Fannie's Last Supper (14 page)

In a July 29, 2009, article in the
New York Times
Michael Pollan says that only twenty-seven minutes a day are spent cooking at home, plus another four minutes for cleanup. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics’
American Time Use Survey 2008
reports that the average amount of time spent cooking during weekdays is about thirty minutes. But wait a minute! The bureau also found that roughly half the American population over age 15 does no cooking whatsoever—meaning that the average time spent cooking, for those who
do
cook, is roughly sixty minutes. Since 2003, this amount has only changed by three minutes. So we have gone from cooking six hours a day in 1900 to just one hour today, but much of that decrease is simply because it takes a whole lot less time to prepare food and clean up afterward than it used to and because, for all intents and purposes, we have gone from three meals a day prepared at home to one.

So let’s put aside the “time spent cooking at home” discussion, since it is almost impossible to judge cooking time from one century to the next. Sure, we are cooking less, but much of this may be due to increased efficiency and the focus on just one meal per day. And how many of us would like to spend one-third of our waking hours just getting food on the table? That’s what cows and horses do—they have to spend most of their time grazing just to get enough to eat. Maybe that’s why they don’t read books, go to movies, or spend time on Facebook.

Of course, anyone can play the “cooking is dead” game. Here are some carefully selected statistics that make the case. From 2000 to 2005, there were huge increases in prepared foods sold at supermarkets, including salads (52 percent), frozen prepared meals (32 percent), and desserts (25 percent). In this period, flour sales were way down (46 percent), as were sugar and chicken (16 percent). Pretty clear that the sky is falling, right? Well, now let me argue the opposite side: that cooking is holding its own very nicely. Spending on baking ingredients has actually
increased
18 percent from 2000 to 2005—butter alone went up 1 percent. Frozen prepared foods actually declined by 15 percent during this period—a hopeful sign. Sales of lettuce, tomatoes, and potatoes all fell by less than 10 percent. And if I were asked about the huge decrease in flour sales, I would simply point out that the French buy their bread and pastries at retail, so why shouldn’t we?

Sales of cookware have also been on the upswing. In 2004, American cookware manufacturers shipped $992 million worth of product; in 2008, the total was $1,269 million. This is after a steady decrease during the prior five-year period. The International Housewares Association’s Consumer Advisory Board conducted focus groups in 2006 indicating that consumers eat dinner at home five or more times per week, and half the participants said that they were eating at home more often than they did a year ago. Internationally, cookware sales rose 9 percent in 2008. One industry analyst commented, “The growing interest in cooking and cooking programmes has had its influence specifically by changing people’s behavior, as ‘dining-in’ becomes the new ‘eating-out.’ ” This was even true in Poland, where cooking shows are extremely popular. This trend will probably be extended by the prospect of a long-term weak world economy.

So in the spirit of a renewed interest in home cooking, we moved on to the vegetable course. Fannie had a few suggestions: asparagus tips with hollandaise sauce, celery salad, dressed lettuce with cheese straws, string bean and radish salad, or a simple preparation of mushrooms, cauliflower, or artichokes. (This vegetable course may, in fact, be the precursor to the inevitable salad course that is, these days, currently sandwiched between the main course and dessert.) The notion of artichokes was appealing, since they were the most unusual choice. Frying battered artichokes was the most compelling recipe offered by Fannie, the others being stuffed artichokes (stuffed with a chicken forcemeat and topped with a “thin white sauce”) and boiled artichoke bottoms, also served with either a hollandaise or béchamel. It seems that every time Fannie was confronted with a plain, simple ingredient, she threw a white sauce or hollandaise on it. Hardly
cuisine minceur
!

We had also put together the kitchen team for the dinner. Erin, my test kitchen director, was to be
chef de cuisine
. Four of our editor-cooks from
America’s Test Kitchen
would be joining Erin, including Keith Dresser, Andrea Geary, Dan Souza, and Yvonne Ruperti (Andrew Janjigian would bake the brown bread off-site); Marie Eleana and her son Ryan would handle cleanup. The waitstaff was chosen by Mike Ehlenfeldt, who had worked at Hamersley’s Bistro with Erin. His wife, Cindy, would work the room, along with Jake McDowell, Debbie McDowell, Emile Arktinsal, and Melissa Klein. A rehearsal was planned for Saturday, October 24, so that we could cook through the whole meal to sort out timing and orchestrate the actual serving of the courses.

IN 1896, THE GLOBE ARTICHOKE WAS BOTH RARE AND EXPENSIVE
in Boston. At a February 1896 meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Anna Barrows, managing editor of
American Kitchen Magazine,
commented, “Many of the wealthy find in the expensive varieties of fruit and vegetables, like the mushroom, the globe artichoke, and the products of the hothouse, an opportunity to spend money lavishly and to gratify their aesthetic tastes.” In other words, it was mostly a European commodity, a taste that sophisticated diners may have enjoyed over in France, England, or Italy, and then brought back to the United States.

As well as being awkward to eat, artichokes were also very expensive.
The National Cook Book
(1896), coauthored by the famous cookbook writer Marion Harland, noted that large, fine specimens of artichoke might fetch 50 cents in the New York markets. This was at a time when fresh salmon was running around 25 cents per pound. This was because most artichokes in the East were imported from France. However, this was not for lack of trying on the part of American farmers. They were grown in California and Louisiana as early as the eighteenth century, but initially were not a successful crop. According to
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America,
“In the 1890s, Italian farmers in northern California’s Half Moon Bay planted the crop, and beginning in 1904 boxcar loads of artichokes were sent east from California to supply the needs of artichoke lovers on the East Coast—at that point, mainly Italian immigrants.” By 1896, specimens from California could be had in the East late in the season.

The Green Laon artichoke was the most favored variety of imported artichoke, and was grown in the United States as well. The artichoke was named after the town of Laon, about ninety miles northeast of Paris, at the heart of which was a citadel and fortress. Its residents were noted gardeners, also producing asparagus from the sixteenth century on. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, growers from southern Europe took over a good deal of the artichoke production.

By 1899, the artichoke was receiving renewed culinary attention and respect. Fannie’s recipe started with boiled artichokes, which were then cut in quarters, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and parsley; dipped into a batter of bread flour, milk, and eggs; then deep-fried in fat and drained. But because of the heavy batter, the artichokes were heavy and pedestrian. We fiddled with the batter, making it leaner, but the finished coating was still thick and the artichokes tasted flat. The best solution was to soak the cooked artichoke halves in buttermilk and then make a light coating of flour, baking powder, and salt. Getting as much of the flour mixture in between the leaves also helped to provide a more interesting, crispier result. The last refinement was to score the leaves so that they would open up like petals of a flower.

FRIED BABY ARTICHOKES

The secret to this recipe is forcing the artichokes open so that they produce a fan of crisply breaded leaves. When done just right, you get a nice pairing of great crunch followed by the moister stem of the choke.

6 lemons, halved, plus 2 whole lemons for wedges

18 baby artichokes

4 teaspoons salt, plus more for seasoning fried artichokes

3 quarts peanut oil

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt, plus more for seasoning

2 cups buttermilk

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

1. Squeeze juice from 3 halved lemons into large bowl of water and add halves to water as well (reserve the remaining 3 halved lemons for step 2). Cut off the top quarter and snap off the fibrous outer leaves of the artichokes until you reach the yellow leaves. With a paring knife, trim dark green exterior from base of artichokes as well as the exterior of stems. Trim a thin slice from the end of stems, and peel stems. Drop trimmed artichokes into bowl of acidulated water until ready to cook.

2. Drain artichokes and transfer to large Dutch oven of boiling seasoned water (4 quarts water, juice of 3 halved lemons, 4 teaspoons salt). Cook until tender, 7 to 12 minutes. Remove and place cut-side down on paper towel–lined plate to drain. Once cool, cut each artichoke in half lengthwise.

3. In large, heavy-bottomed Dutch oven fitted with clip-on-the-pot candy thermometer, heat oil over high heat to 375 degrees. While oil heats, whisk flour, baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt together in large bowl. Whisk buttermilk and parsley together in second large bowl. Working in batches, submerge artichoke halves in buttermilk mixture, making sure that buttermilk gets in between leaves. Working one at a time, transfer soaked artichoke halves to flour mixture and gently coat and open leaves to ensure that flour mixture coats all leaves; transfer to tray. Repeat with remaining artichokes. Note: artichokes can be breaded up to 1 hour before frying.

4. Working one at a time, hold each artichoke by the stem with tongs upside down, slowly submerge leaves into hot oil, and hold for about 5 seconds so that the leaves are forced open. Release into oil to continue frying, stirring occasionally until golden brown, about 1 to 3 minutes. Working quickly, repeat process with remaining artichokes, frying in batches of 8 to 12. As they are ready, using slotted spoon, remove from oil and transfer to paper towel–lined plate, then transfer to wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet in warm oven to hold while frying remaining artichokes. When ready to serve, sprinkle evenly with kosher salt. Serve with lemon wedge.

Serves 12 (3 halves each).

Chapter 10
Canton Punch

Everyday American Food, 1896: Try the Roast and Beans but Skip the Fish

I
f you lived in Boston during the 1890s, what would you be cooking at home and how would you cook it? For starters, home cooking in 1896 was vastly different from what the typical household was preparing a century before.

Let’s take Thanksgiving. In the eighteenth century, the Thanksgiving feast would have been made entirely from local ingredients, and would have appeared provincial to an 1896 Bostonian. The baking would have been done in a brick oven by the fireplace. Wild partridge might have been substituted for the turkey. Pie crusts were made from a fine rye and “adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across the great cranberry tarts.” Egg flip, considered old-fashioned and almost never served by the late Victorian era, was a popular holiday drink around 1800. (Egg yolks were beaten with sugar, hot milk, and brandy, then beaten egg whites were folded in and grated nutmeg sprinkled on top.)

Thanksgiving itself was considered a semireligious day in the early 1800s, with a special service at the meeting house, which, by the way, was not heated. (“A good mug of hot cider before leaving home in the morning had fortified us against the bitter cold of the first service.”) Women brought their foot warmers (cast-iron footrests that contained hot coals and had a handle for carrying), people stood in the “sheep pens” (squared-off sections for the congregation), and the congregants stood for the first hour and then sat for the second hour, which was devoted to the sermon. This was also a day to help out the minister with gifts. He would have been paid roughly $300 per year and given twenty cords of wood. But on Thanksgiving, he would receive all sorts of beef and pork, butter, a bushel or two of beets, candles, geese, and brandy.

By contrast, Fannie’s “Menu for Thanksgiving Dinner” seems rather modern. It began with oyster soup with crisp crackers, celery and salted almonds, and then roast turkey with cranberry jelly, mashed potatoes, onions in cream and squash, then a course of chicken pie, followed by fruit pudding with sterling sauce. Three dessert pies were next—mince, apple, and squash—and then Neapolitan ice cream and fancy cakes (small, individual cakes or cookies), fruit, nuts, and raisins, bonbons, and a final course of café noir with cheese and crackers. Variations on this theme would have included creamed oysters instead of the soup, green peppers stuffed with shrimp, and cooked artichoke hearts served with a white sauce. Some sort of sponge cake might have been added for dessert, since it was popular and could be easily dressed up with colored whipped cream.

Victorian cooks pot-roasted, fricasséed, roasted, fried, panfried, braised, stewed, and boiled. Roasting first meant cooking over an open fire and then, when wood and coal cookstoves came into use, cooking over “fierce heat.” Braising was originally done in a braising pan with a cover that would accommodate coals, so there was no need for an oven. This method was good for “large pieces of tough, lean meat.” A stew might also be referred to as a haricot, a ragout, or a salmi. Salmon or other oily fish was started in cold water and brought almost to the boiling point quickly for best texture and flavor.

Broiling was translated as “to burn.” A one-inch steak would have been broiled for about four minutes, and an inch-and-a-half steak for six minutes or so. They also turned it every ten seconds because they were concerned about overcooking. How did they know when a steak was done? The meat should “spring up instantly when pressed with a knife”—otherwise, it was overcooked. (Late Victorian cooks did understand the benefits of rare to medium-rare meat, so the penchant for overcooked steak that is common among many Americans today did not come from this earlier era.) Chickens were also broiled, and, as stated earlier, often a buttered glazed paper was used to protect them. White letter paper was buttered, folded over, and then pinched together to seal. This was, in effect, a clever
en papillote
technique that they felt would help the chicken to baste in its own juices. The chicken was done when it was well browned.

A fricassée was a common approach to many dishes, defined as “frying” although it was also a form of stewing. Chicken, veal, or some small game was cut into pieces and fried either before or after stewing, and then served with a rich white or brown sauce, without vegetables. They often dipped tougher pieces of meat in vinegar to “soften the fiber.” Panfrying was done with a pan that was heated up “to blue heat” and then rubbed with a bit of beef fat. The meat was seared on both sides and cooked for about four minutes. They also used just about every part of an animal, including the heart. Here is a less than promising recipe from 1896 entitled Stuffed Beef Heart: “Thoroughly cleanse in salt water, fill all cavities with veal stuffing, two ounces beef suet, chopped fine, four ounces bread crumbs, one tablespoon chopped parsley, half teaspoon each of thyme and marjoram, juice of half a lemon, half teaspoon salt, a pinch of pepper and dust of nutmeg. Skewer a few slices of fat pork over the heart, flour, bake one and one-half hours, make gravy, serve hot.”

In terms of cooking times, beef was cooked eight to ten minutes per pound for rare (the desired end state). A thick five-pound halibut would take an hour to cook, whereas a small fish would take twenty to thirty minutes (they either loved overcooked fish or were using extremely low temperatures). Asparagus and hard-boiled eggs were cooked fifteen to twenty minutes (so much for
al dente
vegetables), and they often boiled certain fish such as cubed salmon, cod, haddock, and bass.

When roasting, the Victorians always salted and floured the outside of their meat, which they felt helped retain the juices. (The theory was that salt would draw out juices, which would mix with the flour to help form a coating. Both Lincoln and Farmer went in for this approach.) We tested this method when roasting a chicken and found, oddly enough, that there was some merit to the method, although not for retaining juiciness. Fannie’s recipe suggested rubbing a chicken with salt, then spreading the breast and legs with three tablespoons of softened butter that had been mixed with two tablespoons of flour. The chicken was roasted in a hot oven and, once the flour in the bottom of the roasting pan had browned (some was thrown in as an aid in measuring oven temperature), the bird was basted every ten minutes until cooked.

Following in Fannie’s footsteps, we salted and then floured (no butter paste) a chicken only on one side, and left it sitting on a cooling rack over a baking sheet in the refrigerator overnight. We then roasted it at 425 degrees for twenty minutes, then reduced the temperature to 350 degrees, and roasted it another twenty minutes, basting it just once. Then we roasted the bird a final thirty minutes until just cooked through. The result? The half that had no flour had a tough skin, but the side with the flour was perfectly crisp and delicious. The meat on both sides—that is, with or without the flour coating—was juicy and tender. Turns out that this method does provide crisper skin on a roasted chicken. So the Victorians did have a few tricks up their sleeve.

FANNIE FARMER’S ROAST CHICKEN WITH CRISPY FLOUR COATING

The secret is to use flour, not a butter-flour paste, and to baste the bird only once. Air-drying the bird overnight is a time-tested method for producing a thin, crispy skin during roasting. This air-drying method also works for your Thanksgiving turkey.

1 whole chicken, 3½ to 4½ pounds, giblets removed and discarded

1 tablespoon kosher salt

½ teaspoon ground black pepper

¼ cup flour

2 tablespoons butter

1/3 cup water

1. Pat chicken dry with paper towels and sprinkle all over with salt and pepper; rub with hands to coat entire surface evenly. Coat chicken evenly with flour and pat to knock off excess. Set chicken, breast side up, in a V rack set on a rimmed baking sheet and refrigerate, uncovered, for 12 to 24 hours.

2. In small saucepan (or in microwave), heat butter and water until butter melts. Adjust oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 425 degrees. Flip chicken so breast side faces down. Roast chicken for 20 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees; continue roasting for 20 minutes. Baste with butter mixture, flip chicken breast side up, and baste again. Continue roasting until skin is golden brown and crisp and thermometer registers 160 degrees when inserted in thickest part of breast, and 175 degrees in the thickest part of thigh, about 40 to 50 minutes.

3. Transfer chicken to cutting board and let rest, uncovered, for 20 minutes. Carve and serve immediately.

TO CLARIFY FAT FOR FRYING AND BAKING, UNCOOKED FAT FROM
chickens, lard, and beef suet were cut into small pieces, covered with cold water, and cooked over a slow fire until the fat had melted and the water nearly all evaporated. Then this mixture was strained and pressed. The fat was placed in a pan over the fire; when it melted, a small raw potato, cut into thin slices was added. This stood on the stove until the fat stopped bubbling and the scraps were brown and crisp and had risen to the top. The fat was then strained and kept in a cool place where it lasted for weeks. This clarified fat could also be used for bread, plain pastry, and gingerbread.

Larding, daubing, and barding were common techniques, rarely used today. Larding started with strips of salt pork, two inches wide and four inches long, cut into lardoons, a quarter of an inch both wide and long. Then, the cook was instructed to “with the point of the needle take up a stitch half an inch deep and one inch wide in the surface of the meat.” The ends of the salt pork would then stick out of the surface of the meat, making it look a bit like a porcupine. Daubing was used with a broad, thick piece of beef or veal—the notion was to insert fat all the way through a piece of meat, not just on the surface, as was done with larding. Salt pork was cut into strips a third of an inch both wide and thick. A hole was punched clear through the meat with a steel larding needle and then the strips of pork were inserted with a large larding needle or with the fingers. Another technique was to simply cover a roast with wide strips of salt pork before cooking. (This latter technique, referred to as barding, was offered up in
James Beard’s American Cookery
and tried in our test kitchen with a roast turkey. With a few modifications, it works admirably.)

So what would a Victorian Boston family have to eat during a typical day in 1896? This is easily determined by looking at the menus printed in the back of Fannie’s cookbook. But I also spent time reading two columns from the
Boston Globe:
“Our Cooking School” and the “Housekeeper’s Column.” First, a word about the column. By this time, recipes were no longer rough notes, but very precise, with specific ingredient amounts. The preamble to each day’s column was as follows: “It is also suggested that directions for mixing ingredients should be very explicit, and quantities should be definitely indicated. Only favorite, true and tried recipes should be sent in. Mere skeletonized recipes, such as some cook books give, are not desired.” I also noted that not all of the correspondents to the “Housekeeper’s Column” were female. One such writer referred to himself as “Male Cook” and offered a recipe for broiled veal.

Let’s start with breakfast. One almost always had meat at breakfast: lamb chops, chopped beefsteak (cooked rare), broiled steak, ham, bacon, cold meat, or broiled rump steak were popular. A hearty breakfast was not out of place for a population that was doing a lot of hard manual labor: 38 percent of workers labored on farms; 31 percent were in mining, manufacturing, or construction; and the remainder, 31 percent, were in service businesses. (Today, 78 percent of American labor is in the service sector.) Eggs were served occasionally, but were not a central part of the breakfast table. Fruit was usually included, whether it be prunes, oranges, canned pears, stewed apricots, or stewed apples. For bread, rolls, muffins, or toast was served.

Buckwheat or potato cakes were not uncommon, and maple syrup was often served, even when one did not have griddle cakes on the menu. Pancakes had various names, including fritters, flapjacks, slapjacks, butter cakes, griddle cakes, and slappers. Pancakes were originally a muffin batter mixture, stiffer than a drop batter but not stiff enough to roll out. The batter was dropped from a spoon into hot fat and fried like doughnuts. More recently, Mrs. Lincoln noted in her 1883 cookbook, the name had been applied to a thin batter usually made without soda, cooked one cake at a time on a small well-buttered frying pan and turned like a griddle cake. She described griddle cakes as “any kind of small, thin batter-cakes cooked on a griddle.” Pancakes were “larger, thin batter-cakes made without soda and cooked in a small frying-pan.” Griddle cakes could be made out of many things, including stale bread crumbs, boiled rice, fine hominy, cornmeal mixed with buckwheat flour, dried peas that were boiled, sifted squash, and flour. Potatoes, cornmeal mush, or hominy were on almost every breakfast menu, whether browned, mashed, baked, or lyonnaise. Oatmeal was not as common as one might expect, and coffee, not tea, was the hot beverage of choice.

Dinner, the large meal served in the middle of the day, was not that different from what one might expect in modern times except for the Victorians’ use of pickled foods, love of jelly, and devotion to cheese. Occasionally, dinner would start with a soup such as tomato, turkey, or consommé, but more often than not, there was no first course. The main offering might be veal stew, chicken pie, fricasséed oysters, a leg of pork (fresh pork, I assume, not a ham), roast beef, steamed chicken, stewed beef, roast leg of lamb, or roast turkey. For starch, they served sweet potatoes, rice, potatoes (steamed, mashed, or boiled), and some pasta or “macaroni” as a side dish. The vegetables were most often tomatoes (baked, stewed), turnips, cabbage, canned string beans, or canned corn.

Pickling was popular since it was a preservative, and they served spiced grape pickles, pear sweet pickles, and just regular “pickles.” For jams, marmalades, and jellies, served at most dinners, they used apples, lemons, raspberries, quince, and grapes (for marmalade), cranberries (more for sauce), currants, and peaches. Breads included white bread (often store-bought), cornbread, or just “bread and butter.” For dessert they were fond of ginger cakes, apple and squash pies, floating islands, puddings, turnovers, chocolate cake, canned fruits, sherbet, and gingerbread, although a meal could have been finished with just fresh fruit. Dinner usually ended with cheese and crackers, but not always.