Read Fannie's Last Supper for Free Online Page A

far the most thorough and professional cookbook of the nineteenth century.
    Always with a keen ear for marketing and publicity, Fannie claimed that when she dined at a famous New York or Boston restaurant and the chef would not provide a recipe, she would secrete a dab of sauce or other victual in a handkerchief and “analyze it at the cooking school.” (This sounds like utter claptrap; it was clear from her attempts to reproduce dishes from, say, Delmonico’s, that the “dab of sauce” wasn’t doing her much good, since her versions fell a mile short of the original. Yet her students felt that they were getting the most cutting-edge food—the secrets of the great chefs of the day.)
    MAY 2008. FOR OUR DINNER PARTY OF THE CENTURY, WE HAD to establish some rules about food preparation. My first thought was to ban the use of appliances, including mixers and food processors. A few months later, however, I was visiting friends in Andover, Maine, at the family “big house,” one of those massive eighteenth-century colonials, with winding passageways, cobbled-together additions, and a huge three-story-high main room. The kitchen was primitive at best, with a wood cookstove, complete with brass water heater. In a nod to the twentieth century, there was also a cheap electric range. There were no electric mixers, so I had to beat twelve egg whites by hand to produce the morning pancakes. That got me thinking—a twelve-course meal without plug-in appliances? This was looking grim.
    We had decided to use refrigerators and freezers for food safety as much as anything else, plus hot water out of the tap for cleanup. The management of the cooking process, including how to hold foods until they were served, was going to be one of the biggest obstacles. I only had two ovens plus one cooktop on the coal cookstove. I hoped that modern ovens would not be necessary, but that would depend on the timing and order of the courses. Another large concern was the sheer quantity of food that had to be served perfectly hot, such as the rissoles (fried and filled puff pastry) and the fried baby artichokes. Was I going to have to give in to convenience and use the high-powered commercial wok hiding in my back kitchen, or would we be able to manage the heat of the stovetop and the space available to simultaneously fry enough food for a dinner party of twelve? (I finally decided to do almost all of the cooking on the wood cookstove, other than the baking of cakes; and that electric mixers and food processors would be used only for the baking.)
    There were other considerations as well. For our jellies, commercial food colorings were out, so we had to reinvent the art of using natural ingredients to create a range of different-colored layers. And there were to be no shortcuts in making the puff pastry. For starters, we had to make the dough, fashion it into a 6-inch-square flour and butter mixture, and roll it out to 12 inches. This “paste,” as they called it in Fannie’s time, was then rolled into a 24- by 8-inch strip that was folded letterlike and refrigerated. This was repeated four or five times, and then refrigerated overnight before being rolled into a perfect strip one-sixteenth of an inch thick. No store-bought puff pastry here.
    In addition, old recipes often call for odd measurements that had to be translated to modern terms. For example, a gill is five ounces, the same size as a teacup. A dessert spoon is half a tablespoon. We also came across a breakfast cup, which is half a pint.
    The saddle of venison had to be larded on both sides using a larding needle, and we had to make a stock from an actual calf’s head for the soup. The lobster à l’Américaine required both homemade lobster and fish stocks; we would have to master regulating the cookstove in order to perfectly grill the salmon on the grilling insert; a hand-cranked ice-cream machine would be necessary to freeze the Canton punch; and the elaborate Mandarin cake required