Fannie's Last Supper (2 page)

The average life expectancy was forty-nine. The workweek was fifty to sixty hours; most people worked on Saturday, and annual income in 1900 was about $800 per year, higher for state and local government workers and lower for teachers and those in the medical fields. Domestic servants were paid less, between $350 and $500 per year, depending on the region of the country. Butter was 25 cents a pound, and so were a dozen eggs. A bicycle would set you back about $17. The value of a dollar was about twenty-five times what it is today, so a quarter in 1900 might have been worth over $6 in today’s money, showing just how expensive basic foodstuffs were to a poor working-class family.

What sights would a visitor to Boston have seen? Boston was full of train stations, from the massive Union Station to the Old Colony Station, so there was no problem getting into town using public transportation. By that time, the streetcars were electrified, and one could also take excursion steamers up to the north and south shores. The subway (now known as the T) was just being built, at a cost of $5 million, and one could view the first section under construction at the corner of Boylston and Charles streets.

The
Boston Daily Globe
of July 10, 1895, suggested that tourists might do one of the following: walk around the ethnic neighborhoods of interest, including the Chinese, Hebrew, and Italian quarters; visit Trinity, the Old South or the Park Street churches; or head out of town to Nantasket Beach, Provincetown, Plymouth, Gloucester, or Salem (“home of the witches”). Landmarks included the Old Corner Bookstore, King’s Chapel, Paul Revere’s house, Increase Mather’s house, the site of the jail where Captain Kidd was held in 1699, and Liverpool Wharf, where the Boston Tea Party took place. One of the more unusual features of Boston even today is the Emerald Necklace, a series of parks connected by a seven-mile walking path, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted with the intention of linking the Boston Common and the Public Garden with the country estate known as Franklin Park. And there were always the dime museums and “objects of wonder.” Boston sounded like a great place to visit.

JANUARY 2008. WHERE DOES ONE START PLANNING A TWELVE-COURSE
Victorian menu? By the late nineteenth century, home dining was a culinary mishmash, from a simple supper of leftover cold meat and prunes to birds in potato cases and gâteau St. Honoré. It was the end and the beginning of an era—everything was up for grabs. But I wanted this menu to be extreme: lots of courses with elaborate dishes, plenty of technique, and recipes that would give us a clear window into the higher echelons of cooking in 1896.

Culinary adventurism was not unknown in this period; in fact, it was frequently enjoyed by the rich and powerful. It was no surprise, then, when I came across a January 21, 1917, article in the
New York Times
entitled “Roosevelt Party Dines on Roast Lion.” The Roosevelt in question was Samuel M. Roosevelt, accomplished portrait artist and distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, and the dinner, held at the Beaux Arts Club, was attended by seventeen of Mr. Roosevelt’s fellow artists. The lion was a baby, and roasted whole. It seems that a young man brought the still extant young lion with him to New York from the Salisbury School in Connecticut, where it had been used as a mascot for the football team. The lion had been left loose about the school, destroying property and scaring the students. Something had to be done.

That something was to bring it to New York, place it in a cage in the kitchen of the Beaux Arts, and feed it tenderloin steaks, which, given their cost, was only a short-term solution. It was finally decided that making a dinner out of it—roasting it whole, in fact—was a good return on investment. This was acted upon forthwith, the lion killed, roasted, and served with numerous sauces, along with Monaco soup (tomato soup), bisque d’écrevisse (crawfish bisque), riz de veau (veal sweetbreads), and then the various parts of the baby lion: tenderloin, chops, etc. Just three years later, Samuel Roosevelt died of a massive brain hemorrhage at the Knickerbocker Club while stooping over to pick up his dropped cigar after yet another massive feast.

The pièce de résistance of the gilded age, however, was the Pie Girl Party of 1895 given by Stanford White, the famous architect, in his brownstone just off Fifth Avenue. The guests, all society gents, were seated in pairs at small tables when a line of seminaked young girls marched in, carrying “saucisson chaude.” They were clothed only in “a scarf clasped at the shoulders, wound under their breasts, and then down across their thighs.” After the last meat course had been consumed, there was a faint tinkling of bells, and the young girls, some of them reportedly teenagers, reappeared wearing nothing more than sleigh bells attached to their ankles and castanets on their fingers. After a bout of dancing, they disappeared and then reappeared once more, wearing red, white, and blue liberty caps and “gauzy veils clasped at their waist,” bearing a large trestle holding an enormous pie. The pie was opened and out flew a bevy of canaries, doves, and nightingales, plus an extremely young naked female cherub, who was swept up by the host and taken upstairs. News of the scandalous party soon leaked out and reached the newspapers, including a famous illustration of “The Girl in the Pie,” in which the naked virgin was, for the sake of modesty, both completely clothed and depicted as a woman more advanced in years.

Boston was a tad more conservative in its tastes, but still offered elaborate menus. An example from the 1880s: oysters; turtle soup; bisque of crawfish; chicken halibut; dauphine potatoes; cucumber salad; saddle of venison; brioche potatoes; brussels sprouts; supreme of quail; terrapin Maryland; pâté de foie gras; lettuce salad; sherbet with rum punch; canvasback duck; fried hominy; tutti-frutti ice cream; gorgonzola and brie cheese; fruit; coffee and liqueurs. Finally, we were in the land of the overstuffed gourmand—just where I wanted to be.

At the back of
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
I found a menu for “A Full Course Dinner,” consisting of twelve courses as follows: oysters; clear soup; rissoles; fish; roast venison or mutton; a lighter course of meat, fish, or poultry; a vegetable course; punch; game; cold dessert; cake; and finally, crackers, cheese, and café noir. In an elaborate Victorian meal, the first course was almost always oysters followed by a clear, not a cream, soup. The next course was often something fried, such as rissoles, although at times a bisque would have been substituted. Fish was next, followed by venison, then game or poultry, a vegetable course, frozen punch (much like a sorbet), and then desserts that may have been preceded by a jelly course. Finally, the dinner concluded with coffee, cheese, and crackers, followed by liqueurs. More elaborate dinners may have also served a fresh fruit course followed by nuts, raisins, sugar plums, and dried ginger. Bonbons and demitasse would be served in the drawing room. The menus sampled all levels of the food pyramid here, although they did seem a wee bit short on salads and grains.

In order to actually prepare this gastronomic extravaganza, my test kitchen director, Erin McMurrer, and I would need to start sourcing ingredients. The first course was no problem: I knew an oyster farmer, Island Creek Oysters, just down the coast from Boston, who supplied many of the restaurants in town. Although consommé was typical as a second course, we decided to try something a bit more adventurous: mock turtle soup, made with a calf’s head rather than actual turtle meat. This raised the issue of where we were going to find a half dozen calf’s heads for testing, but more on that later. Rissoles—stuffed and fried puff pastry—were the third course, and the fourth course was to be a fancy fish recipe, lobster à l’Américaine, a dish offered by Escoffier and the famous New York restaurant, Delmonico’s, as well as by Fannie herself. This presented a good opportunity to find out if Fannie, who had never traveled abroad, could handle a serious French recipe.

Per Fannie’s instructions, we were onto roast venison next, knowing that the meat would have to be larded, a technique that I was eager to test. For a lighter fish or meat course, we decided on fish, although Fannie had truly horrible recipes in this department, most everything having been cooked to death and stuffed with heavy, uninspired ingredients. Knowing that salmon was a common item in the late nineteenth century, we decided on a simple dish of grilled salmon, hoping to try out a grilling insert that was made for our coal cookstove. For vegetables, we had fried artichokes, a typical recipe from the time. Following that, a simple frozen punch, Canton sorbet, which simply meant ginger-flavored. The game course was to be roast stuffed goose, and then we were on to desserts.

Jellies were high on our list, since they were spectacular, with many layers of color and flavor. A lot of technique was involved here, for example, creating natural food coloring, and they would present well at the table. (I was to learn that red food coloring, cochineal, was made from small bugs—great!) The next to last course would be a cake, and here Fannie and her contemporaries were rather unimaginative. She suggested a French cream cake, which was made from a light
choux
paste and filled with pastry cream. The good news is that the French were serving spectacular cakes at the time, usually baked in molds. One particular recipe, the Savoy Cake with Oranges, had made it to the United States and was published as Mandarin cake in Charles Ranhofer’s incredible 1895 book
The Epicurean
. This looked promising.

Dessert would be followed by, as Fannie instructed, crackers, cheese, and coffee. Phew. And all of that had to be tested, perfected, and then orchestrated for a sit-down dinner for twelve. Could we do it? I was hopeful, but uncertain.

The last piece of the puzzle, at least as far as the menu went, was the wines. They tended to be overly sweet—sauterne, hock (a generic term for German wines from the Rhine regions, after the town of Hochheim), sherry, liebfraumilch—while a great deal of champagne was being served. The only exceptions were claret (bordeaux) or burgundy, which were wines that might actually have been rather good. I tracked down a former sous-chef at Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston who was quite knowledgeable in this area, and he set out to pull together samples for us to try with each course as they were being developed. Ah, the joys of recipe testing!

I also contacted John Abbott, president of WGBH in Boston, about the possibility of filming the dinner and its preparations, creating a television special about the history of Victorian cooking. He was on board and I was thrilled. Now I really had to get going on planning the twelve courses, but first, I wanted something alcoholic to serve the guests as they arrived. Although cocktails and whiskey were usually not served at home, punch seemed to be a nice way to launch the evening. And I was lucky enough to know just the man to help us: Donald Friary, an expert on punch and punch bowls and a fellow member of Boston’s St. Botolph Club.

BEFORE ATTENDING FRIARY’S ST. BOTOLPH LECTURE ON THE
history of punch, we sampled his personal recipe, given to him by an established Boston family, and realized what we had been missing. As with almost everything else in the culinary world, the history of punch is a messy business. The conventional wisdom is that the word
punch
is derived from the Indian word
panch
, which means “five,” referring to the five basic ingredients of a good punch: alcohol (often rum), water, sweet (sugar), sour (lemon or lime juice), and spice. A more likely explanation is that punch derives from the term
puncheon,
which was a cask for liquids: the type of container used on board ship, for example.

Punch was well established as of the seventeenth century, the recipe having been introduced to Britain by the East India merchants. Punch bowls were common at most taverns, and the punch was made up well in advance. Donald mentioned that he once drank four-year-old punch and indeed found it to be much improved through aging. At the very least, making punch a day ahead of time seems like a good thing, not just a nod to convenience.

Some punch recipes would indeed deliver a punch, if not a ripping headache. A recipe for Thirty-second Regiment of Victoria Punch from the 1862 edition of
How to Mix Drinks
by Jerry Thomas offers the following ingredients: 6 sliced lemons, ½ gallon brandy, ½ gallon Jamaican rum, 1 pound white sugar, 1¾ quarts water, and 1 pint of boiling milk. The lemons are steeped in the brandy and rum for twenty-four hours and then mixed with the other ingredients. The punch is strained and can be served hot or cold. The recipe served twenty, which works out to be about three-quarters of a cup of brandy or rum per guest, plus two tablespoons or so of white sugar, to say nothing of the combination of lemon and milk. The British infantry must have had hard heads and strong stomachs.

By 1880, a New Year’s punch started with a sugar syrup made from the juice of six lemons and oranges, five pounds of loaf sugar, two quarts of water, five cloves, and two blades of mace. This liquid was simmered to make a flavored sugar syrup, and small amounts were used to sweeten a punch. The punch itself was made with a pint of green tea, a pint of brandy, one quart each of rum and champagne, and one teacup of Chartreuse, which is mixed and then sweetened to taste with the reserved syrup. It is served in a punch bowl containing a large block of ice, along with three sliced oranges and lemons.

Things started to go seriously wrong with punch recipes in the early twentieth century. What had been a simple, strong alcoholic drink became a rather revolting cooler, the sort of thing that a modern teenager who was trying to achieve alcoholic oblivion might appreciate. In fact, the term
punch
came to have very little meaning, much like the word
cocktail.
By 1907, for example, a recipe for Victoria punch appeared in a cookbook by Paul Richards, who was writing for the hotel and catering trades. The recipe included a gallon of orange ice frozen with a pint of white wine, beaten egg whites (most recipes suggested beating them “to a froth”), and then a cup of kirsch plus a pint of arrack, or Javan rum. By 1919, Victoria punch was served with a topping of meringue, made from three egg whites beaten with a whopping half pound of sugar. Another recipe, this one from around the turn of the century, suggested adding sliced bananas to the punch bowl. No words can describe the horror.