Chapter 15
Amy Shakes Her Jelly and José Andrés Falls in Love with a Mermaid
The final attendee list of twelve included Harry Smith (CBS), Renee Montagne (NPR), José Andrés (chef/owner Think Food Group), Mark and Kelly Bittman (New York Times), Amy and Bruno Dickinson (Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!), Gordon and Fiona Hamersley (proprietors, Hamersley’s Bistro, Boston), Brian Jones (former musical director for Trinity Church in Boston), Adrienne, and myself. Both Peter Gomes and Maggie Rodriguez from CBS had last-minute health problems. Renee was flying in on Friday evening from Los Angeles and spending the weekend. Mark, Kelly, Harry, and José (he was flying in from Spain) were arriving Saturday afternoon and staying at the house.
Cooking started on Tuesday, November 3. This was a day for stocks—a fumet, the calf’s-head stock, chicken stock, etc. When preparing the calf’s head, we remembered a note from a nineteenth-century recipe that suggested cleaning out the nostrils with a wire brush. We dismissed this as both unnecessary and rather primitive—after all, today’s calf’s heads were sold perfectly clean and well prepared, right? Well, one of the nostrils was plugged with a dark substance that turned out to be a compacted bit of hay. Hay? So, yes, we had to ream out the nostrils with a baby-bottle brush. This was the ultimate experience in locally sourced foodstuffs. In fact, Kate Kelly, the photographer recording the event, lost her appetite one evening while reviewing her photos of the making of the calf’s-head stock—she recalled the toothy grin of the calf’s mouth as it bobbed upward in the broth.
We decided to ramp up the oyster display, so we hired a company to carve a four-foot-high ice sculpture of a mermaid, the base of which would hold the Island Creek oysters. I reviewed a number of sketches, but it all came down to a simple choice: bikini-clad top or not? Well, the naked version sported spectacular breasts, somewhere on a continuum between the Little Mermaid and Annie Sprinkle, so I decided to let it all hang out. Of course, bare breasts would have been totally out of place in the Victorian era. They didn’t even like topless statues, having banned the nude figure of Bacchante from the Boston Public Library in 1897.
As we got closer to the big evening, we descended deeper and deeper into puff pastry hell. We had by now mastered making the puff pastry, but we were having considerable problems with it when it was rolled out, cut, filled, and fried. Some of the rissoles broke apart at the seams and others would not puff properly, even when we tried freezing them first. By early Saturday morning, we were still having only mixed success. We would fry up four rissoles; three would come out fine and one would fail. Finally, by midafternoon, Erin, our test kitchen director, seemed to have things under control. After hundreds of tests and days of failures, she finally realized that the puff had to be kept very cold—it warms up quickly when rolled and cut, especially in a kitchen with a large wood cookstove. The edges had to be pinched and sealed extremely carefully, then checked once more before frying. This was the ultimate fussy recipe and required a great deal of last-minute attention. José Andrés, who had arrived midday on Saturday, watched the testing process and commented, “What’s the problem? They’re beautiful! They’re delicious!” to which Andrea responded, “But they’re not perfect,” and then stamped her foot for emphasis. Finally, my favorite detail of the preparation: the brains were poached and left in a bowl in the refrigerator marked “Abnormal.”
Meanwhile, the kitchen, front parlor, and dining room were lit by Jim Hirsch, whose company High Output also handles Hollywood movies. It took about six hours to install the metal scaffolding from which were hung a series of lights, including two large pillow-shaped soft lights over the dining room table. Jim explained that light levels are expressed in foot-candles, and a small handheld meter was used to check the output. With the cameras wide open at the largest iris setting, we would still need about eight foot-candles, which was a lot more than I wanted. Instead of a dark, romantic room, this was bright Hollywood lighting. So the food and the conversation (not to mention our makeup artist) were going to have to pull us through, not romantic ambiance.
By Thursday, we had a crew of five cooking full-time: Andrea was handling the gelatins, Yvonne was in charge of the mandarin cake, and Erin, Keith, and Dan were prepping most everything else. In another last-minute complication, the calf’s-foot jelly was not setting up properly, although it had performed admirably in a dozen previous tries. We tried various strengths, and Andrea rode home at night on her bicycle, a forty-minute trip, with the gelatin packed in saddlebags for further testing. We finally found it necessary to combine three different concentrations of homemade gelatin with the lemon syrup to see which one would hold up while also providing the least rubbery texture. We finally realized that the problem was that all calf’s feet are not created equal—younger animals have more gelatin in their feet than older calves. What? We had gone to all the trouble of making homemade gelatin by boiling calf’s feet and now we had to worry about how old the feet were? A small packet of Knox was looking rather attractive.
Suddenly it was Saturday morning, the day of the party. I made breakfast for the crew—buttermilk waffles made from a mixture of four flours plus cornmeal, a recipe inspired by the original 1890s Aunt Jemima pancake mix. We were almost out of wood for the stove, so we had a half cord delivered the day before as backup. However, it was not completely dry and therefore did not burn as well. We decided to use this greener oak until late afternoon, when we would have to crank up the cookstove, and then use up the last bit of our well-seasoned wood.
The camera crew showed up in the late morning to set up the control room, install hidden microphones in the flower arrangements on the dining room table, and run the various cables between the cameras and the monitors. Michael, our maitre d’, and his crew (his wife, Cindy, Jake, Debbie, Emile, and Melissa) arrived midafternoon and ran through the order of the courses—which menu items had sauce and might be difficult to transport upstairs, for example. They were briefed on the cheese course, the cordials, and the timing; dishes were to be served every twenty minutes.
As the afternoon progressed, the pace started to increase. Renee Montagne and José Andrés were already in-house. Mark Bittman and his wife, Kelly, turned up later in the afternoon, as did Harry Smith. Meanwhile, the kitchen was literally heating up, since meats had to be roasted and a good bed of coals would be necessary for grilling the salmon later in the evening. Brenda Coffey, our makeup artist, set up shop in the library. Showers were taken, suits and dresses donned, and then suddenly, after over two years of research, recipe testing, and intense planning, it was showtime.
The front parlor of our Victorian brownstone is fourteen feet wide by twenty-nine feet long, with a curved front wall featuring two high windows. These overlook a small oval English-style square populated by the few remaining four-story-high chestnut trees and a fountain with a center sculpture featuring dancing children. A fireplace with an ornate carved white marble mantel is on one wall; opposite are two richly varnished nine-foot-high walnut doors leading to the front hall. My great-grandfather, Harper Pennington, was a portrait artist and contemporary of Whistler, and two of his paintings are on the wall flanking the doors—one a standard-issue military portrait and the other, smaller but nicer, of my great-aunt Kid as a child in a white Victorian-style frock. A long, rather primitive landscape adorns the opposite wall, a second-rate painting of an early settler gazing on the Schenectady Stockade and the Mohawk River. The back of the room is framed by two pocket doors with etched glass that open up into the dining room, which itself has a large bay window and a fireplace that used to burn coal (and now burns wood).
The ice mermaid was standing on a well-lit table between the two front windows, replete with oysters. The sculpture was spectacular—her thick hair drifted back as if through water, her tail swooped up and around, and every scale was minutely carved. Champagne bottles stood askew in a large bucket of ice as if slightly tipsy. The silver 1880s punch bowl, resplendent on the center table, was kept chilled by a floating ring of ice. A hint of smoke came from the burning logs in the fireplace, the flue not yet heated sufficiently to stop a curl or two from escaping from the black iron inset in the marble surround.
The room started to fill. Oysters were splashed with mignonette and slurped down. The champagne corks were popped and punch was poured. The conversation grew louder. Newcomers stood and admired the mermaid, while others were deep into the politics of Afghanistan or anecdotes from their professional lives in radio or television. Finally, it was time to move into the dining room and be seated.
The dining table seated twelve, with the fireplace on one end and a shallow butler’s pantry with folding doors on the other. There was a grandfather clock on one side of the fireplace, and a small table for staging the food next to it, plus a large mahogany crockery cabinet along one wall. The bay window was filled with a mustard gold upholstered settee, with sprouting ferns as bookends. Hand-inscribed placecards held by silver calla lilly bud–shaped holders were at each setting. Three small arrangements of red roses were set in the middle, surrounded by fern. The chandelier was bedecked with copious greenery. The silver candlesticks rose from a circle of flowers sprouting hand-dipped gold candles; a gold-rimmed charger was set at every place; and the tablecloth, custom-made for the evening, matched the pewter and gold pattern of the wallpaper with an acanthus leaf ribbon pattern and gold trim with tassels around the hanging perimeter. To my left were Renee, Harry, Brian, Amy, and Gordon; Adrienne was seated at the opposite end. To my right were Fiona, José, Bruno, Kelly, and Mark. The candles and fireplace were lit, the parlor doors partially closed, and we were seated.
Ever since college I have had the same dream once a month like clockwork. It is the “I am sitting naked in front of the queen” dream—the one in which my humiliation is so profound that I am frozen into inaction. Well, here I was, with chairs filled with our distinguished guests, some of them having traveled thousands of miles, and now I had to announce that they were about to be served a soup made from a boiled calf’s head with garnishes made from the poached brains of said calf. I quickly regained the use of my voice and explained the nature of the first seated course. Amy, our resident humorist, responded cheerfully, “Well, that is good to know.” While trying to maintain my share of amiable chatter, I discreetly looked about to see how the brain balls were selling. The clear soup was a winner, but most guests left one or two floaters behind. Had I invited the wrong guests to dinner?
Things picked up when José Andrés got into gear. Proving that he knew something about almost everything, he noted that the Amontillado Sherry served with the soup was made in his wife’s hometown in Spain. (Later on, however, when he was singing the praises of a can of fresh clams sold for the princely price of $80, his enthusiasm for all things culinary seemed to lurch out of control.) Then I was rescued by the rissoles, which were served piping hot, salty, crisp, and filled with chicken with three variations: duxelles, blue cheese with dried cherries, and chicken liver with caramelized onion. With the 1996 Heimbourg Pinot Gris, it was a stunner, and everyone was back onboard with the food. Just like a rock band, I thought, never start with your best song. (I discovered later that evening that since we were short on long-handled spoons, Yvonne and Andrea’s hands had been frequently splashed with hot oil when frying the rissoles.)
Perhaps the best course was up next, the lobster à l’Américaine. Once again, our Spanish chef opined on the origin of the term l’Américaine. His claim was that this was a common dish in the south of France but also in the Mediterranean, including on Minorca, and hence the term l’Américainea long-shot bastardization. Other theories claim that the original dish came from Brittany, which, at one time was called Amorica (hence, Américaine).
Regardless of nomenclature, one mouthful of the rich tarragon-scented sauce would be sufficient to convince even Rachael Ray that making homemade fish stock and then combining it with pan-sautéed lobster shells to forge a deeply resonant sauce was worth every second and dollar of expense. “This is why we cook,” I thought, “to transform the ordinary ingredients of our trade—fennel, peppercorns, brandy, white wine, and leek—into something extraordinary, a combination that hints at a more perfect state of being.”
All of a sudden, the kitchen ran into serious trouble and almost burned down the house. A wood cookstove is not hard to heat up—you add wood, open the vents underneath the firebox, open the flue all the way, and let it crank. Once you get up to temperature, you close the vent and shut the flue until it is just barely open, in an effort to retain the heat instead of allowing it to disappear up the chimney. The venison had been larded with salt pork and required a very hot oven indeed—we were using 600 degrees.
In a burst of enthusiasm, however, Keith, our sous-chef, had cranked the oven so high that the oven thermometer had rotated off the scale, well past 600 degrees—creating, in effect, a pizza oven. (A few days later, it occurred to me that twelve hundred pounds of red-hot iron surrounded by wood, 150-year-old lathing, and plaster was probably a near-miss in terms of spontaneous combustion.) After ten minutes of roasting, Erin discovered that the ends of the salt pork had actually charred. So there they were, snipping off the burned ends of the salt pork and using a pastry brush to wipe them away. Then they had to finish roasting the venison with the oven door open to cool things down.
But, oh, the venison once again reminded me that we live in lackluster times, an era without appreciation for the exalted role of the French sauce. For the saddle of venison, we had turned back the clock and roasted venison bones, made homemade currant jelly, and simmered our own veal stock, all in an effort to transform two thin slices of roasted venison loin with a currant jelly sauce that was sweet yet bracing; a sauce that made one shut one’s eyes just for a second in order to appreciate the rich colors of taste.
The overheated oven had transformed the kitchen into the boiler room of the Titanic. One of the lightbulbs exploded from the heat, the brass pulls on the drawers in the center worktable could not be touched with bare hands, and the soapstone counters in the scullery in the next room were hot to the touch. An instant-read thermometer sitting on the air conditioner that was blasting cold air read an incredible 93 degrees, although it was probably 30 degrees hotter by the stove. Erin was wearing poly-blend chef pants, which started to melt onto her thighs; Keith, Andrea, Dan, and Yvonne had to crouch down by the stovetop while working in order to avoid singing their eyebrows in the rush of heat, especially when frying the rissoles and artichokes.
For service, Debbie, Cindy, and Melissa were wearing long skirts that made it nearly impossible to climb the stairs to the dining room, so they did what many women have done before them—they hiked them up to midthigh, pinning a few folds of material under one arm. (One wonders if Victorian housemaids did the same when nobody was looking.) Meanwhile, upstairs, there was the usual wine-fueled chatter about the order of the dishes on the menu, the fish course appearing after the venison, and then the goose just before the jellies and dessert. Modern chefs, including Gordon Hamersley, thought this was a bit odd, starting light, going heavy, pulling back to a fish course, and then heading into another full-flavored dish before winding down. I had reviewed dozens of menus from the period, and game was, indeed, served after a sorbet and before the fruit or jellies and then dessert.
Here’s the problem: when serving a twelve-course meal, you would not want to start light and then move toward heavier and heavier food in a slow, inexorable march to gastric overload. (“Just one more chocolate, sir?”) As with a Beethoven symphony, one needs pacing, a brisk prestissimo followed by a course of adagio, then largo (think funeral march), and then a slightly faster andante, a quick vivace, and a slow lento before moving onto a lively presto jelly course and a crescendo of cake for dessert. The modern notion of light to heavy is just too streamlined, too one-dimensional, for such a puffed-up culinary undertaking. And we were not suffering from the back-and-forth wine service, from Pinot Gris to Bordeaux, from Riesling to Burgundy. I was starting to feel like some rich, useless Victorian fop.
The trick for grilling the salmon indoors was to create a thick bed of fiery coals, since the addition of fresh wood only insulates the fish from the heat of the fire. Since Keith had almost burned down the house an hour before, the good news was that the coals were perfect for grilling, so two of the “burners,” the round cast-iron inserts, were removed and the oblong grilling insert was put into place, preheated, and oiled frequently to build up a nonstick surface. The salmon turned out rich and moist with a hint of wood smoke and skin that was near black and perfectly crisp; it balanced perfectly with the caper vinaigrette. The fried artichokes were our salad course—hot, crunchy, and fresh-tasting with a bright splash of lemon. (The cooks found that chopsticks were quite useful in the frying process, a notion that would have been quite foreign to Fannie.)
Meanwhile, Harry Smith was wondering what planet José Andrés was born on, given his optimism about the changing food scene. Harry, a hard-news reporter from the Midwest, felt that José was speaking to an elite audience, the sorts of home cooks who know farci from farfalle—whereas Harry was more familiar with what folks were having for dinner at the Kansas City airport. They were, at once, irreconcilable yet well-paired: José brimmed with vast stores of kinetic energy, while Harry tempered his tremendous intellect and held back his coiled wit just enough to keep the conversation pointed but flowing pleasantly.
The Canton sorbet was up next, a simple frozen ginger palate cleanser, admittedly the bane of third-class French restaurants. (This was not one of my favorite dishes—I prefer the Victorian notion of a small glass of champagne to cleanse the palate rather than a fruited ice—but it was well conceived, not too sweet, and with enough bite to dismiss the notion of dessert.)
As for the roast goose, this was the course that was the diciest of all. Let’s face facts: goose is almost impossible to cook well. The breast meat is often tough and livery, and the dark meat is rarely cooked long enough to render it tender. Our final method called for cooking breasts and legs separately, the legs and thighs on top of the bare carcass—using it much like a roasting rack—the breasts sautéed and then finished in the oven. When the oven was opened and the bird was checked, however, it turned out that the legs had slipped to one side, like a tenderfoot off a saddle. This was quickly remedied and the final dish was almost perfect, the breast meat still a tad chewy although the flavor was excellent. However, the dark meat was a triumph, both moist and tender. A gravy based on homemade goose stock worked well, as did the earthy chestnut stuffing and the fresh-tasting, slightly tart applesauce. When cooked properly, it was clear that goose is the epicure’s version of turkey—more complex and deeply flavored, but much harder to cook and sauce.
Next, we were on to the three homemade Victorian jellies. Andrea had made two of each jelly—the multilayered lemon jelly with a pineapple design on top, the rhubarb jelly filled with a strawberry Bavarian cream, and then the Spätlese jelly with a spiral of cubed port jelly. If you have never had a homemade jelly, let me offer you this description. The first thing one notices is the flavor—it is not overly sweet or sharp-tasting like a child’s notion of lemon or rhubarb, too bright and candylike for the grown-up palate. Instead, the flavors are bright but subtle—they change on the tongue as they melt, a slow process of evolution as the first cool bite of jelly slowly transforms, melting across the tongue and slipping across the pebbled surface down into the mouth, the flavors expanding and becoming less certain, less one-dimensional. Then, if the mold has a secondary flavor, one is introduced to the taste of port or the foamy change of pace offered by strawberry Bavarian, to remind us once again that this is a more complex, adult offering. At the same time, the shape and colors of a perfectly conceived jelly mold are intensely childlike and one finds it hard to stop grinning like a four-year-old at a birthday party. Amy Dickinson, with unabashed enthusiasm, grabbed the platter with the lemon jelly and started shaking it playfully. She evidently couldn’t help herself. That started the jellies moving around the table, poked and jiggled, everyone digging in for seconds. The formality of a Victorian meal—a place where any sort of human appetite or uncontrolled behavior was abhorred—was clearly a lost cause.
The final course, the mandarin cake, was the ultimate Victorian fantasy dessert. The center portion, a classic fluted savoy cake, stood almost a foot tall and was filled with pastry cream. The base layer, one large round of almond-orange cake covered with white marzipan, provided the foundation. Around the base of the savoy cake were half-tangerines filled with frozen tangerine sorbet; circling the fluted savoy cake were arranged a series of quartered tangerines filled with alternating layers of tangerine and almond jellies. Sugared lemon leaves were added for decoration. All on one plate, one had a quick tour of the French dessert cart: luxurious warm pastry cream, ice-cold orange sorbet, a perfectly moist almond cake, the intense concentration of almond flavor in the marzipan icing, and then a bright note of clementine jelly and a baseline of almond blanc mange as a partner. The final course—coffee, crackers, cheese, bonbons, and liqueurs—was to be served in the parlor with the rapidly melting ice mermaid. (It was duly and unkindly noted that her figure now resembled that of a naked woman who has had at least two kids.) It was now 11:30 p.m., four and a half hours after we had been seated for dinner.
At midnight, as the guests and the kitchen and waitstaff (who had already been enjoying the leftover punch from the first course) were enjoying the port, Benedictine, Chartreuse, Framboise, etc., the folks from Brookline Ice and Coal showed up to remove the mermaid. The tail had to be removed—hacked off is more like it—so it could be loaded back up on a dolly and stepped down the outside stairs to the street. Then she was summarily tossed into a pile of leaves in the park as José Andrés begged to have this beautiful woman, the woman he “loved,” brought up to his bedroom, “Immediately!” (If you ever want a lively dinner party, all you have to do is invite José.)
Finally, around 1:00 a.m. or so, Brian Jones started playing show tunes and Harry, being a fan of Oklahoma!, got Amy Dickinson and myself to sing the theme song, “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” and then a few favorites from My Fair Lady. The upstairs and downstairs were joined, the evening was running down, a few guests started to retire upstairs clutching green bottles of Apollinaris water to head off the inevitable hangover, and it was no longer showtime. The Dinner Party of the Century was over.
Was this just a bunch of overprivileged gourmands enjoying ridiculous overconsumption while the rest of the country was stuck in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression? There is an undeniably frivolous notion to this sort of undertaking, given the nature of the menu and the cost of testing and preparing the food. But as the Cambridge don said, “The best thing about it is that no one can make any use for it for anything . . . this uselessness is the highest kind of use. It is kindling and feeding the ideal spark without which life is not worth living.”
One hint that there was, indeed, some deeper meaning in all of this: the kitchen staff, after seventeen hours of cooking over a very hot wood cookstove, said they had loved the experience—the heat, stoking and maintaining the fire, using a large cast-iron work surface to tend stocks, sauté goose breasts and lobster tails, and keep sauces warm. In fact, as I discovered later, they had moved more and more of the preparation from the conventional gas cooktop in the smaller side kitchen to the Victorian cookstove, since they found it both more fun and, oddly enough, more efficient.
The Victorians lived in the most progressive, rapidly changing era in all of human history. In just one generation, they went from local to international, from coal cookstoves to gas, from slow food to fast food, from rural to urban, from family enterprises to factories, from carts to cars, from preservation to refrigeration. The promise was one of change, one of outgrowing the human condition, overcoming our weaknesses—hunger, alcoholism, poverty, poor nutrition—through the application of scientific methods: hence, the creation of domestic science. Technology would help us to outgrow our foibles, move past our baser human instincts, put aside the day-to-day bother and mess of living, including the cooking and the cleaning. Science and improved methods of social organization would allow women to achieve their higher artistic goals, leaving behind the drudgery of daily living. This has always been the promise of science, to alleviate the less desirable aspects of the human condition. The problem, of course, is that technology has taken away too much of what defines humanity, leaving us with little that goes to the heart of being a useful, happy person.
That being said, the notion that advancements in technology may ease the most appalling aspects of the human condition, including disease and hunger, is perfectly sound. But on some level, I suspect that we wish to leave all of the human condition behind because of our modern distaste for what used to be called “daily chores.” By returning to an earlier culinary period and employing their methods, we put this proposition to the test. Has the relentless march toward convenience—from roasting meat over a fire to heating frozen meals in a microwave—allowed us the extra time to explore our artistic selves, thus providing happiness? Or, to put it another way, can time be saved so that it can be better spent? Based on the evidence of the last fifty years, the answer is no. Clearly, what modern civilization has done with those additional six hours per day not spent cooking and cleaning has been mostly a waste of time, since over five of those hours are spent watching television. And the hundreds, even thousands, of hours spent on this project were well spent indeed, hard work that brought us to the height of the joy of being human. In other words, given lots of free time, most of us have absolutely no idea what to do with it. The myth of leisure is just that—yet another silly misunderstanding about human nature.
Happiness is derived, I propose, from being useful—from putting one’s oar in the water and helping move the boat forward. This is an entirely unoriginal notion, but it bears repeating. It is also no surprise that happiness is enhanced when work is shared and appreciated by others. Excessive leisure, it might be stated, is a recipe for unhappiness. If you doubt this proposition, just spend some time in a retirement community full of folks who have nothing worthwhile to do other than planned activities. (I note that in our small Vermont town, old-timers want nothing more than to be useful. In his early nineties, Russell Baines was strapped to a riding lawn mower with extra seat belts and allowed to mow on Sunday afternoons when he was rescued by neighbors from the old-age home. They even took a picture of him mowing and left it at his bedside so he could enjoy seeing himself at work during the week.)
Life is not about extremes. We consider civilization as a continuum, always moving forward and getting better. Yet history denies that absurd notion—witness the dark ages after the inestimable glories of Rome. As William Manchester so aptly put it, the twelfth century was a “world lit only by fire.” Just as a backbreaking schedule of cooking and cleaning is not ideal, neither is its opposite, a life with no responsibilities. Our future lies not in the ultimate life of pleasure after climbing out of the mud and squalor of the dark ages; it lies in finding the point along history’s ragged time line that offers the most satisfying life. Much like a pendulum that comes to rest, not at the extremes of the arc but at the center point, as determined by the laws of nature, humans find the greatest happiness when there is still work to be done, when we still have connections to the natural world, when we can balance the joys of physical labor with the pleasures of the mind. Teddy Roosevelt knew this lesson better than anyone: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
And speaking of work, cooking over a coal stove that is only twenty-five inches high and blistering hot reinvested the process of cooking with a sense of very hard work indeed. (This made us wonder why the stovetop was so low. Okay, the Victorians were about four inches shorter on average, but even if one was a modest five feet tall, a two-foot-high cookstove is still on the low side. One answer is that if one were used to cooking over a fireplace, any elevated stovetop was a huge improvement. The other, more compelling reason, is that tall stockpots are much easier to look into, and lift up and off, when sitting on a low cooktop. Some stockpots were so large and heavy that it took two people to move them.) It was also bloody hot—so hot that when the ovens were cranked up for roasting meat, the cook could get a nice sunburn just by standing next to the stove and stirring a pot. And burning oneself was a frequent occurrence: when the wood was added, when hot handles were grabbed without a pot holder, when one brushed up against twelve hundred pounds of blistering cast iron or picked up the lid lifter that had been sitting on the warming shelf.
The lesson of the Victorians and the Victorian kitchen is that they were at a midpoint—industrialization was creating wealth and convenience, yet they still had one foot in the day-to-day routines of the past. They were at the very beginning of a period in which refrigerators and gas stoves were coming into use, and Jell-O would make the fabulous Victorian jellies obsolete; yet foods were still mostly local, and the family sat down to dinner each day at noon. It was a bit of this and that, a hands-on life free from the horrors of survival (at least among the wealthier Victorians) and not yet severely diminished by the soul-sucking horrors of industrial food and mass-market entertainment.
There is no tomorrow. Time cannot be saved and spent. There is only today and how we choose to live it. The future is unknowable and unpredictable; it offers no clear path to happiness. Science will not save us. Each of us, then, needs to cobble together a daily routine filled with basic human pleasures, wedded, to be sure, to the best that modernity has to offer. It is a life of compromise rather than extremes. It is a touch of the old and a taste of the new. And cooking, it seems to me, offers the most direct way back into the very heart of the good life. It is useful, it is necessary, it is social, and it offers immediate pleasure and satisfaction. It connects with the past and ensures the future. Standing in front of a hot oven, we remind ourselves of who we are, of what we are capable of and how we might stumble back to the center of happiness. Effort and pleasure go hand in hand.
At the end of the evening, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, there was a warm glow in the kitchen, and not just from the stove. We were hot, tired, and sweat-soaked, our legs drained of energy, having been on them all day, but blissful as well. The kitchen had the forest scent of oak, of wood smoke and hot iron, of roasted larded venison, of rich, all-day veal stock and the lingering taste of grilled salmon and the sharp memory of frosty ginger sorbet, mixed with the almost sexual melting on the tongue of Spätlese jelly freckled with small bursts of sun-ripened port.
Something had happened to us cooks—we became fellow travelers, saddle-sore to be sure, but closely joined as well, like pieces of our massive cookstove. We were in the midst of a long, exhausting journey to a place where the modern kitchen no longer travels. We realized, when we were in for both a penny and a pound, that cooking transcends dinner—it is a thing unto itself, a distant shore that is worth every mile, every bead of sweat. Those who take the journey are transformed along with the pursuit of an idea that has no purpose other than the satisfaction of imagination and a fleeting moment when we share with others our food, our hard work, and our invitation to supper.