Chapter 2
In Which We Move to the Wrong Side of the Tracks
The house or, more explicitly, the 1859 brick Victorian bowfront, was located in a neighborhood referred to as St. Elsewhere of TV show fame, just one block from Boston City Hospital and on the wrong side of the tracks. The elevated trolley that ran down the center of Washington Street was demolished in 1987, and, sadly, the social demarcation still existed. The neighborhoods east of Washington Street (and therefore farther away from Back Bay and the central shopping district) were still considered to be a no-man’s-land in terms of real estate value and personal safety, even though the physical dividing line, the one that had separated our neighborhood from the rest of the South End, was now gone. In fact, the entire South End, the term for the 526 acres of Victorian housing that was the flip side of Back Bay, was a complete train wreck in 1991, suffering from a statewide depression and collapse in real estate values. Thousands of adventurous baby boomers had invested in South End property, only to see their condominiums plummet in value, making them hostage to an area of Boston that now looked down and dirty instead of up and coming.
How bad was it? It was such a tough neighborhood that in April 1991, my wife, Adrienne, spent a whole morning parked outside the building to check out the foot traffic before we committed to the purchase. It was not encouraging. She noted, among other details, that drug dealers hid their stash underneath loose sidewalk bricks so they would be clean if searched. Another aspect of South End living was revealed by a long-time resident across the park, who told us of the day she returned home with her groceries. She found her back door blocked by a working girl pursuing the world’s oldest profession with a local customer. She asked them politely to move over so that she could get into her house; they grudgingly complied. A few years later, we were told about a resident of West Newton Street who decided to move when he came out one morning to find blood all over his Toyota—a man had been stabbed on the hood during the night. This same street had, for many years, boasted of a mobile car repair service; the mechanic worked on your car where it was parked, scavenging spare parts from other cars around the neighborhood.
My immediate impetus for the move was a call in January 1991 from an old friend who had recently purchased East West Journal and was looking for a partner to come to Boston and transform the publication from a money-loser to a money-maker, a process that took two years and a name change to Natural Health. Meanwhile, I was learning a bit more about the South End. The good news was that hundreds of buildings had been untouched since the Victorian era—that is, the owners had lacked sufficient funds to modernize or otherwise destroy the original interior structure, and the exteriors were protected by law. Most of the South End was built in the late 1850s and 1860s, the larger homes being close to Washington Street, the main thoroughfare into Boston in the old days, with five full stories plus a basement. Smaller homes with a narrower footprint were built closer to the center of town and Back Bay.
After showing us a series of smaller homes in better neighborhoods, our Realtor finally, and somewhat reluctantly, drove us down to a square adjoining Boston City Hospital. At the time, this was the worst part of the South End, and so close to Roxbury that the post office, to this day, labels our mail as “Roxbury,” rather than “Boston.” As we turned into the square from depressed and hard-luck Washington Street, the first thing we noticed were the gutters layered with compressed trash and the narrow park in the middle of the square that was windswept with coffee cups, loose papers, the odd used condom, and the contents of garbage bags that had been eviscerated by razor-wielding homeless seeking deposit bounty. Putting aside the forlorn and abandoned look of the square, which was in reality a long, narrow oval, the good news was that a new fountain had just been installed and the park was dotted with massive Dutch elms, some of them reaching almost as high as the five-story Victorian townhouses that ringed the park. It was easy to see former glory here, although a wasting disease had clearly set in decades before and the patient was on its last legs.
But then, all of a sudden, we were standing in front of our home-to-be, and it was love at first sight. It was a classic Boston redbrick Victorian: a bowed front taking up two-thirds of the width of the house and then a flat face for the rest, with two dormer windows on the top floor built into an angled slate roof. A steep procession of steps led up to the main entrance on the second floor, with a small arched-top entrance tucked under the stoop.
Adrienne and I climbed the length of steps and then passed through two sets of double doors into the second-floor parlor level. We had, in just a few steps, traveled back a hundred years. The foyer was small, the house dark and quiet, the air stale as if the windows hadn’t been opened in years. To the right were the stairs with a curving mahogany wood banister; light filtered down softly from the fifth floor through a skylight positioned over the stairwell. There was a short hall straight ahead, and to the left were a pair of magnificent dark walnut doors that opened into the front parlor. This room featured twelve-foot-high ceilings, curved front windows overlooking the park, and a fireplace with marble mantels and carved surrounds. Two pocket doors with etched glass panes led into the dining room, which had its own fireplace and double windows. The plaster ceiling moldings were elaborate with medallions and cornices. Chair rails ran around the walls. The only detail that required immediate attention was the raspberry eggshell paint—a color that must have been chosen by someone who was blind drunk during a blackout.
We climbed one set of stairs to the third floor, where we discovered a library, also facing the park, with a working fireplace, high ceilings, and Corinthian columns on either side of the doors. As we kept moving up, we saw that the two top floors had the same basic floor plan: a large room in the front with a small dressing room or bedroom off to the side and a slightly smaller bedroom in the back of the house with an adjoining bathroom. The top floor had dormer windows, and the basement still contained two original soapstone sinks for doing the wash, plus an intact coal bin enclosed by massive stone blocks. There was two-car parking out back, and since none of the former owners had much money, the house was more or less intact, with the exception of locks cut into doors and the first and top floors having been walled off as rental units. Over the years, as we removed the two apartments and restored the house to its original plan, we had a total of five bathrooms, six bedrooms, a library, an office, a large playroom on the fifth floor, a full basement, a large living room, a good-size dining room, a butler’s pantry, working sinks in two of the bedrooms, and plenty of closets—all for the price of a one-bedroom condo on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Clearly, this was the perfect home to raise four kids. The five-story layout provided plenty of privacy, but there was one problem: we felt like prisoners in our own home. The neighborhood offered the constant scent of personal danger: screams in the middle of the night; gangs of young kids constantly moving through; prostitutes, drug dealers, and the sense that nobody who could afford to live somewhere else would be here.
The first six months was like a first-time tour with the Peace Corps—we had a severe case of culture shock. We served on the board of the local neighborhood organization, where, on one memorable evening, I almost got into a fistfight with a neighbor who told me that if we did not like heroin needles sticking out of the fences around our parking area, we should never have moved to the South End in the first place. Hey, the drug addicts were here first! We threatened local drug dealers with exposure, hung out with off-duty detectives who gave us the lowdown on recent crimes, got tricked by numerous kids who knocked on the door and asked for contributions to various totally fictitious school projects, and watched prostitutes climb up fire escapes in the alley to an abandoned fifth-floor rental unit, which they were using as their “office.” We participated in the annual spring cleanup run by longtime local and ward chief Steve Green, who smoked cheap cigars and drove his pride and joy, a Subaru station wagon with two hundred thousand miles on it. Adrienne and the kids attended one of the first legalized gay weddings in the state. And on a more memorable occasion, Adrienne and our son Charlie were held up at gunpoint by a drug addict. Adrienne told him off, grabbed our son, and then threw a few twenties at him, telling him to get lost. That’s what city living does to you.
We also began our education about all things Victorian by joining the South End Historical Society, housed in a private building just off of Massachusetts Avenue on Chester Square, a few blocks from our house. We learned that the Victorians, including Fannie Farmer, made a distinction between private and public spaces within a house. (This is in stark contrast to current homeowners, who will give you a tour of their entire house, including the bedroom, at the drop of a hat.) The second floor, with its large front and back parlors plus a small music room off the back, was for entertaining. This is why the ceilings were high and the architectural finish was so elaborate. Downstairs, the family dining room was in the front of the house and the kitchen was in the back. The third floor front, what we ended up calling the library, was also a public space, given its detailed ceiling and door moldings—a place where the woman of the house might entertain a friend or two. However, the rest of the house was private. If there was live-in domestic help, they were housed on the top floor, the hottest space in the summer. Victorians were also less apt to invite friends over for dinner. Dining in someone else’s home was an intensely personal event, and an invitation was the “highest form of social compliment.”
These 4,500-square-foot homes were heated with coal furnaces that ran hot air up the flues and out into the room through vents in cast-iron fireplace inserts. These were not wood-burning fireplaces as originally conceived, although some houses did offer coal grates in the large second-floor parlors. Heavy drapes were one hallmark of the Victorian era; they were highly functional, keeping out cold air in the winter. In summer months, drapes were removed and cleaned, leaving simple lace curtains that allowed for the flow of fresh air. The kitchen was always on the ground floor in the back of the house; our original brick hearth was still intact. Cooking would have been done on a small coal cookstove with two ovens located above the cooking surface on either side of the flue.
About 1860, the South End had begun life as a rich man’s alternative to Beacon Hill. A few wealthy residents had even built mansions that took up an entire city block, complete with stables and circular driveways. But most dwellings did not last as true single-family homes for long. By the time Fannie Farmer had moved into the South End in the 1890s, the neighborhood was already well on its way down the slope toward urban decay, since Back Bay, which was built in the 1880s, was now the more desirable location. The rich moved out, real estate values dropped, and by the 1960s, many buildings could be had for as little as $10,000. The Pulitzer Prize–winning book Common Ground detailed the struggle of young families in the South End in the 1970s during the busing crisis, trying to start their own schools, chasing drug dealers down the street with baseball bats—the sort of thing that was not uncommon deeper in the South End in 1991, the year that Adrienne and I moved in. Although the portion of the neighborhood closer to Back Bay had now become gentrified, our home in St. Elsewhere was still at the very beginnings of a turnaround. It was a hodgepodge of mixed-income apartment houses, Victorian townhouses, a large gay population, and a vibrant ethnic mix. That was, in our opinion, its charm, although the area was so poor that it could not sustain a half-decent restaurant, drugstore, bakery, coffee shop, bookstore, or supermarket. It was like living on runway 3 out at Logan Airport—you were a long way from anywhere familiar.
But by the late 1990s, we had settled in and come to love our slowly improving neighborhood, and my interest in Fannie Farmer had surfaced once again. I discovered that during her tenure at the Boston Cooking School Fannie Farmer had lived no more than twenty feet from my early-morning walk to the bus with my two girls, Whitney and Caroline, at 87 West Rutland Square. (The 1900 census shows that the house at 87 West Rutland Square was full. The entire Farmer family had settled in: Frank and Mary with their four daughters, Fannie, Mary, Cora, and Lillian, plus Cora’s husband, Herbert, and their son, Dexter. There was also one servant, Ellen Macadam, who was twenty-four years old, and two lodgers, both schoolteachers: Harriet Bolman and Fanny Batchelder. By 1910, the extended family had moved to Huntington Avenue, just a few blocks away. Both of Fannie’s parents were still alive at the time of the 1910 census.)
Living in a house constructed in 1859 does one of two things: Either it makes you hungry for modernity, so you rip out most of the interior and install glass floors, two-story ceilings with skylights, and a thoroughly modern granite-counter kitchen. Or you fall in love with the past and become intensely curious about what life was like the year the house was built. Adrienne and I fell into the latter category. I started to ask basic questions: What kind of town was Boston in 1896? What was it like to step out the front door on a Monday morning and go to work? Whom would you see on the sidewalk? What about the stores, public transportation, and the other buildings? Was it an earnest backwater or a sophisticated, lively place to live and work?
For starters, Boston had 448,477 residents in 1896, including 8,590 “colored” and 158,172 foreign-born, half of whom were Irish, 5,000 of whom were Italian, and 20,000 of whom were Jewish. The Boston Social Register listed 8,000 families, of which a mere dozen were Catholic; only one person, Louis Brandeis, was Jewish. The Boston Globe of that era accused Lizzie Borden of killing her parents in Fall River on August 4, 1892; in the early 1890s, a great financial panic set in—the greatest since 1873—and the economy didn’t rebound for almost five years. In 1895, with city finances again on the upswing, the Boston Public Library opened in Copley Square at a cost of $2.5 million. Designed by McKim, Mead, and White, it contained paintings by Sargent and Whistler.
The average life expectancy was forty-nine. The workweek was fifty to sixty hours; most people worked on Saturday, and annual income in 1900 was about $800 per year, higher for state and local government workers and lower for teachers and those in the medical fields. Domestic servants were paid less, between $350 and $500 per year, depending on the region of the country. Butter was 25 cents a pound, and so were a dozen eggs. A bicycle would set you back about $17. The value of a dollar was about twenty-five times what it is today, so a quarter in 1900 might have been worth over $6 in today’s money, showing just how expensive basic foodstuffs were to a poor working-class family.
What sights would a visitor to Boston have seen? Boston was full of train stations, from the massive Union Station to the Old Colony Station, so there was no problem getting into town using public transportation. By that time, the streetcars were electrified, and one could also take excursion steamers up to the north and south shores. The subway (now known as the T) was just being built, at a cost of $5 million, and one could view the first section under construction at the corner of Boylston and Charles streets.
The Boston Daily Globe of July 10, 1895, suggested that tourists might do one of the following: walk around the ethnic neighborhoods of interest, including the Chinese, Hebrew, and Italian quarters; visit Trinity, the Old South or the Park Street churches; or head out of town to Nantasket Beach, Provincetown, Plymouth, Gloucester, or Salem (“home of the witches”). Landmarks included the Old Corner Bookstore, King’s Chapel, Paul Revere’s house, Increase Mather’s house, the site of the jail where Captain Kidd was held in 1699, and Liverpool Wharf, where the Boston Tea Party took place. One of the more unusual features of Boston even today is the Emerald Necklace, a series of parks connected by a seven-mile walking path, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted with the intention of linking the Boston Common and the Public Garden with the country estate known as Franklin Park. And there were always the dime museums and “objects of wonder.” Boston sounded like a great place to visit.
JANUARY 2008. WHERE DOES ONE START PLANNING A TWELVE-COURSE Victorian menu? By the late nineteenth century, home dining was a culinary mishmash, from a simple supper of leftover cold meat and prunes to birds in potato cases and gâteau St. Honoré. It was the end and the beginning of an era—everything was up for grabs. But I wanted this menu to be extreme: lots of courses with elaborate dishes, plenty of technique, and recipes that would give us a clear window into the higher echelons of cooking in 1896.
Culinary adventurism was not unknown in this period; in fact, it was frequently enjoyed by the rich and powerful. It was no surprise, then, when I came across a January 21, 1917, article in the New York Times entitled “Roosevelt Party Dines on Roast Lion.” The Roosevelt in question was Samuel M. Roosevelt, accomplished portrait artist and distant cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, and the dinner, held at the Beaux Arts Club, was attended by seventeen of Mr. Roosevelt’s fellow artists. The lion was a baby, and roasted whole. It seems that a young man brought the still extant young lion with him to New York from the Salisbury School in Connecticut, where it had been used as a mascot for the football team. The lion had been left loose about the school, destroying property and scaring the students. Something had to be done.
That something was to bring it to New York, place it in a cage in the kitchen of the Beaux Arts, and feed it tenderloin steaks, which, given their cost, was only a short-term solution. It was finally decided that making a dinner out of it—roasting it whole, in fact—was a good return on investment. This was acted upon forthwith, the lion killed, roasted, and served with numerous sauces, along with Monaco soup (tomato soup), bisque d’écrevisse (crawfish bisque), riz de veau (veal sweetbreads), and then the various parts of the baby lion: tenderloin, chops, etc. Just three years later, Samuel Roosevelt died of a massive brain hemorrhage at the Knickerbocker Club while stooping over to pick up his dropped cigar after yet another massive feast.
The pièce de résistance of the gilded age, however, was the Pie Girl Party of 1895 given by Stanford White, the famous architect, in his brownstone just off Fifth Avenue. The guests, all society gents, were seated in pairs at small tables when a line of seminaked young girls marched in, carrying “saucisson chaude.” They were clothed only in “a scarf clasped at the shoulders, wound under their breasts, and then down across their thighs.” After the last meat course had been consumed, there was a faint tinkling of bells, and the young girls, some of them reportedly teenagers, reappeared wearing nothing more than sleigh bells attached to their ankles and castanets on their fingers. After a bout of dancing, they disappeared and then reappeared once more, wearing red, white, and blue liberty caps and “gauzy veils clasped at their waist,” bearing a large trestle holding an enormous pie. The pie was opened and out flew a bevy of canaries, doves, and nightingales, plus an extremely young naked female cherub, who was swept up by the host and taken upstairs. News of the scandalous party soon leaked out and reached the newspapers, including a famous illustration of “The Girl in the Pie,” in which the naked virgin was, for the sake of modesty, both completely clothed and depicted as a woman more advanced in years.
Boston was a tad more conservative in its tastes, but still offered elaborate menus. An example from the 1880s: oysters; turtle soup; bisque of crawfish; chicken halibut; dauphine potatoes; cucumber salad; saddle of venison; brioche potatoes; brussels sprouts; supreme of quail; terrapin Maryland; pâté de foie gras; lettuce salad; sherbet with rum punch; canvasback duck; fried hominy; tutti-frutti ice cream; gorgonzola and brie cheese; fruit; coffee and liqueurs. Finally, we were in the land of the overstuffed gourmand—just where I wanted to be.
At the back of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book I found a menu for “A Full Course Dinner,” consisting of twelve courses as follows: oysters; clear soup; rissoles; fish; roast venison or mutton; a lighter course of meat, fish, or poultry; a vegetable course; punch; game; cold dessert; cake; and finally, crackers, cheese, and café noir. In an elaborate Victorian meal, the first course was almost always oysters followed by a clear, not a cream, soup. The next course was often something fried, such as rissoles, although at times a bisque would have been substituted. Fish was next, followed by venison, then game or poultry, a vegetable course, frozen punch (much like a sorbet), and then desserts that may have been preceded by a jelly course. Finally, the dinner concluded with coffee, cheese, and crackers, followed by liqueurs. More elaborate dinners may have also served a fresh fruit course followed by nuts, raisins, sugar plums, and dried ginger. Bonbons and demitasse would be served in the drawing room. The menus sampled all levels of the food pyramid here, although they did seem a wee bit short on salads and grains.
In order to actually prepare this gastronomic extravaganza, my test kitchen director, Erin McMurrer, and I would need to start sourcing ingredients. The first course was no problem: I knew an oyster farmer, Island Creek Oysters, just down the coast from Boston, who supplied many of the restaurants in town. Although consommé was typical as a second course, we decided to try something a bit more adventurous: mock turtle soup, made with a calf’s head rather than actual turtle meat. This raised the issue of where we were going to find a half dozen calf’s heads for testing, but more on that later. Rissoles—stuffed and fried puff pastry—were the third course, and the fourth course was to be a fancy fish recipe, lobster à l’Américaine, a dish offered by Escoffier and the famous New York restaurant, Delmonico’s, as well as by Fannie herself. This presented a good opportunity to find out if Fannie, who had never traveled abroad, could handle a serious French recipe.
Per Fannie’s instructions, we were onto roast venison next, knowing that the meat would have to be larded, a technique that I was eager to test. For a lighter fish or meat course, we decided on fish, although Fannie had truly horrible recipes in this department, most everything having been cooked to death and stuffed with heavy, uninspired ingredients. Knowing that salmon was a common item in the late nineteenth century, we decided on a simple dish of grilled salmon, hoping to try out a grilling insert that was made for our coal cookstove. For vegetables, we had fried artichokes, a typical recipe from the time. Following that, a simple frozen punch, Canton sorbet, which simply meant ginger-flavored. The game course was to be roast stuffed goose, and then we were on to desserts.
Jellies were high on our list, since they were spectacular, with many layers of color and flavor. A lot of technique was involved here, for example, creating natural food coloring, and they would present well at the table. (I was to learn that red food coloring, cochineal, was made from small bugs—great!) The next to last course would be a cake, and here Fannie and her contemporaries were rather unimaginative. She suggested a French cream cake, which was made from a light choux paste and filled with pastry cream. The good news is that the French were serving spectacular cakes at the time, usually baked in molds. One particular recipe, the Savoy Cake with Oranges, had made it to the United States and was published as Mandarin cake in Charles Ranhofer’s incredible 1895 book The Epicurean. This looked promising.
Dessert would be followed by, as Fannie instructed, crackers, cheese, and coffee. Phew. And all of that had to be tested, perfected, and then orchestrated for a sit-down dinner for twelve. Could we do it? I was hopeful, but uncertain.
The last piece of the puzzle, at least as far as the menu went, was the wines. They tended to be overly sweet—sauterne, hock (a generic term for German wines from the Rhine regions, after the town of Hochheim), sherry, liebfraumilch—while a great deal of champagne was being served. The only exceptions were claret (bordeaux) or burgundy, which were wines that might actually have been rather good. I tracked down a former sous-chef at Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston who was quite knowledgeable in this area, and he set out to pull together samples for us to try with each course as they were being developed. Ah, the joys of recipe testing!
I also contacted John Abbott, president of WGBH in Boston, about the possibility of filming the dinner and its preparations, creating a television special about the history of Victorian cooking. He was on board and I was thrilled. Now I really had to get going on planning the twelve courses, but first, I wanted something alcoholic to serve the guests as they arrived. Although cocktails and whiskey were usually not served at home, punch seemed to be a nice way to launch the evening. And I was lucky enough to know just the man to help us: Donald Friary, an expert on punch and punch bowls and a fellow member of Boston’s St. Botolph Club.
BEFORE ATTENDING FRIARY’S ST. BOTOLPH LECTURE ON THE history of punch, we sampled his personal recipe, given to him by an established Boston family, and realized what we had been missing. As with almost everything else in the culinary world, the history of punch is a messy business. The conventional wisdom is that the word punch is derived from the Indian word panch, which means “five,” referring to the five basic ingredients of a good punch: alcohol (often rum), water, sweet (sugar), sour (lemon or lime juice), and spice. A more likely explanation is that punch derives from the term puncheon, which was a cask for liquids: the type of container used on board ship, for example.
Punch was well established as of the seventeenth century, the recipe having been introduced to Britain by the East India merchants. Punch bowls were common at most taverns, and the punch was made up well in advance. Donald mentioned that he once drank four-year-old punch and indeed found it to be much improved through aging. At the very least, making punch a day ahead of time seems like a good thing, not just a nod to convenience.
Some punch recipes would indeed deliver a punch, if not a ripping headache. A recipe for Thirty-second Regiment of Victoria Punch from the 1862 edition of How to Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas offers the following ingredients: 6 sliced lemons, ½ gallon brandy, ½ gallon Jamaican rum, 1 pound white sugar, 1¾ quarts water, and 1 pint of boiling milk. The lemons are steeped in the brandy and rum for twenty-four hours and then mixed with the other ingredients. The punch is strained and can be served hot or cold. The recipe served twenty, which works out to be about three-quarters of a cup of brandy or rum per guest, plus two tablespoons or so of white sugar, to say nothing of the combination of lemon and milk. The British infantry must have had hard heads and strong stomachs.
By 1880, a New Year’s punch started with a sugar syrup made from the juice of six lemons and oranges, five pounds of loaf sugar, two quarts of water, five cloves, and two blades of mace. This liquid was simmered to make a flavored sugar syrup, and small amounts were used to sweeten a punch. The punch itself was made with a pint of green tea, a pint of brandy, one quart each of rum and champagne, and one teacup of Chartreuse, which is mixed and then sweetened to taste with the reserved syrup. It is served in a punch bowl containing a large block of ice, along with three sliced oranges and lemons.
Things started to go seriously wrong with punch recipes in the early twentieth century. What had been a simple, strong alcoholic drink became a rather revolting cooler, the sort of thing that a modern teenager who was trying to achieve alcoholic oblivion might appreciate. In fact, the term punchcame to have very little meaning, much like the word cocktail. By 1907, for example, a recipe for Victoria punch appeared in a cookbook by Paul Richards, who was writing for the hotel and catering trades. The recipe included a gallon of orange ice frozen with a pint of white wine, beaten egg whites (most recipes suggested beating them “to a froth”), and then a cup of kirsch plus a pint of arrack, or Javan rum. By 1919, Victoria punch was served with a topping of meringue, made from three egg whites beaten with a whopping half pound of sugar. Another recipe, this one from around the turn of the century, suggested adding sliced bananas to the punch bowl. No words can describe the horror.
So we decided to stick with the earlier, British recipe for punch, a simple alcoholic drink made from rum, water, fruit juice of some sort, sugar, and a spice or two. We made a few minor revisions and added five drops of bitters just to add a hint of bite to the foundation of the drink. It was now perfect. In fact, it is so good that we have been drinking it ever since.
VICTORIA PUNCH
This recipe, with a few minor changes, is courtesy of Donald Friary and, I am told, improves with age. I suggest that you make it a day or two ahead of time. Serve chilled, although it does not need to be refrigerated for storage.
4 tablespoons sugar
8 tablespoons lime juice
1 cup rum
1 cup water
Pinch nutmeg
5 drops bitters
Combine ingredients and pour over ice to serve.