Fannie's Last Supper (6 page)

FEBRUARY 2009. GIVEN THE CENTRAL ROLE OF THE COOK IN
the Victorian household and the rather primitive conditions under which she worked, I quickly became intrigued with the details of her life, starting with the details of getting dressed in the early morning. One historical expert, Tames Alan, was particularly useful in describing the lives of household servants, since she regularly provides “living history” lectures on this period and others, dressed in period costume.

In a large private household, the kitchen maid was always the first to rise, cleaning the stove, firing it, scrubbing the floor, making tea, and then bringing a cup to the cook, who might request help in getting dressed. The first article of clothing donned in the morning was a set of split drawers followed by a camisole: cotton in the summer, wool in the winter. The lady of the household, however, wore a one-piece version that was made of silk or extremely fine cotton, so thin that it could pass through her wedding ring, much like a handkerchief. This distinction in the quality of clothing between employer and cook was continued within the household hierarchy: kitchen and housemaids wore even coarser fabrics than the cook. The same inequality was also true between households of different social status: a wealthy family provided better garments for its cook than did one of merely middle-class stature.

Next were the wool stockings, held up by ribbons or, toward the end of the nineteenth century, elasticized garters. The cook would then slip on a petticoat: red flannel in the winter, cotton in the summer. The corset was next, loosely laced and ending above the hips so that the cook would bend easily while working. (Her mistress wore a tightly laced corset to appear as narrow-waisted as possible; a thin cook was never a good sign. Corsets also provided bust support since brassieres were not invented until the 1920s.) The stays were made of a springlike steel, rather than whalebone, another contribution of the Industrial Revolution. One inevitably wonders how one tightened a corset when dressing alone. One clever solution was to install a metal ring on the wall of a servant’s bedroom. The wearer would tie the corset strings to the ring and simply walk away to tighten it.

A cook was likely to wear a corset made of coarse material and therefore a sleeveless corset cover was often slipped on next; this protected the petticoat or dress that rubbed up against it from chafing and wear. The dress was the final piece of clothing; it would still have had a high neckline in the 1890s—no low scoop—and long sleeves that had to be pushed up for cooking. Fabric colors were solid and muted: a light blue or gray, perhaps. The final touches were sensible shoes, perhaps boots, hair pushed into a mobcap or cook’s cap, and a spotless apron. (Women almost never cut their hair and therefore a cap was necessary. In fact, a short-haired cook applying for a job would be regarded with suspicion. A woman had her hair cut for just two reasons: to remove lice or to sell hair for money.) According to a 1904
House Beautiful
article, outfits were often changed midafternoon to provide a more formal appearance for the evening.

As the century progressed, however, social equality became the cry of the working class and so the workmen, maids, and cooks often chose clothing that mimicked that of their employers.
Harper’s Bazaar
noted this trend in 1867, pointing out that crinoline and a flowing train of silk have no place next to a red hot stove or dirty kitchen floor. Instead, they promoted looser, more practical clothing, preferring the flowing blouse of the French workman to the tight-fitting coats and pants often worn by the lower classes in imitation of their masters. This smacked of putting the working class in their place, however, as in this printed admonition: “Let her take the advice of the tasteful, who will tell her that the rude freshness of natural beauty appears to the greatest advantage in a plain setting.”

The pay was modest—a few hundred dollars per year—although cooks in wealthy households were at the high end of the scale and were usually treated well, since a good cook was hard to come by: poaching within one’s social circle was not uncommon. (Cooks had their own menu books—collections of personal recipes—and the mistress of the household would choose among them to create menus.) Life with a middle-class family, however, was often a nightmare; the mistress of the house often had little experience with managing servants, so they were often poorly treated and paid. To get by, then, the cook had her own bag of tricks. When interviewing for employment, she would ask if she could choose the tradesmen. This was crucial, since she often asked purveyors to mark up their prices, paying her the difference. She would also inquire as to the dispensation of the pan drippings and candle ends, both of which could be sold for ready money. On the other hand, servants, including cooks, had their quarterly pay docked if they broke a plate or burned the pudding. In some cases, the servant owed the household money at payday.

As for washing, undergarments, including petticoats, would be laundered either commercially or in-house, but dresses would only be spot-cleaned, since they were usually made of finer, more expensive material and could not withstand constant soap and water. One could purchase “double-motion” hand-cranked washing machines, fashioned from galvanized iron and white cedar tubs. Also for sale were endless designs for racks to dry clothes outside (including one model that attached to a window frame), wash benches, ironing tables, ironing boards, and bosom boards, designed specifically for ironing shirts.

By the early 1900s, however, a private home was often no longer staffed by numerous household servants but reduced to employing just one all-purpose maidservant. In the 1904
The Expert Maid
-
Servant
, the mistress of the household is cautioned that cooking would be just one of the maidservant’s many duties and therefore one had to inquire whether the potential employee understood plain cooking and could follow a simple recipe. “More elaborate accomplishments can rarely be looked for in a maid-of-all-work.” By 1920, after the devastation of the First World War and the influenza epidemic, and the increased availability of factory and other nondomestic jobs, the era of the well-staffed Victorian household was at an end both here and in England.

THE THIRD COURSE WAS TO BE RISSOLES, SMALL FRIED AND
filled pastries; this presented the problem of making and rolling out thin sheets of puff pastry. I had never made puff pastry from scratch using the old-fashioned French method, but I was about to get an education.

Rissoles and Boston were perfectly suited for each other, since the original notion was frugality, a kitchen where every scrap was saved, even the water used to boil vegetables. By Fannie Farmer’s era, the de facto rissole was a small puff pastry turnover filled with cooked meat, moistened with a classic French white sauce, and then deep-fried and served on a folded napkin. The term comes from Latin,
pasta russeola
(later translated as
ruissole
in Old French;
rissoler
means “to brown” in modern French as well), which, roughly translated, means “reddish paste.” The fillings were made from just about anything, including peacocks (pheasant, rabbit, and chicken were also offered in descending order of desirability), as one recipe from Apicius, the famous Roman gastronome, attests. Over the centuries, rissoles (sometimes called “rissables” as well) have also been made from fish, lobster, veal, beef, game, tongue, lamb, sweetened fruit, and vegetables.

The puff pastry of Fannie’s day is, of course, a French invention and her nod to being continental, but this sort of rissole was nothing new, a similar recipe having already been offered in
The White House Cookbook
by Fanny Lemira Gillette. Earlier nineteenth-century versions, however, were nothing more than chopped meat, bound with eggs and bread, then fried in a pan with perhaps a simple bread crumb coating. Over time, the bread crumb variety became known as croquettes.

Rissoles could be dainty, made from puff pastry cut into two-inch squares, or gargantuan, the pastry cut to the size of a dinner plate and folded over a mound of minced meat, fried, and served with a garnish of fried parsley. The fillings could be fashioned from chicken or other poultry, lobster, raw oysters, boiled clams, Indian corn, leftover veal, ham, tongue, lamb, sweet stewed fruit, or mincemeat. Many cooks used lemon zest as a seasoning as well as spices such as cayenne, mace, and nutmeg. Like hash, rissoles were more of an idea than a recipe, one that made good use of whatever happened to be on hand.

Fannie’s recipe did have one unusual aspect. She writes, “Roll in gelatine, fry in deep fat, and drain. Granulated gelatine cannot be used.” I had never heard of using gelatin as a coating for fried foods, but was game to try it. We used the chicken-and-ham combination that she offered as a filling choice, then moistened it with different amounts of béchamel, the “thick white sauce” that she referred to in the recipe. For the gelatin coating, we purchased agar-agar (a dried, tasteless seaweed that was also used in Fannie’s time), rehydrated it, cooled it to room temperature, coated the rissoles, and then fried them up, finding that 360 degrees was just right. To our surprise, the agar-agar coating made the surface blister, and it yielded an extraordinarily crisp coating. This was one of those rare moments when a technique from the foggy culinary past comes back as a true revelation. The filling, however, was bland and creamy, and did not stand up to the wonderful puff pastry on the outside. The moisture in the filling also made it difficult to cook the puff pastry all the way through.

A flavorful chicken-duxelles mixture seemed like a better option. In addition, we thought that cutting out two-inch circles of puff pastry, filling them, and then laying a second circle on top was a better approach than cutting out three-inch circles and folding them over. Our theory was that the folded edge was too thick, making it difficult to cook the pastry all the way through. We also wanted to test using sheet gelatin in place of the agar-agar; we were curious whether frozen rissoles were better than refrigerated in terms of frying and whether a two-step process, similar to the way french fries are cooked, made any sense.

The chicken-duxelles mixture was a winner since it held less moisture and had more flavor, although we thought we could reduce the amount of fat slightly. Adding more chicken also made for a drier, and therefore better, filling. We tried a very thin sheet of puff pastry, just a sixteenth of an inch thick (older recipes speak about “the thickness of a penny”), and this worked a bit better, but the pastry was still not cooking through properly. The sheet gelatin worked pretty much the same as the agar-agar, although both will thicken even at room temperature. Since it is easier to coat rissoles with a liquid than a solid, we used sheet gelatin in a lower concentration.

Chilled rissoles are much better than frozen for frying; the latter sank to the bottom of the pot and one side never cooked properly. The notion of pressing together the circles of puff pastry was indeed better than the “foldover” method, since the folded edge in Fannie’s recipe never cooks through properly. A two-frying method was not necessary.

One other trick: we found that constantly basting the rissoles with the hot oil as they fried made a huge difference—they puffed up immediately and seemed to cook through better. This meant that one could fry only two at a time, but the results were worth it.

As for the remarkable effect of the gelatin, edible coatings were nothing new when applied to fried foods, egg whites being a prime example. The theory is that proteins tend to inhibit oil absorption. The use of gelatin, however, was not part of the culinary repertoire until just before Fannie’s era; the first published example that we were able to find was in 1869. (In addition, gelatin had been used as a preservative. Meat was dipped into hot gelatin, allowed to dry, and then dipped again.) Even today, patents from the 1980s include gelatin used in formulas for frozen pastries. This method promotes a “crisp, unsoggy texture and contributes to mouthfeel.” In our testing, however, the big difference was an immediate blistering effect, the puff pastry exploding like a hooked blowfish, making the rissoles incredibly light and crispy. The result was visually spectacular and was not primarily an issue of absorbing too much oil.

MASTER RECIPE FOR RISSOLES

Yes, this recipe is a lot of work and, yes, you do have to roll out the pastry until it is a mere 1/16 inch thick. Despite these hurdles, this is a fascinating recipe. The little dumplings fry up quickly with a crackly, blistered coating because of the hot oil and gelatin coating—all in all, a spectacular first course. If you want to cheat, just purchase a good-quality frozen puff pastry and the recipe will come out just fine: simply roll it out to a thickness of 1/16 inch and then into 2-inch squares. Proceed with step 3. Our recipe for Homemade Puff Pastry can be found at www.fannieslastsupper.com. In terms of commercial puff, we prefer Dufour Classic Puff Pastry, but Pepperidge Farm also works well.

2½ sheets gelatin

Cool water (for soaking sheets)

1 cup water (for simmering)

1 package frozen puff pastry sheets (or use 1/3 of the Homemade Puff Pastry recipe)

1 recipe filling (see page 68)

2 to 3 quarts frying oil

1. Cover gelatin sheets with cool water to soften, about 5 minutes. Remove, squeeze or drip dry, and add to 1 cup simmering water to dissolve, about 20 seconds. Remove from heat, transfer to small bowl, and let cool to room temperature.

2. Roll puff pastry into a rectangle about ½ inch thick, being careful not to press dough too hard with rolling pin. Cut in half, parallel to the short side. Working one at a time, roll each half gently, flipping and rotating piece until 1/16 inch thick. Square off edges of each half with a sharp knife; cut into 2-inch squares, about 18 per sheet. Keep puff pastry refrigerated as much as possible during this process to keep the butter firm.

3. Working with three rissoles at a time, add 1 teaspoon of either the Chicken Liver filling or Duxelle and Chicken filling (recipes at www.fannieslastsupper.com) or ½ teaspoon of Onion-Cherry Chutney Filling plus 1 pea-sized piece of blue cheese (see recipe on page 68) in center of each cut-out puff. Brush edges lightly with water or gelatin mixture. Top with second piece of puff, pressing air out before completely sealed; press edges to seal. It is important that puff pastry is chilled, and handled as little as possible while assembling; if dough warms up too much, it won’t puff properly when fried. Repeat with remaining puff and filling. Cover tightly with plastic wrap. Refrigerate.