Fannie's Last Supper (16 page)

Sweetbreads, since they lend themselves to myriad preparations, also made a good comparison. The later edition included exactly the same introduction plus all the recipes from the 1896 edition. However, by 1913, Fannie had added three recipes that say a lot about how American cookery, and her style of teaching, had changed since the 1890s. The Sweetbreads, Country Style are simple enough, baked with a slice of salt pork. However, both the Sweetbreads à la Napoli and the Braised Sweetbreads Eugenie are a bold attempt to tart up the cooking, make it more continental, and appeal to a class of women who were trying hard to impress their guests. The Napoli recipe involves rounds of bread, a layer of Parmesan cheese, a slice of sweetbread, and then a large cap of mushroom all baked in domed glass–covered dishes. The Eugenie version is similar, but substitutes sherry for cheese and adds multiple mushroom caps, also baked in a covered glass dish. It is the domed glass dish that Fannie is after—the presentation itself—rather than the underlying culinary approach. (I also noted that the original 1896 edition had only two chocolate cakes, yet by 1913, chocolate had come on strong, Fannie offering a total of seven cakes in this category, plus a series of frostings.)

The ads in the back of the 1913 edition tell us how quickly home cooking was changing. One could still purchase coal-fired Hub ranges, but Chambers “fireless” cooking gas ranges were now being advertised and, believe it or not, electric ranges were also available. One would also recognize many of the brands advertising in 1913, including Ivory soap, Crisco, Welch’s grape drink, Karo corn syrup, Bell’s seasoning, Wheatena, White Mountain freezer, King Arthur flour, Fleischmann yeast, Chase & Sanborn coffee, Royal baking powder, and Baker’s chocolate.

Two things that had not changed at all were the first line of the first chapter—“Food is anything which nourishes the body”—and the dedication to Mrs. William B. Sewall, in which Fannie thanks her for her work in promoting scientific cookery, “which means the elevation of the human race.” On one hand, Fannie was working hard to make her food appeal to the nouveaux riche. On the other, she still defined cooking as a means of elevating the human race through better nutrition. Perhaps investing cooking instruction with a higher, nobler purpose while, in effect, playing with her food was the perfect formula for success. After all, Fannie always described herself as a businesswoman, and anyone good at business knows the fine art of selling totally contradictory messages: it’s fun, but it’s also good for you.

One of the more modern culinary notions of Fannie’s time was the palate-cleansing sorbet course, which, today, appears old-fashioned and often tastes more like dessert than a change of pace served between savory courses. Many cooks served this course almost—not completely—frozen in glasses and then sipped as a liquid. We tested this notion and found that, unfortunately, this almost frozen drink had a very short window of perfection—it would quickly melt and become rather unpleasant. So we decided to stick with a frozen sorbet and noted that Fannie did the same with her Victoria, Cardinal, Roman, and even—gulp—hollandaise punches. (The latter, thankfully, is based on grated pineapple, brandy, and gin
.)

The earliest version of a frozen punch that we could find was a recipe entitled Punch Water Ice that was published in
The Complete Confectioner
in 1807 in London. The Victoria punch recipe in the 1896 edition of
The Boston Cooking
-
School Cook Book
is nothing like the drink; it is a frozen alcoholic ice. Fannie calls for water, sugar, lemon and orange juices, orange rind, angelica wine (a sweet fortified white wine), cider, and gin. The mixture is then frozen. We made a batch and found that it was too sweet and on the syrupy side (the angelica wine made it boozy); it had too little lemon flavor and the gin was pretty much lost.

Boston being the epicenter of trade with the Far East, new ingredients were constantly showing up on store shelves, and one of these was Canton ginger, an item that Fannie used in her recipe for Canton punch. Boston’s fortunes were built on shipping. It all started with salt cod, which was shipped to the West Indies and sold for a cargo of sugar, molasses, and tobacco, which were loaded and then transported to England. Finished goods were then taken onboard for the trip back to Boston. Later, Boston distilled rum that was shipped to Africa, where it was traded for ivory, gold dust, mahogany, and slaves. The ships then sailed for the West Indies, where molasses was taken on and the slaves were off-loaded, and then made the return trip to Boston, where the molasses was used to make rum, the cycle starting afresh.

In 1748, a total of 540 ships left and 430 entered the port of Boston. A century later, in one single day, a whopping 70 ships sailed out of Boston. No other American city had command of the international trade in the 1840s—not New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. This was due in part to Boston’s natural deep-water harbor, which, by 1700, had forty wharves (Long Wharf was built in 1710 and extended two thousand feet from the foot of King Street out into the deeper waters of the harbor). But also Boston’s fleet of tall ships opened up trade with the Far East, where tea, opium, spices, and silk became dominant players in foreign commerce in the colonies. Huge fortunes were made, mansions built, and families catapulted into the highest ranks of Boston’s social circles.

Looking at maps from the early nineteenth century, one can see why. The city was not much more than a port with a maximum amount of waterfront and a minimum amount of city. Lewis Wharf was perhaps the greatest wharf in mid-nineteenth-century Boston, the peak years being 1840 to 1860, with ships arriving from Liverpool as well as great clipper ships from San Francisco. However, by the 1860s, Atlantic Avenue was built; this signaled the beginning of the end, reducing the footprint of Boston’s wharves and marking the decline of the great sailing ships. (So much of Boston was on the waterfront and so little of it is now that a modern resident of Boston would be shocked to learn that British ships anchored in Copley Square during the siege in the Revolution. Copley is located in the middle of town, sandwiched between Back Bay and the South End, in the heart of Boston’s upscale shopping district. This would be like ships docking at Times Square in New York.)

Going back to the recipe for Canton punch, we researched Canton ginger to get a better understanding of what this recipe might have been like in 1896. Just using fresh ginger did not seem the right way to go because it would be much too strong. It turns out that there are two different meanings to “Canton” ginger: it referred to “true ginger,” or
Zingiber officinale,
but it also described preserved ginger that was packed in a sugar syrup in Canton and then shipped in stone jars, a common gourmet item in the United States by 1900.

The process for making preserved ginger was very similar to the process of making candied or “dry” ginger. Both were boiled in water after washing, and then the preserved ginger was boiled again in equal parts water and sugar. The candied or crystallized ginger would also get a second boiling, but with very little water added, contributing to its dry texture.

After much testing, we decided to use galangal, a very mild form of Asian ginger that gave the sorbet a subtle flavor. This was probably not what Fannie had in mind, although she probably did not mean fresh ginger of any kind. The good news is that Fannie’s Canton Sorbet recipe was virtually perfect, a frozen palate cleanser that was light, refreshing, and perfect between courses.

CANTON SHERBET

Although this recipe is listed as a sherbet, it is really nothing more than an ice, since sherbets usually have either milk or egg whites added. Do not use traditional ginger for this recipe—you need to purchase galangal or a similar ginger that is much milder. This is the ginger served with sushi: it tastes like ginger, but has much less bite. This recipe will serve 12 as a palate cleanser between courses.

4 cups water

1 cup sugar

5 ounces peeled and trimmed galangal, cut into ¼-inch pieces

½ cup freshly squeezed orange juice

1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

Heat water, sugar, and galangal in medium saucepan over high heat until it reaches a boil. Cook for 13 to 15 minutes until reduced to 3 cups (including galangal). Cool to room temperature. Add fruit juice, strain mixture through fine mesh strainer, refrigerate until it reaches 40 degrees. Start ice-cream machine and add juice mixture to canister. Churn until sherbet has texture of soft-serve ice cream, 25 to 30 minutes.

Serves 12 as a small palate cleanser.

Chapter 11
Roast Stuffed Goose

The Transformation of the Victorian Kitchen: The Lady of the House Rolls Up Her Sleeves

T
he original kitchen of our house on Worcester Square was located at the rear of the first floor, but since that floor had been converted into a rental unit, we did not have access to it. Our own kitchen, of more recent vintage, with cheap chipboard cabinets and Formica countertops, had been shoehorned into what used to be the music room off the parlor-floor dining room. Since we needed the income from the rental unit, we had to make do, but we were planning for the day that we could return the kitchen to its original location, once again using the 1859 hearth, which was, remarkably, still intact.

Ours was a modest affair compared to a true Victorian kitchen in a wealthy household in England. In the English countryside, kitchens were positioned so they faced either north or east to keep them cool. In an architectural approach, which also found favor here in the States, the Victorians did not like built-in cabinetry, since it encouraged mice and vermin. The center of the kitchen contained one very long worktable. There was often tile on the walls, or, in less wealthy households, the plaster walls were simply whitewashed. And if there was room, there was also a separate scullery for cleaning as well as a larder for food storage. Oilcloth was used as an early floor covering if one could not afford tile. (Take cloth, cover it with a thin coat of rye paste, then add paint and let it hang for two months.)

Linoleum was invented in 1863 by a British subject named Frederick Walton. In the 1870s, he founded the American Linoleum Manufacturing Company in New York City. Made from linseed oil, fillers, and ground cork on a burlap backing, linoleum was stronger and more durable than oilcloth and less expensive than tile, so it was favored primarily by the middle class. And for tin ceilings, far from being a luxury, they were nothing more than a cheap imitation of the carved plaster ceilings found elsewhere in the more public portions of the house.

Coal was stored in a separate area, in a shed attached to the back of the kitchen (one large home on Beacon Street in Boston still has its attached coal bin) or emptied into the a stone-walled chamber under the outside stairs leading up to the parlor floor. A coal chute was built into the sidewalk just in front of the stairs. It was covered by a piece of stone, which was lifted off for deliveries. Our coal bin was still intact, and we now use it as a wine cellar, the perfect spot given the constant below-grade temperature throughout the year. (One Newport mansion stored its coal underground on the other side of the main road; the coal was brought to the kitchen by an underground railroad.) Shelving was simple, the wood to make it was nothing more than pine (expensive materials were reserved for the upstairs living spaces used by the owners), and the kitchen was not much more than a room, sparsely furnished, with a stove, worktable, and wall storage. It was easy to clean, easy to move around in for the staff, and very, very hot all year round. Hoosiers, the one-piece minikitchens with storage, an expandable shelf, and a built-in flour dispenser, were not introduced until the turn of the twentieth century, although our kitchen still uses one, to hold spices, jams, extracts, oils, and baking chocolate.

Coal was dirty, and the Victorians were extremely keen on cleanliness. To wash glasses and silverware, they employed two pans, one with hot soapy water and the other just hot water, with ammonia added. A half cup of milk was often added to hard dishwater to keep hands soft and promote sparkling dishes. By the late nineteenth century, however, lots of prepackaged cleaning supplies were also popular, including Armour’s white soap. In the 1890s, there were outbreaks of smallpox and cholera, so sanitary measures became even more important in the kitchen. In this war against germs, householders used carbolic acid and water, chloride of lime, chloride of zinc, corrosive sublimate, sulfate of iron, sulfate of zinc, and chloride of lead, the latter employed for sinks and drains.

The Victorians were substantially different from modern epicures—the whole notion of an open kitchen with savory smells wafting out into the dining area would appall them. Under no circumstances did they want to smell the food as it was cooking, and that is one reason the kitchens were usually located in the basement or in the rear of the first floor. (Another Newport mansion has an entire wall of glass windows between the kitchen and the hallway. These windows were kept closed during cooking, and only opened when dinner was served.) In addition, the kitchen had rules about reducing odors: grease was not to fall onto the oven floor (if it did, hay or straw was immediately burned in the oven); a crust of bread was put into water used for boiling green vegetables and when discarded, either poured into a corner of the garden or, if in the sink, followed by carbolic acid. In very large English Victorian houses, the kitchen was as far away as possible from the dining room, sometimes connected by long passageways that had air ducts to keep them smelling fresh. If you have ever wondered about covered serving dishes, this is why they were invented: to keep the food hot on the sometimes long journey from kitchen to dining room. Plates and serving dishes had to be preheated, and many dishes sat over hot water as they traveled up to be served.

However, by Fannie’s time, the kitchen was no longer the culinary equivalent of a boiler room, the engine of the house, occupied only by the poorly paid lower classes. Domestic help, once cheap and plentiful, had become a rare commodity for most households. As a result, the lady of the house was now spending a lot more time in the kitchen. This was to change the culinary arts and American cooking forever.

The American kitchen depended on domestic help of one sort or another from the very beginning. The early-seventeenth-century colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth had brought servants with them, and black slaves were used by the Hudson Valley Dutch. Other families relied on the practice of indentured servitude—many who came to the New World paid for their passage through long work contracts—as well as apprenticeships. However, by the early part of the nineteenth century, many immigrants were paying cash for their voyage, so this source of cheap labor started to dry up. (Tickets were becoming cheaper and existing communities of immigrants here in the United States were providing economic assistance for the passage.) By the mid-nineteenth century, indentured labor had pretty much disappeared, but the ranks of young women available for paid domestic work were growing as urban centers started to prosper with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to this period, a woman might employ the daughters of neighbors (and therefore of the same social class) for short-term paid help, but these women usually went on to start their own families and were not career domestics. In fact, Fannie herself was a family helper for a short time before attending the Boston Cooking School.

The rapid growth of the middle class in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought with it the opportunity to work in either a factory or a domestic job. Yet many young women preferred to take factory work, even though it often paid considerably less than domestic work. One reason, not usually mentioned in history books, is that the public workplace was an excellent opportunity to meet men, whereas a domestic servant had little chance to socialize and start her own family, since she worked twelve-hour days and had but one half-day off per week. One example is cited in
Family Life in 19th
-
Century America
. The husband of a household in New York had advertised for a female copyist at $7 per week, while his wife was advertising for a cook at $10. Nevertheless, there was “one applicant for the cook’s place, while 456 ladies were anxious to secure the post of copyist.”

In addition, women now had a wider range of job options beyond factory work. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women could choose from a variety of (admittedly mostly uninspired) professions, including attendants in asylums, bookbinding and folding, bookkeeping, china painting, Christmas card making, clerkships, embroidery, feather making, glove making, hairdressing, indexing, laundry work, literary work, lithographing, medical drawings, and nursing. Some women became entrepreneurs, offering their services as spiritualists, helping the living speak to the dead. One such spiritualist was headquartered right across from our Boston home in the late nineteenth century.

This huge demand for domestic help coincided with the immigration of large numbers of Irish women, many of whom came to America alone or with small groups of other unmarried females. They were available; they were similar in culture to the families that hired them (black servants were often considered socially awkward, especially after the Civil War); they spoke English, unlike many other immigrants, and they had been sent to America in order to earn money to send it to starving relatives back home, so they had plenty of incentive to get a steady, well-paying job.

However, life as a domestic servant or cook was hard. Accommodations were basic, if not outright prisonlike, a small, barely furnished room in an attic or basement. Working conditions were also poor, since the lady of the house spent little or no time in the kitchen and therefore cared little for its convenience, health, or decoration. Cleaning was an ongoing, difficult activity, given the messy coal stove and the reliance on plenty of elbow grease and caustic ingredients such as lye. In addition, the cook had to manage all of the suppliers, and the foodstuffs, such as large cuts of meat, often had to be broken down and preserved in various fashions—this in an environment that had only one small icebox, an appliance that was only invented in 1827. Especially in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, cooking focused, in large part, on time-consuming preservation cooking methods that would extend the shelf life of perishables.

As the 1896 World’s Fair indicated, cooking at home had changed dramatically from the midcentury. A middle-class American family prior to the Civil War might have had two or three servants, but by the end of the century, it would be lucky to have just one. In 1870, one out of eight families had a domestic servant; by 1900, it was just one in fifteen. So the woman who headed up the household was now likely to be involved in the shopping and perhaps also helping with the cooking, even among the upper classes. As for the middle class, well, they were much less likely to be able to afford a cook.

Foods were no longer sourced locally—the railroads and steamships were bringing in ingredients from California and Europe. Convenience foods—canned and jarred fruits and vegetables, pancake mix, self-rising flours—were already in the market. Time-saving gadgets were making domestic labor less about drudgery and more about the joy of cooking and entertaining. By the turn of the twentieth century, convenience was key and industry was stepping up to the plate. The front door had been opened and American industry had stepped right in.

One reason for this explosion goes back to a simple invention in 1851: the Brown and Sharpe sliding caliper. It revolutionized tooling work, making manufacturing much more precise. This led to the building of steam engines, which, in turn, made the construction of kitchen appliances and tools that much easier—everything was made from water power prior to this. For example, the total of manufactured goods in the United States was just $199 million in 1810; by 1860, it had exploded to $1,885 million. The problem was that mass production of cookware and kitchen tools also meant that manufacturers were loath to invest in expensive dies or time-consuming processes. Simply put, many of these goods were poorly made and had little in the way of decorative features; why use two rivets when one would do? The result? A handle on a pot might fall off more readily, but the marketplace was soon packed with time-saving devices.

One of the early kitchen appliances was Johnson’s Patent Ice Cream Freezer, invented by William Young around 1848. The Dover eggbeater (there were also Miller’s, Earle’s, and Munroe’s Patent eggbeaters) was nothing more than a hand-cranked beater that replaced the common whisk for beating eggs or egg whites. (I used one as a kid in Vermont.) The well-respected cookbook author Marion Harland sang the praises of this device in her 1875 volume,
Breakfast, Lunch and Tea
: “But if I could not get another, I would not sell mine for fifty dollars—nor a hundred. Egg-whipping ceased to be a bugbear to me from the day I speak of . . . with it, I turn out a meringue in five minutes . . . with no after tremulousness of nerve or tendon.” One could also purchase the Zeppelin Potato Baker, an egg-shaped device that opened to accept just one potato at a time; or pick up the Novel Egg Boiler, which had a whistle attached to the boiler to let you know when the eggs were done.

Many manufacturers wrapped their products in a thick skin of pseudoscientific jargon, such as the “anti-Burning or iron Clad salamander bottom for sheet Metal kitchen utensils,” which was nothing more than a metal ring to be used between pot and burner. American industry was turning out so many new kitchen devices that in an 1894 article in the
New England Kitchen Magazine,
Mrs. Lincoln offered a list of 373 kitchen tools that the well-equipped home ought to have. One utensil store in Boston offered a catalog with over one thousand pictures showing “useful and ornamental goods for the parlor, dining room, kitchen and laundry.”

Many kitchens had been moved from the basement to the first floor, owing to the arrival of indoor plumbing. This meant that the kitchen could now be considered a room, not just a workspace, and the mistress of the house might actually care about its decoration. Paint colors such as tan, light gold, or soft green, rather than whitewash, started to come into use. In 1891, in
Manners, Culture, and Dress of the Best American Society,
Richard Wells pointed out that the kitchen should have fresh air, windows, plants on the window sill, an easy chair, and woodwork grained instead of painted. In fact, the home itself had become the focus of social status, given the rapid growth of the middle class. As a result, women started returning to their kitchens. The lady of the house might have started by helping her domestic workers with the lighter chores: washing glass and china, sweeping floors, ironing, opening the front door to receive visitors (something only done by domestic help just a generation before), and helping with the preparation for baking day, which was often on Wednesday.