Fannie's Last Supper (10 page)

In terms of cooking potatoes, I was surprised to find that many cookbooks suggested boiling potatoes with their skins on (for better nourishment), a technique that our test kitchen has promoted for many years. Our reasoning, however, was based on producing lighter, fluffier mashed potatoes, since less water is absorbed with the skins on. Again, Victorian-era cooks were on to this concept as well, since they suggested placing boiled potatoes on top of the range or in the oven to allow surplus moisture to escape. Cooked potatoes were often sliced and sautéed; they were cut into small pieces and placed in a gratin pan, covered with milk, finished with cheese and bread crumbs, and then baked in a hot oven, or even cut into squares and cooked with cream and boiled salt pork, then finished “au gratin.”

Potatoes lyonnaise is simple enough: onions are cooked in a skillet; precooked, cold potatoes are sliced and added; then the whole dish is finished with thyme and parsley. Not much to it, or at least that is what we thought at first. We found two recipes for lyonnaise potatoes in the
Boston Cooking
-
School Cook Book
. Start with one thinly sliced onion briefly cooked in three tablespoons butter. Add three cold boiled potatoes cut in quarter-inch slices and sprinkled with salt and pepper. Stir the mixture lightly and then cook until the bottom layer is well-browned. All in all, a lackluster approach. Fannie’s second recipe for lyonnaise potatoes uses much less onion—a mere tablespoon, chopped—and the potatoes and onion are cooked separately. Again, a dull recipe with greasy potatoes (a lot more butter was called for here), not enough browning, and not worth the time or trouble.

We then looked to our own version of potatoes lyonnaise, as printed in
Cook’s Illustrated
; one and a half pounds of russets are boiled, cooled, peeled, halved, and then cut into quarter-inch slices. Onion is sautéed in a skillet, removed, the potatoes are added to the pan and browned, and, finally, the onions are added back to finish. We still wanted more flavor so we decided to cook the onions with white wine, butter, and a little brown sugar for about half an hour rather than just for a few minutes. Finally, cooking the potatoes in two batches instead of one gave us superior browning and deeper flavor. This rather bland, greasy offering had been transformed into a rich and crisp side dish.

POTATOES LYONNAISE

Most recipes for this dish are nothing more than potatoes, onions, and parsley, and the flavors are not well developed. We caramelize the onions to add richness, which makes this a dinner party recipe, not just an everyday affair.

For the potatoes:

2 pounds russet potatoes, unpeeled and scrubbed, smaller potatoes preferred, roughly 2½ by 3½ inches

Salt

6 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

For the onions:

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

½ teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon brown sugar

2 pounds medium onions, halved pole to pole, root end removed, peeled and sliced ¼ inch thick pole to pole (8 cups)

1/3 cup dry white wine

½ teaspoon thyme, minced

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

1. Place potatoes in large saucepan, cover with 1 inch water, and add 1 tablespoon salt. Bring to boil over high heat; reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until potatoes are just tender—a paring knife can be slipped into and out of center of the potatoes with very little resistance—25 to 35 minutes. To preserve shape, gently remove from water with tongs or slotted spoon. Refrigerate overnight until cold.

2. Meanwhile, heat butter and oil in 12-inch nonstick skillet over high heat; when foam subsides, stir in salt and sugar. Add onions and stir to coat; cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are golden brown and beginning to darken around the edges, about 12 to 16 minutes. Reduce heat to medium and cook, stirring frequently until onions are deeply browned and slightly sticky, about 14 to 18 minutes longer. Add wine and thyme; increase heat to medium high and cook, stirring frequently until dry, about 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from heat and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover to keep warm. Reserve.

3. Once potatoes have cooled, carefully peel and cut potatoes in half lengthwise, and then slice into ½-inch-thick half-moons. Season each piece with salt and pepper on both sides, being careful not to break apart.

4. Heat 3 tablespoons oil in 12-inch nonstick (or cast-iron) skillet over medium-high heat, until shimmering. Add half the potatoes in a single layer, and cook, shaking pan occasionally until deep golden brown, about 7 to 11 minutes. Flip. Continue to cook on second side until deep golden brown, about 4 to 6 minutes; transfer to paper towel–lined plate, wipe pan with additional paper towels to remove oil. Add ½ tablespoon butter and browned potatoes back to cleaned skillet. Gently swirl to coat and then transfer contents to a rimmed baking sheet lined with a cooling rack and hold in warm oven. Wipe pan with paper towels; repeat with remaining potatoes, oil, and butter. (You can also do this simultaneously in two 12-inch nonstick skillets.)

5. Serve potatoes with onions and garnish with chopped parsley.

Serves 12 as small side dish.

Glazed Beets

Beets were not a very profitable crop, and therefore, much of what Bostonians consumed in the 1890s may have been locally grown, although they did receive root vegetables shipped in from the South in the spring. According to
Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book: A Guide to Marketing and Cooking,
“Beets, carrots, turnips, and onions are received from the South in April and May, so that we have them young and fresh for at least five months. After this period they are not particularly tender, and require much cooking.” There were two type of beets, those whose seed was sown early in the spring, and those that were planted in June as a fall crop and referred to as “winter” beets.

Nobody can accuse Fannie Farmer of doing anything continental or silly with beets. Her recipe for boiled beets suggests a cooking time of from one to four hours, noting that old beets may never become tender, no matter how long they are cooked. This range of cooking times is based on whether one is cooking freshly dug beets in the summer or the winter variety, which might have been stored for months and become quite tough. To finish them, Fannie simply added a few tablespoons of butter and a touch of sugar and salt to the sliced beets and tossed the ingredients together, reheating them for serving—nothing very exciting.

The first problem with Fannie’s recipe was the issue of size—we were probably using much smaller specimens than those available in 1896. The second issue was flavor; the beets were rather plain. To solve this problem, we sautéed the beets in butter, sugar, and salt rather than using these ingredients as just a coating. Further testing proved that higher heat was helpful in adding depth of flavor, as were four tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, which brought the dish into balance. A sprinkling of fresh parsley finished off a simple but flavorful recipe.

GLAZED BEETS

Smaller beets tend to have a nicer flavor and are more tender. The winter beets of the Victorian time were so tough and large that they had to be boiled for hours.

8 to 10 golf-ball-sized beets (2 to 2½ inches), greens discarded,
washed and patted dry

2 tablespoons oil

Kosher salt

Ground black pepper

2 tablespoons butter, cut into 2 pieces

Pinch clove, ground

3 tablespoons light brown sugar

6 tablespoons aged balsamic vinegar (10-year preferred)

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees, adjust oven rack to middle position. Place beets in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish. Drizzle with oil; season with 1 teaspoon kosher salt and ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper and toss to coat. Cover with foil and bake until beets are tender, shaking dish occasionally, 60 to 75 minutes. Remove foil, and continue to roast until pan is dry and beets begin to brown, about 15 to 25 minutes. Cool. Peel, cut in half, and then cut each beet into 1-inch wedges.

2. Melt butter in a 12-inch nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until foaming subsides. Add beets, clove, 1 teaspoon kosher salt, and ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper and cook until edges begin to brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Add brown sugar and cook, stirring frequently until sugar dissolves and coats the beets, about 30 seconds. Add vinegar and cook to a syrupy glaze, so that beets are coated, about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from heat; add parsley and toss to coat. Serve immediately.

Serves 12 as small side dish.

Chapter 8
Wood-Grilled Salmon

How to Cook on a Short, Hot Coal Cookstove

T
he beast in the basement of the St. Botolph Club was an authentic Victorian-era six-burner coal cookstove with two large ovens: a Number 7, the largest model ever made for the American market. It was sitting unused in a corner of a small office, and I immediately inquired as to its future. After months of sly suggestions, petitions to the board, and promises to fully restore this black monster, it was decided that I might purchase the stove and move it to our townhouse. Unlike modern ranges or the wood cookstoves used on farms, this urban colossus is an assembly of cast-iron parts that are assembled around an existing brick structure. In other words, the stove is the outer shell and the bricks form the inner workings. Yes, there are metal ovens (they can be slid out), but when one removes one of the circular “burners,” one looks down into a firebox made entirely of brick.

Almost a year later, the stove had been deconstructed, the brick foundation built, and the stove put back in its place after having been fully restored off-site. As it turns out, the problem with coal stoves is that the extreme heat of anthracite coal over a period of decades warps the top, especially the oval pieces that surround the burners. In other words, the top of the stove is not one solid piece of cast iron but made up of a series of small interconnected bits, many of which had to be recast in order to present a smooth, even cooking surface. Since heat makes metal expand, we soon discovered that the pieces had to fit rather loosely when the stove was cold since, when hot, the pieces would overlap and buckle, turning our perfectly flat stovetop into a train wreck. But over time, this was sorted out, and we began the long process of learning to cook on our Number 7.

Today, most readers would find this method of preparing food both silly and terribly outdated. The coal cookstove was in fact a modern invention, one that infinitely expanded the possibilities of the home kitchen from the limited potential of a fireplace. Cooking in and around a fireplace presented a host of problems, including lack of precise temperature control, the inability to cook a number of things at once unless one had a built-in brick oven next to the hearth, the need to constantly turn meat and game so that they came out evenly cooked, and the general difficulty of managing a cooking process that was nothing more than a campfire moved indoors with all the dirt and lack of a convenient cooking surface.

Roasts were delicious when cooked over or near an open fire, but they had to be turned by hand. A dripping pan was placed directly underneath the roast—usually a cast-iron skillet or, in England, a pan used to bake puddings, Yorkshire pudding being the most famous and also the crispiest. They had grease, heat, and a hot pan—why not simply throw in a batter and bake it up? These breads were often served as a first course, not as a side dish, and when the coal cookstove came into fashion, these puddings had to be baked in an oven, which led to the invention of popovers.

Hand-turning the roast for a few hours was not ideal, so the simplest solution was to hang the roast by a string; a kitchen helper could give the roast a turn every few minutes, and it would spin back and forth until it came to a stop. It was then given another spin by the cook. (I have seen this done with a roasting chicken over a campfire at a Revolutionary War reenactment near our farm in Vermont.) Later improvements on this system were the
clock jack
, which used a system of pulleys and levers to automate this process, and the
spit engine
, which was spring-loaded and used a horizontal spit in front of the fire on which the roast was tied. The most ingenious solution was the
smoke jack
, which automatically rotated a spit above a wood fire. It was a horizontal wheel, installed in the chimney above the fireplace and filled with metal spokes set obliquely like the sails of a windmill. The spokes turned when a current of hot air and smoke hit them, in turn rotating another wheel to which a chain was attached. The chain stretched down to a wheel fastened to the spit so that the spit rotated. The hotter the fire, the faster the jack went around.

As the process of casting iron became more refined and with the advent of a sophisticated railroad network, coal cookstoves could be easily cast and transported. Early prototypes had an open-faced fire in the center of the cookstove, which meant that the foods nearest the fire cooked more quickly. Eventually, both wood and coal cookstoves had an enclosed fuel box and built-in dampers that allowed the heat to circulate evenly around the oven(s) once the wood or coal was well lit and up to temperature (although all the country wood-fired cookstoves that I have ever used had the firebox on the left side of the stove, thus making the left side of the oven hotter). This produced more even heating, which was particularly important for the afternoon baking when the fire had been allowed to decrease a bit from the fierce heat needed for breakfast (toast, chops, bacon, and so on).

Why coal and not wood? In the countryside where wood was free and plentiful, most folks did use wood cookstoves, but in the city the issue was storage. Coal is substantially more efficient per cubic foot, and therefore took up a whole lot less space in the basement coal cellar, and required less transporting of fuel within the house as well. I have cooked on both wood and coal cookstoves, and the difference is remarkable. Just to keep a cookstove hot for an eight-hour cook day, I have had to use ten to twenty lengths of oak; the coal stove needed no more than two large shovelfuls, although coal does require jostling to stay properly lit. (Coal stoves have a handle on the side that allows one to rotate the grates under the coals, thereby knocking off excess ash.)

So what was it like for a kitchen maid at the height of the Victorian period? She would start the day by raking the ashes at 5:00 a.m., saving the cinders that could still burn. (The light, useless coals were referred to as “clinkers,” since they clinked when jostled.) Then the flues had to be cleaned with long-handled brushes or a long chain tied to a stick. The stove had to be cleaned and black lead (carbon and iron) had to be applied to the front and sides. It was purchased in sticks and mixed with a drop of turpentine, then put on a brush, much like shoe polish: one brush was used to put it on, one to brush it off, and one to put on a shine. Steel or chrome on the range also had to be burnished. Wind was also a problem, causing a downdraft and a terribly smoky kitchen, but chimneys were usually built within the walls of a house in order to keep the flue warm, offering a better draw. On many occasions, I have tried to start a wood cookstove connected to a chimney mounted on the outside of our Vermont farmhouse on a cold morning, only to find it is almost impossible to warm up the air quickly enough to jump-start a good draft. We had to install an electric fan on top of the flue to help get things moving.

In the 1880s, home cooks had a wide array of fuels: wood (soft and hard), charcoal made from wood, anthracite coal, coke, kerosene oil, and gas. In cities, however, coal was the fuel of choice. To start a coal cookstove, the bottom was lined with paper, then fine pine kindling crosswise, and then hardwood, leaving plenty of air spaces. The direct draught (damper) and the oven damper were opened and the paper lit. When the wood was fully kindled, coal was added to fill the firebox. The coal was pushed down as the wood burned away, and more coal was added to keep it even with the top of the fire bricks. When the flue flame turned white, the oven damper was closed, and when the coal started to burn freely, but not red, the direct draught was also shut. Lincoln cautioned that coal was at its height when kindled and only needed sufficient air to keep it burning; when bright red throughout, however, it had lost most of its heat and was dying out.

Although the stovetops offered a variety of heat levels and were therefore quite convenient, the ovens were difficult to manage, since it took time to either increase or decrease their internal temperature. (After six months of experience on our cookstove, however, I found that I could raise the temperature of the ovens 200 degrees in about forty minutes, so heat levels could be managed more efficiently than I had thought. It is also possible that wood fire offers more rapid adjustments in heat levels than coal, which is a slower, steadier source of heat.) To deal with this, Lincoln suggested using a screen (another pan, for example) on a rack above or below the item cooking if the oven was too hot. This would moderate the temperature around the food by reducing the amount of radiant heat. Another method was used when roasting: adding water to the roasting pan in order to moderate the oven’s temperature. Lincoln also suggested that the cook get to know the various points in the oven to understand their relative temperatures. (Even modern ovens have a wide range of temperatures—sometimes 40 degrees or more—depending on where one measures inside.)

In the early days, there were no built-in thermometers, so cooks had to judge their ovens from experience, using either the flour method (sprinkle flour on the floor of the oven; brown is good, but black is too hot) or the paper method (if the paper burns when thrown into the oven, it is too hot; if it turns dark brown, the heat is good for pastry; light brown is good for pies; dark yellow for cake; and light yellow for puddings). Over time, however, oven thermometers became available. Joseph Davis invented a thermometer that had the bulb inside the oven and the tube with the mercury outside, attached to the oven door. He also made a thermometer that stood inside the oven. By the 1870s, most wood or coal stoves had hot-water reservoirs either within the stove or in an attached tank; metal pipes for circulating and heating water ran from the tank to the back of the stove.

Gas cookery did not become popular until 1900, although prototype gas stoves had been invented in the 1840s. The first commercially distributed gas stove was made by William W. Goodwin of Philadelphia as early as 1879. The Sun Dial range included two to four cooking burners and an oven and open broiler below. There were problems with rapid adaptions of this technology, including the high price of gas—over $50 per thousand feet in 1850, compared to under $2 by the end of the century—and the consumer’s fear that the gas itself would taint food during the cooking process. It wasn’t until 1896, however, that the Massachusetts Pipe Line Gas Company was capitalized at $5 million with the purpose of “conveying, transporting and distributing gas for illuminating, heating, cooking, chemical, mechanical and power purposes.”

Early on, we decided to use wood instead of coal for three reasons: we had plenty of room in the basement for storage; the smell of wood burning is nicer than coal, which has a noticeably unpleasant aroma; and because David Erickson, our stove expert, had made a grill insert for our stovetop that would allow us to grill indoors over a wood fire. Our first thought was that indoor grilling would throw off a great deal of smoke, but to our amazement, the draft was so strong in our cookstove that all the smoke was sucked down into the firebox and then out the flue. So we had an unexpected bonus—an indoor grill.

So, exactly how does our stove work? The firebox is located in the center of the stove; this is ideal since it heats both sides of the cooktop evenly. To add wood, one removes one of the circular cast-iron burners with a lifter and simply slides the wood into the firebox. (To start a fire, paper and kindling are added first, as with any wood fire.) There is a door in front of the stove that allows the firebox to be used much like a fireplace, but for cooking purposes it remains closed. There is a sliding draft control underneath the firebox at the front of the stove which is slid open for maximum air intake during lighting or when you want a rapid increase in oven or stovetop temperature. Then there are two additional controls above the cooktop and located between the two ovens. (The ovens sit fourteen inches above the stove, built into the brick surround, and are twenty inches deep by nineteen inches wide.) These are two “pulls.” One is a knob that can be pulled out to adjust the opening in the flue. The other controls the direction of the draft: when the knob is pulled, the hot air moves directly up the flue and out the chimney; when pushed in all the way, the heat is diverted around the ovens and heats them. These controls were also effective when grilling on the stovetop, since a few quick adjustments turned a moderate fire into a fierce source of heat.

Victorian cooks had to be remarkably inventive since the temperature of the stovetop varies depending upon location: right over the central firebox you get enough heat to boil water; off to the sides, the two burners are medium in heat; and toward the back, you get the equivalent of a hot plate or a low simmer burner—hence the origin of the expression “on the back burner.” Yet this is still a rather primitive setup, since the heat of the whole unit cannot be changed quickly and the internal temperatures of the ovens is usually the deciding factor, the stovetop being less crucial. So what do you do?

For starters, you might invent the bain-marie, whose original purpose was to keep sauces just below a simmer. These were long oval pans with small covered pots that fit neatly into them, usually resting on a trivet inside. These bains-marie were also partially filled with water, and since water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the sauces would never get any hotter. The braising pan, used to cook meat on the top of a cookstove, used a similar principle. Meat and broth were put into the pan, then the lid was put on and then sealed with clay or dough. The braising pan was put on the corner of the range to simmer, and live embers or coals were put on the concave top of the pan. This was, in essence, an indoor Dutch oven, which also used heat above and below the pot. Copper cookware was lined with tin, and pots had to be constantly retinned. Anyone who has used an old copper saucepan or skillet knows that if the pan is heated while empty for too long, the tin will simply melt and puddle at the bottom of the pan.

One story recounted the fate of several gentlemen who died from a ragout that had been stored in a copper vessel that was badly tinned. In the event that one was poisoned, the Victorian remedy was to beat the whites of a dozen eggs in two pints of cold water, administer to the victim, and repeat every two minutes until vomiting was induced.