Chapter 11
The Transformation of the Victorian Kitchen: The Lady of the House Rolls Up Her Sleeves
The original kitchen of our house on Worcester Square was located at the rear of the first floor, but since that floor had been converted into a rental unit, we did not have access to it. Our own kitchen, of more recent vintage, with cheap chipboard cabinets and Formica countertops, had been shoehorned into what used to be the music room off the parlor-floor dining room. Since we needed the income from the rental unit, we had to make do, but we were planning for the day that we could return the kitchen to its original location, once again using the 1859 hearth, which was, remarkably, still intact.
Ours was a modest affair compared to a true Victorian kitchen in a wealthy household in England. In the English countryside, kitchens were positioned so they faced either north or east to keep them cool. In an architectural approach, which also found favor here in the States, the Victorians did not like built-in cabinetry, since it encouraged mice and vermin. The center of the kitchen contained one very long worktable. There was often tile on the walls, or, in less wealthy households, the plaster walls were simply whitewashed. And if there was room, there was also a separate scullery for cleaning as well as a larder for food storage. Oilcloth was used as an early floor covering if one could not afford tile. (Take cloth, cover it with a thin coat of rye paste, then add paint and let it hang for two months.)
Linoleum was invented in 1863 by a British subject named Frederick Walton. In the 1870s, he founded the American Linoleum Manufacturing Company in New York City. Made from linseed oil, fillers, and ground cork on a burlap backing, linoleum was stronger and more durable than oilcloth and less expensive than tile, so it was favored primarily by the middle class. And for tin ceilings, far from being a luxury, they were nothing more than a cheap imitation of the carved plaster ceilings found elsewhere in the more public portions of the house.
Coal was stored in a separate area, in a shed attached to the back of the kitchen (one large home on Beacon Street in Boston still has its attached coal bin) or emptied into the a stone-walled chamber under the outside stairs leading up to the parlor floor. A coal chute was built into the sidewalk just in front of the stairs. It was covered by a piece of stone, which was lifted off for deliveries. Our coal bin was still intact, and we now use it as a wine cellar, the perfect spot given the constant below-grade temperature throughout the year. (One Newport mansion stored its coal underground on the other side of the main road; the coal was brought to the kitchen by an underground railroad.) Shelving was simple, the wood to make it was nothing more than pine (expensive materials were reserved for the upstairs living spaces used by the owners), and the kitchen was not much more than a room, sparsely furnished, with a stove, worktable, and wall storage. It was easy to clean, easy to move around in for the staff, and very, very hot all year round. Hoosiers, the one-piece minikitchens with storage, an expandable shelf, and a built-in flour dispenser, were not introduced until the turn of the twentieth century, although our kitchen still uses one, to hold spices, jams, extracts, oils, and baking chocolate.
Coal was dirty, and the Victorians were extremely keen on cleanliness. To wash glasses and silverware, they employed two pans, one with hot soapy water and the other just hot water, with ammonia added. A half cup of milk was often added to hard dishwater to keep hands soft and promote sparkling dishes. By the late nineteenth century, however, lots of prepackaged cleaning supplies were also popular, including Armour’s white soap. In the 1890s, there were outbreaks of smallpox and cholera, so sanitary measures became even more important in the kitchen. In this war against germs, householders used carbolic acid and water, chloride of lime, chloride of zinc, corrosive sublimate, sulfate of iron, sulfate of zinc, and chloride of lead, the latter employed for sinks and drains.
The Victorians were substantially different from modern epicures—the whole notion of an open kitchen with savory smells wafting out into the dining area would appall them. Under no circumstances did they want to smell the food as it was cooking, and that is one reason the kitchens were usually located in the basement or in the rear of the first floor. (Another Newport mansion has an entire wall of glass windows between the kitchen and the hallway. These windows were kept closed during cooking, and only opened when dinner was served.) In addition, the kitchen had rules about reducing odors: grease was not to fall onto the oven floor (if it did, hay or straw was immediately burned in the oven); a crust of bread was put into water used for boiling green vegetables and when discarded, either poured into a corner of the garden or, if in the sink, followed by carbolic acid. In very large English Victorian houses, the kitchen was as far away as possible from the dining room, sometimes connected by long passageways that had air ducts to keep them smelling fresh. If you have ever wondered about covered serving dishes, this is why they were invented: to keep the food hot on the sometimes long journey from kitchen to dining room. Plates and serving dishes had to be preheated, and many dishes sat over hot water as they traveled up to be served.
However, by Fannie’s time, the kitchen was no longer the culinary equivalent of a boiler room, the engine of the house, occupied only by the poorly paid lower classes. Domestic help, once cheap and plentiful, had become a rare commodity for most households. As a result, the lady of the house was now spending a lot more time in the kitchen. This was to change the culinary arts and American cooking forever.
The American kitchen depended on domestic help of one sort or another from the very beginning. The early-seventeenth-century colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth had brought servants with them, and black slaves were used by the Hudson Valley Dutch. Other families relied on the practice of indentured servitude—many who came to the New World paid for their passage through long work contracts—as well as apprenticeships. However, by the early part of the nineteenth century, many immigrants were paying cash for their voyage, so this source of cheap labor started to dry up. (Tickets were becoming cheaper and existing communities of immigrants here in the United States were providing economic assistance for the passage.) By the mid-nineteenth century, indentured labor had pretty much disappeared, but the ranks of young women available for paid domestic work were growing as urban centers started to prosper with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to this period, a woman might employ the daughters of neighbors (and therefore of the same social class) for short-term paid help, but these women usually went on to start their own families and were not career domestics. In fact, Fannie herself was a family helper for a short time before attending the Boston Cooking School.
The rapid growth of the middle class in the latter half of the nineteenth century brought with it the opportunity to work in either a factory or a domestic job. Yet many young women preferred to take factory work, even though it often paid considerably less than domestic work. One reason, not usually mentioned in history books, is that the public workplace was an excellent opportunity to meet men, whereas a domestic servant had little chance to socialize and start her own family, since she worked twelve-hour days and had but one half-day off per week. One example is cited in Family Life in 19th-Century America. The husband of a household in New York had advertised for a female copyist at $7 per week, while his wife was advertising for a cook at $10. Nevertheless, there was “one applicant for the cook’s place, while 456 ladies were anxious to secure the post of copyist.”
In addition, women now had a wider range of job options beyond factory work. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women could choose from a variety of (admittedly mostly uninspired) professions, including attendants in asylums, bookbinding and folding, bookkeeping, china painting, Christmas card making, clerkships, embroidery, feather making, glove making, hairdressing, indexing, laundry work, literary work, lithographing, medical drawings, and nursing. Some women became entrepreneurs, offering their services as spiritualists, helping the living speak to the dead. One such spiritualist was headquartered right across from our Boston home in the late nineteenth century.
This huge demand for domestic help coincided with the immigration of large numbers of Irish women, many of whom came to America alone or with small groups of other unmarried females. They were available; they were similar in culture to the families that hired them (black servants were often considered socially awkward, especially after the Civil War); they spoke English, unlike many other immigrants, and they had been sent to America in order to earn money to send it to starving relatives back home, so they had plenty of incentive to get a steady, well-paying job.
However, life as a domestic servant or cook was hard. Accommodations were basic, if not outright prisonlike, a small, barely furnished room in an attic or basement. Working conditions were also poor, since the lady of the house spent little or no time in the kitchen and therefore cared little for its convenience, health, or decoration. Cleaning was an ongoing, difficult activity, given the messy coal stove and the reliance on plenty of elbow grease and caustic ingredients such as lye. In addition, the cook had to manage all of the suppliers, and the foodstuffs, such as large cuts of meat, often had to be broken down and preserved in various fashions—this in an environment that had only one small icebox, an appliance that was only invented in 1827. Especially in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, cooking focused, in large part, on time-consuming preservation cooking methods that would extend the shelf life of perishables.
As the 1896 World’s Fair indicated, cooking at home had changed dramatically from the midcentury. A middle-class American family prior to the Civil War might have had two or three servants, but by the end of the century, it would be lucky to have just one. In 1870, one out of eight families had a domestic servant; by 1900, it was just one in fifteen. So the woman who headed up the household was now likely to be involved in the shopping and perhaps also helping with the cooking, even among the upper classes. As for the middle class, well, they were much less likely to be able to afford a cook.
Foods were no longer sourced locally—the railroads and steamships were bringing in ingredients from California and Europe. Convenience foods—canned and jarred fruits and vegetables, pancake mix, self-rising flours—were already in the market. Time-saving gadgets were making domestic labor less about drudgery and more about the joy of cooking and entertaining. By the turn of the twentieth century, convenience was key and industry was stepping up to the plate. The front door had been opened and American industry had stepped right in.
One reason for this explosion goes back to a simple invention in 1851: the Brown and Sharpe sliding caliper. It revolutionized tooling work, making manufacturing much more precise. This led to the building of steam engines, which, in turn, made the construction of kitchen appliances and tools that much easier—everything was made from water power prior to this. For example, the total of manufactured goods in the United States was just $199 million in 1810; by 1860, it had exploded to $1,885 million. The problem was that mass production of cookware and kitchen tools also meant that manufacturers were loath to invest in expensive dies or time-consuming processes. Simply put, many of these goods were poorly made and had little in the way of decorative features; why use two rivets when one would do? The result? A handle on a pot might fall off more readily, but the marketplace was soon packed with time-saving devices.
One of the early kitchen appliances was Johnson’s Patent Ice Cream Freezer, invented by William Young around 1848. The Dover eggbeater (there were also Miller’s, Earle’s, and Munroe’s Patent eggbeaters) was nothing more than a hand-cranked beater that replaced the common whisk for beating eggs or egg whites. (I used one as a kid in Vermont.) The well-respected cookbook author Marion Harland sang the praises of this device in her 1875 volume, Breakfast, Lunch and Tea: “But if I could not get another, I would not sell mine for fifty dollars—nor a hundred. Egg-whipping ceased to be a bugbear to me from the day I speak of . . . with it, I turn out a meringue in five minutes . . . with no after tremulousness of nerve or tendon.” One could also purchase the Zeppelin Potato Baker, an egg-shaped device that opened to accept just one potato at a time; or pick up the Novel Egg Boiler, which had a whistle attached to the boiler to let you know when the eggs were done.
Many manufacturers wrapped their products in a thick skin of pseudoscientific jargon, such as the “anti-Burning or iron Clad salamander bottom for sheet Metal kitchen utensils,” which was nothing more than a metal ring to be used between pot and burner. American industry was turning out so many new kitchen devices that in an 1894 article in the New England Kitchen Magazine, Mrs. Lincoln offered a list of 373 kitchen tools that the well-equipped home ought to have. One utensil store in Boston offered a catalog with over one thousand pictures showing “useful and ornamental goods for the parlor, dining room, kitchen and laundry.”
Many kitchens had been moved from the basement to the first floor, owing to the arrival of indoor plumbing. This meant that the kitchen could now be considered a room, not just a workspace, and the mistress of the house might actually care about its decoration. Paint colors such as tan, light gold, or soft green, rather than whitewash, started to come into use. In 1891, in Manners, Culture, and Dress of the Best American Society, Richard Wells pointed out that the kitchen should have fresh air, windows, plants on the window sill, an easy chair, and woodwork grained instead of painted. In fact, the home itself had become the focus of social status, given the rapid growth of the middle class. As a result, women started returning to their kitchens. The lady of the house might have started by helping her domestic workers with the lighter chores: washing glass and china, sweeping floors, ironing, opening the front door to receive visitors (something only done by domestic help just a generation before), and helping with the preparation for baking day, which was often on Wednesday.
AUGUST 2009. AFTER THE VAST MAJORITY OF FANNIE FARMER recipes we had tested turned out close to inedible or a country mile from being enjoyable, I was getting the feeling that Americans had almost no discerning palates whatsoever in the nineteenth century and that food was, for the most part, fuel rather than pleasure. Sure, Fannie was on solid ground when dealing with simple roasts, chops, puddings, and the like, but once she tried to tart up a dish or had to cook more delicate items such as vegetables or fish—well, the modern cook would find the food more compost than compelling. (To be generous, there is often something lost in translation, as when we made Fannie’s plum pudding which calls for “½ pound chopped suet.” It was inedible. Of course, we soon realized that the suet had to be rendered first, which improved the dish considerably, although it was still second-rate.)
I am not, however, throwing out the baby with the bath water. The nineteenth century did have some great food, including much of the food at Delmonico’s in New York, and a whole range of fruit desserts, including pies, cobblers, pandowdies, betties, and grunts. Plus, Fannie did know how to roast a chicken and make Canton sorbet. A few of her more unusual desserts—orange snow, for example—were actually rather good. But taken as a whole, the recipes in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book were a mediocre, middle-class lot at best. So here was the obvious question that I was going to have to answer by the end of this project: what had I learned about American cookery by cooking through dozens of Fannie Farmer recipes, reading through an entire year of Boston Globe food columns, and thumbing through dozens of nineteenth-century cookbooks?
For starters, we live in a country that always thought of food as necessity rather than art: it was fuel, it was medicine, or it was a social affectation like a new ball gown. In fact, I would state unabashedly that American cooks had little common sense in the kitchen compared to most of their European brethren when it came to good taste and good technique. They simply made the best of whatever was on hand. Cooking for Americans was more a matter of life and death, an issue of taking expensive local ingredients and putting them up for future meals, like squirrels storing nuts. And don’t forget that prior to 1850, the United States was still a rather primitive place, especially in the kitchen, and certainly compared to France or Italy.
Then, as soon as food manufacturers offered easier, quicker solutions to putting food on the table, we rushed to buy what they were selling—from good ideas such as powdered gelatin and compressed yeast, to really bad ideas such as Jell-O ice-cream powder, margarine, and canned vegetables. The Industrial Revolution did two things simultaneously: it deprived home kitchens of inexpensive labor, thus making the preparation of meals more onerous for the woman of the household; and it offered time-saving solutions that were wholeheartedly accepted by this same oppressed mother/cook/household manager. It was a winning combination.
Rather than look at our past as a halcyon culinary age, I conclude that it is simply a matter of different choices. Prior to 1850, the American home cook had no options; everything was local and natural, and therefore the food was probably reasonably healthy, albeit heavy. By the end of the century, American industry had completely changed the culinary landscape and increased the possibilities, from an expanded range of sources (California, Italy, France, Florida), to preparation method (fresh, canned, bottled), to natural versus ersatz (ice-cream powder versus homemade ice cream), to high quality versus adulterated (manufacturers using food coloring, some of it outright poisonous, to make bad food look inviting). The current culinary scene is merely an extension, albeit an exponentially more complex one, of what began in the era of Fannie Farmer. I am quite certain that we are no different from our Victorian ancestors, who would have been standing in line right next to us at McDonald’s. Convenience sells.
Although my admiration for all things Victorian is virtually boundless, I would choose to live in modern times as a food lover. Many of our choices seem to be going in the right direction, toward local, toward quality, toward an appreciation of well-prepared, healthy food. Maybe for the patient to get better, he first had to get sick. The Victorians had no sense of what they were about to lose; we do. Like a second marriage, we now know how good it can be—and how much worse it can get.
Our last savory course was to be game. Goose was our first choice because it is worthy of a fancy dinner party and because it is hard to cook well. I had developed a recipe years ago that involved simmering the goose in water for forty-five minutes and then letting it air-dry in the refrigerator overnight, uncovered, before roasting the next day. This seemed to render much of the excess fat under the skin, but the results were still lackluster. The big problem with goose is that the dark meat and the breast meat need to be cooked quite differently, as we were soon to discover. This meant deconstructing the bird and coming up with a whole new way to cook it.
GEESE WERE POPULAR IN ROME AFTER CAESAR CONQUERED Gaul, but in this country it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that they were bred in quantity because wild ducks and geese were so plentiful. However, geese were extremely valuable, not just for the meat, but also for down for comforters, feathers for mattresses and pillows, quills for pens, along with their fat and oil, which were used in cooking as well as in medicine. In fact, early on in American history, the feathers were more prized than the meat. The average goose produces about a pound of feathers per year, so feathers were often picked from live geese, a practice that was considered inhumane and therefore pretty much abandoned by the mid-1900s. Early farmers, mostly because their options were limited, had a more ecologically sound approach to most things, and used geese to control weeds in cotton fields, a major reason why the goose population in the South was much higher than in the North. By 1890, there were 8.5 million geese on American farms, which was only slightly less than the number of turkeys. Yet today, geese are rare and expensive, running up to $100 for a good-sized bird (about $7 a pound). Probably because their meat is less desired by consumers, ducks and geese have not been as refined genetically. The poor turkey has gone from large legs and small breasts to just the opposite—consumers love white meat—and they fatten up quickly and live only eighteen weeks; a “heritage breed” takes thirty weeks to bring to market. Geese are more like heirloom turkeys—they have not been turbocharged and redesigned to meet the needs of the marketplace.
In the nineteenth century, there were a few common approaches to preparing and roasting a goose. First off, a goose was never to be killed and eaten on the same day. It would hang for at least twenty-four hours, but in cold weather it could be hung for up to a week. Onion and sage were two common ingredients for the dressing, but many cooks mixed in mashed potatoes or bread crumbs as well. One particularly interesting recipe called for using sliced fingerling potatoes tossed in goose fat.
Fannie’s recipe from 1896 is as follows: “Stuff, truss, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and lay six thin strips fat salt pork over breast. Place on rack in dripping-pan, put in hot oven and bake two hours. Baste every fifteen minutes with fat in pan. Remove pork last half-hour of cooking. Place on platter, cut string, and remove string and skewers. Garnish with watercress and bright red cranberries, and place Potato Apples between pieces of watercress. Serve with Apple Sauce.”
Having roasted a number of geese over the years, we knew that the large amount of fat under the skin was going to be a problem. We also guessed that since modern birds are fed a fattier diet and are larger than their Victorian brethren, simmering the bird in water first might be a good idea, since it would melt a good deal of the fat and help to render the skin crisper. We tried steaming, air-drying, roasting, and parboiling, but the breast meat was still tough. The more it was cooked, the more it had an unpleasant gamy flavor, as well as being tough and chewy, similar to the taste of a cheap cut of beef from the round. Separating the cooking of the breast meat from the legs worked well; the dark meat, when thoroughly roasted, was tender, moist, almost shredded, while the breast meat was sautéed in a skillet and then finished to medium-rare in the oven. We thought that salting or brining might help, and indeed, we achieved crisp skin, juicy tender meat, and no livery flavor. Overnight salting instead of brining was clearly an improvement.
As for the stuffing, we started with a mashed-potato recipe used by Fannie and many other nineteenth-century cooks, but it was poorly rated by our tasters—too soft and boring. Next, we moved on to bread crumbs (we tested both dried and fresh) and mushrooms and ended up with a damp, mediocre result. Chestnuts were suggested by many nineteenth-century authors, so we included them as well. At first we boiled them in the shell, and then we found that roasting was actually easier and produced a better flavor.
ROAST GOOSE WITH CHESTNUT STUFFING AND JUS
If, once stuffing comes out of oven, the legs and breasts have cooled too much, simply put them on a tray in the oven for 5 minutes to quickly reheat. (Note: Legs can stay in longer if necessary, but to keep breasts from overcooking, don’t heat for more than 5 minutes.) We bard the goose, which simply means laying strips of salt pork on top of the legs as they roast. This adds flavor and also helps to protect the meat during the early portion of roasting. Our recipe for Goose Gravy and Goose Stock can be found at www.fannieslastsupper.com.
1 goose (12 to 15 pounds), neck and gizzards reserved for stock, liver reserved for stuffing (recipe follows)
Kosher salt
Ground black pepper
12 ounces salt pork, fatty, partially frozen, sliced into 1/8-inch slices
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
1 recipe Goose Gravy
1. To prep the goose: Remove wing tips; reserve for stock. Remove breasts, trim excess fat and silverskin, and score skin every quarter inch, being careful not to cut into flesh. Sprinkle each breast evenly on both sides with 1 teaspoon kosher salt per pound of meat; wrap tightly and refrigerate overnight. Crack backbone in half; with chef’s knife, cut through backbone at split and cut to remove leg section from remaining carcass; reserve for later use. Trim excess fat from legs, and score entire surface of skin with ¼-inch crosshatch, being careful not to cut into flesh. Wrap and refrigerate leg section and remaining carcass until ready to use.
2. Once goose is broken down, trim carcass of all skin and fat; save along with skin and fat trimmings from leg and breast for rendering. Cut into 2-inch pieces, place in medium saucepan, add ½ cup water, cook slowly over medium-low heat until skin has rendered, become crisp, and turned a light golden brown, 1 to 1½ hours. Strain through fine mesh strainer; discard cracklings and reserve fat for use in gravy and stuffing. Remaining fat can be frozen. One bird can yield up to 3 cups of rendered fat.
3. To cook the goose: Set oven rack at lower-middle position. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Unwrap leg section and carcass and pat dry. Place carcass on wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet. Pour ½ cup water into pan. Season leg section with 1½ teaspoons kosher salt and ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, then place over carcass. Lay salt pork over surface to cover. Roast for 1½ hours until salt pork is stiff, crisp, and just beginning to brown. Remove salt pork and discard and continue to roast for another 1½ to 2 hours until skin is rendered, crisp, and golden brown and thickest part of thigh reaches 190 degrees, turning pan halfway through. Reduce oven temperature to 250 degrees. Remove legs from oven and let rest 20 to 30 minutes.
4. While legs are resting, pat breasts dry, season with pepper. Heat oil in heavy-bottomed 10-inch ovenproof skillet over medium-high heat until beginning to smoke, about 3 minutes; swirl skillet to coat evenly with oil. Place each goose breast skin side down and cook until skin is fully rendered and golden brown, about 6 to 8 minutes. Flip and brown second side, about 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer skillet to oven and cook until thickest part of breast registers about 125 degrees on instant-read thermometer, about 15 to 25 minutes. Transfer breasts to wire rack and let rest 10 minutes. Slice breasts into 1/8-inch slices; carve legs and thighs and serve with stuffing and gravy.
Serves 12 (small servings).
CHESTNUT STUFFING
Don’t even think about using jarred chestnuts—they tasted moldy and made the stuffing inedible. The only commercial chestnuts we liked were from D’Artagnan.
1 goose liver, patted dry
Kosher salt
Fresh ground black pepper
2 tablespoonfuls rendered goose fat or butter
2 shallots, chopped fine (½ cup)
8 ounces sausage meat
36 chestnuts, roasted, shelled, and peeled; 24 of them chopped into ¼-inch pieces and the remaining 12 pounded in a mortar (Do not use jarred chestnuts)
10 ounces mushrooms, chopped finely
3 tablespoons finely chopped sage
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
2 tablespoons brandy
1 ounce fresh bread crumbs, fine
¼ cup goose broth
1 tablespoon rendered goose fat
4 to 5 drops lemon juice
1. Season liver with salt and pepper. Heat fat in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add liver and cook until well browned on both sides, but not cooked through, about 1 to 2 minutes per side; transfer to plate and refrigerate immediately. Add shallots to skillet and cook, stirring constantly, until just softened, about 1 minute. Add sausage and cook, breaking it up into small pieces (the largest, the size of a large pea), 4 to 5 minutes, until browned and just cooked through. Add chopped chestnuts, stirring constantly until heated through, about 1 to 2 minutes; transfer mixture to bowl.
2. Add mushrooms, ½ teaspoon kosher salt, and ¼ teaspoon black pepper to skillet and cook, stirring occasionally for about 2 minutes until pan begins to deglaze. Add mashed chestnuts and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture comes to boil; cook down until mixture is almost dry, about 6 minutes. Add sage and parsley; stir to combine. Add brandy and cook until dry, about 30 to 60 seconds. Transfer to bowl with sausage mixture. Chop liver into ¼-inch pieces. Add liver, bread crumbs, broth, and goose fat to sausage mixture and mix thoroughly to combine. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Transfer to an 8-inch Pyrex pan, cover with foil, bake in 375-degree oven for 15 minutes, remove foil, and bake until heated through and top begins to dry out and darken, another 10 minutes.
Applesauce
Our farm in Vermont includes an orchard that we planted over fifteen years ago: mostly apple varieties, but also plum, cherry, and pears, as well as raspberry, currant, and blueberry bushes. Here’s the deal. Apples are incredibly difficult to grow unless one is willing to dump a fair amount of poison on the trees (and, in turn, your backyard) to prevent apple maggots, powdery mildew, apple rust, coddling moth, aphids, mites, plum circulio beetle, scab—the list just goes on and on. It is, indeed, much like trying to control terrorists—they just keep reappearing in different forms.
The basic drill is as follows: start with a spray of dormant oil in the early spring to control insects that have overwintered in the bark of the trees. Then, once the leaves have appeared, spray a copper sulfate mixture in an effort to control fungi. After the blossoms have dropped and the bees are done with their work, the trees are supposed to be sprayed regularly, every two weeks or so, with a poison, usually something with foul-smelling malathion in it.
Given that many of our trees are next door to the farmhouse, we use only dormant oil and copper sulfate, which are nontoxic or pretty close. Then we discovered a product called Surround, a white powder made from kaolin clay that is dissolved in water and sprayed on the trees weekly, turning them white and providing protective covering, both from insects and sun damage. So, how did we do?
Are you kidding me? With about forty fruit trees, we produced no more than a few bushels of mostly scarred, misshapen fruit. If we had not wrapped the bottom of the trees with tape, animals would have eaten the bark, ringed the trees, and killed them. If we did not prune properly, the inside of the canopy would be too dark, the fruit wouldn’t grow well, and the trees would spend all their energy growing more shoots, not producing fruit. Then, unless the young trees were properly fenced, the deer would show, acting like greedy New Yorkers at the annual James Beard gala buffet, pushing each other aside to snag yet another handful of Michel Richard’s fried shrimp.
Finally, we got rid of all toxic sprays, simply using dormant oil and the Surround, which, truth be told, did not seem to be helping all that much. Oh, and did I mention the $4,000 irrigation system we had to install? Every time we weed-whacked around the trees, the hoses would get split and the water would simply shoot up into the air. And then, to top it off, we pressed most of the apples for cider, froze the containers, and promptly forgot about them until next year. And the bushel or two of apples that we placed in the root cellar? Well, they lasted about a month or so before turning black and soft. So, to complete the great circle of apple production, we dumped them outside for the deer.
As a result of this experience, I have great respect for anyone who grows apples, especially if they go down the organic road. Until the midnineteenth century, farmers were 100 percent organic, used plowing, washed the growing fruit with soap or ashes, or coated the trees with tar in an effort to combat pests. By the 1870s, farmers were experimenting with arsenic, pyrethrum (organic insecticide made from dried, ground chrysanthemum flowers), carbolic acid, hellebore (made from hellebore plants), petroleum, kerosene, whale oil, soap, hydrocyanic acid gas (extremely deadly), and lead arsenate. Gas engine–powered spray pumps came along in the 1890s, and by 1908, things had gotten so out of hand that a bill was introduced into Congress to supervise the use and sale of agricultural poisons.
Hand in hand with the development of insecticides came commercial fruit operations, and farms near large populations began selling excess fruit in local markets. The particular problem with apples, however, was that most of these varieties did not lend themselves to shipping or storage, so growers started to focus on varieties that made commercial sense, but not much culinary sense. In addition, apples grown without modern herbicides were often scarred, bug-infested, or otherwise unsuitable for sale. This meant that the bulk of an apple crop was destined to be pressed and turned into cider, this noncommercial fruit being referred to as “cider apples.”
The two leading commercial apple varieties of Fannie’s era were the Ben Davis and the Baldwin. Over time, of course, the demands of the marketplace reduced the diversity of apple varieties from thousands to a few dozen. By the late twentieth century, fewer than a dozen varieties were generally distributed and available at supermarkets. As one wag supermarket employee once told me, “We offer three apple varieties: red, green, and yellow.”
FANNIE’S APPLESAUCETO ACCOMPANY ROASTED GOOSE
This recipe is a bit unusual since it begins by making a sugar syrup that is flavored with ginger and lemon rind. Then the cored, quartered apples are added to the pot and cooked quickly, about 6 minutes. This is a relatively small recipe designed for our dinner party. You can increase it easily, although you will want to use the widest possible pot so that the apples can be cooked in one layer if possible. If not, stir them a bit during cooking. To double this recipe, cook the first batch of apples, remove them with a slotted spoon, and then cook a second batch in the same syrup. To quadruple the recipe, double the sugar syrup, use four times the amount of apples, and cook them in two batches. If you cannot find Rhode Island Greenings or Northern Spy, simply use one pound of crisp, tart apples.
1 cup granulated sugar
1 piece lemon rind, ½ inch by 2 inches
2 slices ginger, each about the size of a nickel and 1/8-inch thick
1 pound McIntosh
8 ounces Rhode Island Greening
8 ounces Northern Spy
1. Place the sugar, lemon rind, ginger, and 2½ cups water in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a lively simmer, stirring occasionally until the sugar is dissolved, about 3 minutes. Cover and simmer for an additional 3 minutes to allow ginger to flavor the sugar syrup.
2. Meanwhile, wash the apples, cut them into quarters, and remove the seeds and cores. When the sugar syrup is ready, add the apple quarters, cover, and cook until tender, about 6 minutes.
3. Using a slotted spoon, remove apple pieces and place into a food mill set over a medium-sized bowl. Remove and discard ginger and lemon pieces. Pass apples through food mill until only skins remain. Add cooking liquid to applesauce in small increments until desired consistency is achieved.
Makes about 1½ cups.