the English tradition; the first tavern in Boston was opened in 1634 by Samuel Cole on Merchants Row.

Chophouses were also popular, for instance, the Coolidge Café, opposite the Paul Revere House. The steaks and chops were cooked over a hot coke fire on “silver grills” that were grooved to drain the fat away from the fire. (Coke was coal that was heated in the absence of oxygen, making it both purer and able to produce higher temperatures. Coke was used primarily in steelmaking.) Locke-Ober, at 3 Winter Place, originally named the Winter Palace tavern, was a merger of Frank Locke’s wine bar (established 1892) and Louis Ober’s French restaurant (established 1868). There were many French dining establishments as well, usually named after their proprietors, and heartier fare was served around the markets for the men and women who worked there. By the late 1800s, there was a group of little French restaurants in Van Rensselaer Alley (later called Majestic Alley), next to the Majestic and Colonial theaters.

There were a number of oyster houses, as well as establishments that sold pies in Pie Alley. The selling of small pies was a common practice in Boston—one of these establishments was Henry’s Hole in the Wall, which sold small meat pies called “cat pies” for 10 cents. Another favorite food of the time was—yes, it’s true—baked beans served with coffee for a modest 6 cents.

Club life was, and still is, an important part of the social and culinary scene, and no club in Boston has more history than the Tavern Club, which had, albeit briefly, a live bear cub as its mascot. Boston’s private clubs were also a key part of the cuisine of the city, many boasting French chefs and long menus. It all started with the Old Colony Club in Plymouth, which met for the first time on December 22, 1769, whereupon the members consumed a feast of Indian whortleberry pudding, succotash, clams, oysters, codfish, venison, sea fowl and eels, apple pie, cranberry tarts, and cheese made in the colony. Perhaps the most prestigious establishment was the Saturday Club, founded in 1855; its members included James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others. Another early club was the Porcellian Club, founded by Joseph McKean, later a Congregational clergyman, who once smuggled a roast pig into his rooms at Harvard. The most powerful club in Boston is still the Somerset Club, located on Beacon Street about halfway up the Common.

Women’s clubs flourished in the latter part of the century, including the Mayflower Club (named for the flower, not the ship), which was founded in 1893, and the Chilton Club, founded in 1910. Dining at the club was, for many, much more socially acceptable than eating at a public restaurant, and for a long time, much club food was actually superior to the fare at most Boston restaurants. The Somerset Club, in particular, was known for its variety of choices. The chef had fifty-nine ways of preparing tournedos, sixty-seven chicken dishes, and eleven ways of cooking calf’s brains. However, the clear winner was the egg category—they offered one hundred different egg dishes. Club menus in the Victorian period often offered a dozen different courses.

The true eccentricity of the Boston character is revealed through club life. The Tavern Club bear, who was housed for a few weeks at the club before being sold back to a vaudeville show, was walked by a waiter who was forced to dress in a highly picturesque “Spanish costume for the special purpose of leading the bear on a chain into the Common and exercising him there.” Another club, the Wharf Rats, uses the reproductive member of a whale as a gavel. When the original gavel was consumed in a fire and no longer usable, a visiting admiral learned of their loss and procured a substitute through naval connections in Japan. Clubs were famous for their entertainments, and one of the strangest was a late-nineteenth-century event entitled “Darkest Africa.” Since Mr. Stanley (as in “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”) had declined the club’s invitation to speak, a member assumed the role of the explorer. A contemporary review commented, “Curtis Guild, Jr., the lecturer, came forth as a black Stanley in white duck and then 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.” Finally, the Somerset Club refused to accept the bequest of Admiral Byrd’s stuffed penguin, “mainly on the grounds that it looked too much like some of the members.”

Understanding the essence of club life in Boston is understanding the difference between life within the walls of the club and everything else. To a true Bostonian, hell can freeze over, Rome can burn, and technology can run amok all it likes, but here in Boston, nothing changes. A Cambridge don who had invented an ingenious mathematical theorem once said, “The best thing about [the theorem] is that no one can make any use of 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.”

This notion of uselessness, of inquiry with no higher purpose, of pursuit for the sake of pursuit, is a Victorian ideal, one that was soon to be crushed under the boot heel of science, practicality, and the pursuit of the common good—all ideals carried under the banner of Fannie Farmer and many other such modernists.

MARCH 2009. IT WAS TIME TO FIND OUT IF FANNIE KNEW HER
way around French cooking, so we chose lobster à l’Américaine, a dish that requires subtlety, stock-making skills, and a delicate balance in flavors. How did Fannie do? Fannie’s recipe was certainly competent, if a bit ham-handed, with a heavy, floury sauce. We had to look to Escoffier, Julia Child, Jasper White, and, finally, Gordon Ramsay to come up with a recipe that was sophisticated, rich, and capable of being served to a dozen guests in a demanding time frame. Fannie might have been a marketing genius, but her command of French cuisine was lacking.

This was also a dish for which my status as sous-chef and kitchen assistant was made painfully apparent. Erin, my test kitchen director and a longtime friend, was heading up the recipe development. Erin appears solid and practical, which is ideal for long, hot days spent in a Victorian kitchen, yet she is also blessed with the face of a classic beauty, the fiercely handsome qualities of a Hepburn married to the energetic bright-eyed humor of a Mickey Rooney, all framed by acres of long, curly black hair. She cons you with a sweet, gentle smile, but woe to the cook who disappoints, who falls short of the finish line. In her kitchen, excellence and energy are not suggestions; they are requirements. So, over a two-year period, we spent days and weeks at the stove getting to know each other’s culinary skills and personality quirks. The routine never changed. The day started with cranking up the massive cast-iron cookstove before dawn, a waffle breakfast, a review of the schedule (much like a football coach prepping his team for the big game), and then a headlong rush into a full day of boiling calf’s heads, poaching brains, roasting venison, or baking cakes. Visitors or my kids would look in occasionally, hoping for a slice of cake or spoonful of jelly, but they were most often offered a bite of fried brain ball, a chewy slice of rare goose breast, a small bowl of ripe-tasting turtle soup, or a slurp of calf’s-head stock. To make up for the lack of desirable tidbits, we soon decided to mix up a fresh batch of rum punch around midafternoon; this ameliorated the heat of the stove and made us more popular with adult kitchen visitors.

But it was clear from these cooking sessions that Erin was the boss. She had made her bones as a real sous-chef at Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston. Yes, I actually cooked all the recipes over the two years that we worked on this project, but she took the lead, and I was often left to mince the carrots, make the stock, or lard the venison. My inferior culinary skills became painfully apparent when the time came to dispatch live lobsters. She instructed me that the best way to kill a lobster was to hold it from the top at a 45-degree angle, the head touching the cutting surface. Then, using a large, very sharp knife, whack down hard and cut off its face.

Cut off its face? I immediately suspected a prank and suggested that she show me. She did, and it seemed to work, so I grabbed a lobster and brought the ten-inch chef’s knife hurtling down. Unfortunately for this, the world’s unluckiest lobster, my knife only got halfway through the face, which caused the poor beast to writhe in agony, the tail closing and opening convulsively, the claws reaching out instinctively for something to attack. This caused me to lose my grip, drop the lobster, and start all over again.

Sweating, nervous, and a bit in shock, I finally did the dirty deed and left the lobster on the cutting board in its own death juices, the legs rowing back and forth, the tail still flapping in postmortem spasms. For the next one, I reverted to my tried and true method, severing the spinal cord behind the head with a sharp thrust of the knife. (I still think that I was had. Erin experienced her own moment of lobster fear late one night while testing the recipe alone. The tails had been reserved and refrigerated while she was making the stock. She removed the tails, salted them, and then, incredibly, the meat started to pulsate, almost dancing in the shell. There is something very odd about lobster.)

ALTHOUGH FANNIE WAS TRYING TO CREATE A VERY SPECIAL RECIPE
, the underlying ingredient, lobster, was relatively inexpensive at the time—the 1800s witnessed huge catches, including 350,000 pounds sold in just one day—and was not yet considered a gourmet food. In May 1895, lobsters from Nova Scotia were plentiful, and they sold for just $5 per crate of 140 pounds. When they became scarce later in the year, they sold for $18 per crate. These, of course, were wholesale prices, the actual retail price varying from a bit less than 15 cents per pound up to 25 cents or so. This compares as follows to other seafood: halibut, 15 cents; scallops, 35 cents per quart; fresh Oregon salmon, 35 to 50 cents. All in all, lobster was on the low end of the price scale. This did not mean, however, that the industry was unregulated. There were fines of $5 per lobster under 10½ inches in length and $25 for every “seed” lobster found onboard. It was also common for rogue fishermen to break off lobster tails and sell them illegally to seaside resorts.

Lobster preparation was not much of an art, at least before Fannie’s time; by 1890, canned lobster was also an option. A quick glance at Mrs. Lincoln’s cookbook tells the story. The basic cooking method was twenty minutes in boiling water, with a few variations using the cooked meat: Plain lobster is removed from the shell, arranged on a plate, and served with salt, pepper, vinegar, and oil, or melted butter. Stewed lobster is placed into a stewpan with a little milk or cream. Creamed lobster is made with one pint of lobster meat to one pint of béchamel. Curried lobster is simply lobster meat heated in a curry-flavored béchamel. Scalloped lobster is creamed lobster placed back into the shells, covered with cracker crumbs, and then baked until the crumbs are brown (Lincoln suggests placing two tails together, ends out, to imitate a canoe, and then laying the small claws over the side to represent oars). And deviled lobster is prepared with the addition of salt, pepper, and cayenne plus chopped parsley, onion juice, mustard, and Worcestershire sauce. One could also find lobster soup, chowder, cutlets, croquettes, and salad as well.

By 1896, Fannie included all of Mrs. Lincoln’s preparations but offered a few more adventurous recipes, including lobster à l’Américaine, which was cooked in a large omelet pan. She sprinkled the split lobster with a bit of onion and cayenne and cooked it for five minutes. Then she added a half cup of tomato sauce and cooked it for three minutes; then she added two tablespoons of sherry, covered the pan, and placed it in an oven for seven minutes. Then she made a sauce of the liver using wine, tomato sauce, and melted butter. The lobster was served with the plain sauce. For our Victorian dinner, this seemed like a good place to start.

So how was Fannie’s lobster à l’Américaine? The cooked tomato sauce was heavily thickened with a roux, but loosened up a bit with the addition of the sherry. The lobster was cooked perfectly, and the flavors were rich (browning the butter and then the roux added a nuttiness to the sauce). The sauce was full-bodied but borderline grainy, and too thick and muddy for modern tastes. So, nice idea, but the recipe needed a lighter, more sophisticated approach.

The obvious next step was Escoffier, since his
Guide Culinaire
was published about the same time, in 1902. Here we find quite a different recipe, lighter and more in keeping with the main ingredient. He sprinkled the lobster tails with shallot, garlic, white wine, fish fumet, a small glassful of burnt brandy, one tablespoon of melted meat glaze, three small fresh pressed tomatoes, a pinch of chopped parsley, and a very “little bit” of cayenne, covered it, and cooked it in the oven for eighteen to twenty minutes. The lobster was removed, the sauce reduced, and then reserved bits were chopped and added along with butter. The sauce was strained, reheated, a bit more butter added, and then served over the lobster.

This seemed a tad more promising, so we looked to Julia Child to give us a more modern version of this recipe, as well as to the 1995 edition of
The Joy of Cooking,
which had a more streamlined version. These versions were much better, although the sauce was still a bit grainy and the lobster overcooked. We then turned to a colleague, Jasper White, who is a well-known Boston chef and author of
Lobster at Home
(1998), since he based his recipe on a homemade lobster stock made from roasted shells. The dish was vastly improved, but we still had a big problem—and this goes back to a basic rule of lobster cookery, well known a century ago. Once a lobster is killed, the meat deteriorates rapidly. Since we were using the shells to make stock and then reserving the raw meat for up to two hours, the results were disappointing.