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two separate cakes, a filling of Bavarian cream, a fondant icing, and tangerines filled with ice cream and two different jellies. And how much of this could be prepared ahead of time? We had to test the frozen punch (more or less a sorbet)—would it still be soft and refreshing if made the day ahead, or would it would turn dense and hard? And I knew from experience that jellies tend to stiffen over time: the gelatin keeps on working, so there might be a small window of time when our elaborate, towering jellies had the perfect texture. If they were too loose, we could not serve them properly; if too stiff, they would lose much of their flavor and be unappealing to eat. There were smaller, more finicky issues as well—for instance, how does one cut into a tower of jelly and serve it cleanly?
    We also had to consider the issue of service. As in all Victorian households, our kitchen was downstairs and the dining room was upstairs. We had to serve twelve courses, many of them with more than one recipe on the plate, and keep the service well paced to get through the entire dinner in one evening. (One course every twenty minutes would mean a four-hour dinner; Victorian etiquette called for a two-hour time limit on formal dinners, a time frame that appeared impossible to meet.) Given a lack of space and our preference for performing carving and plating out of the view of our guests, we would have to figure out how to warm plates and move quickly to get the food to the table while it was still hot. We would also have to carefully orchestrate the silverware, the wineglasses, and the plates, since we would have to do a large amount of recycling during the dinner. Washing up had to be an ongoing activity, and well paced to provide the cutlery and flatware for upcoming courses.
    We had eighteen months to test and refine the recipes, assemble a kitchen and waitstaff, pull together a dozen high Victorian table settings plus period table decorations, create a blue-ribbon guest list, figure out how to use an authentic Victorian cookstove, choose and taste-test the wines, and become experts on the cooking of Boston in the 1890s.
    MY FIRST SERIOUS AND MOST EMBARRASSING ENCOUNTER WITH oysters occurred in the mid-1990s when Julia Child called to invite me over to cook dinner together. This was nothing special for Julia; she invited virtually everyone in the food world in Boston over to her home frequently since she loved company and she loved to cook. For me, it was nerve-wracking and, as it turned out, a near disaster.
    I had met Julia a number of times at industry events and had driven to Boston back in the 1980s to interview her and her husband Paul for Cook’s Magazine. On that memorable occasion, we had an oyster stew and a warm crisp baguette that was yanked from the oven and ripped into hunks—delicious. And, like most of her viewers, I thought of Julia as a kindly teacher, a patient, accepting educator. What I did not realize until that evening was that Julia was playful and quite competitive, often putting others on the spot to see how well they would respond.
    So a few minutes into our evening together, she sidled up to me with a large plastic tub and issued the challenge: “Would you mind shucking a few oysters?” using her inimitable and slightly challenging voice. Ten minutes later, by which time I had two oysters open and one slightly bloody finger, she came back and asked, with more than a hint of pixie humor in her query, “Do you need some help, dearie?” I thought for a moment and then threw caution to the wind. “Just get me the biggest glass of wine you can find, and then you shuck the oysters while I cook the rest of dinner!” We were good friends after that. I guess I failed the cooking test, but had passed the character part of the evening’s entertainment.
    Despite this experience, the first course on our elaborate menu was to be, of course, oysters, the reason being that oysters were almost always the first