Chapter 7
The Old Boston, the New Boston, and Social Nudism
My favorite Boston anecdote dates from the 1920s, when a Chicago banking house asked for a reference from the Boston investment firm of Lee, Higginson & Company with regard to a young Bostonian it was considering hiring. The young man was vouched for in a letter, noting that his father was a Cabot, his mother a Lowell, and his extended family included Saltonstalls, Appletons, Peabodys, etc. Several days later, a curt acknowledgment arrived stating, “We were not contemplating using the young gentleman for breeding purposes.”
Although Fannie Farmer did represent change in Boston’s culinary world, the city itself had resisted change for more than two centuries, and had done so rather effectively. In fact, the very essence of the Boston character remained well into the twentieth century. Simply put, there was a proper way to behave and everyone else be damned. In one story, a tall girl was passing by the house of Mrs. Jack Gardner. She heard a tapping on the pane and saw a beckoning finger. She knocked on the door and was admitted to find the mistress of the house facing her in a dark room. Mrs. Gardner noted that the girl was not carrying herself properly and stated flatly, “Walk erect,” then rang for the maid to have the girl ushered out. Life was a series of rules and habits that had been refined over the centuries, and woe to those who thought otherwise.
This worldview is not unique to Boston but is very much part, I think, of the Pilgrim culture. My maternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Blanche White, was not much different from Mrs. Gardner. At the tender age of ten, I was summoned upstairs to her daffodil yellow sitting room, located in a stately brick home on Kalorama Road in the nation’s capital, and given “the talk.” This was to be a succinct transfer of wisdom from one generation to another, a summation of what she had learned in over seventy years of living. She looked me in the eye and said, “Now, Christopher, always remember—wash your fruit!” Well, I admit to having been quite taken aback. Until that time, I had no reason to suspect my fruit but, I can assure you, I took her advice to heart, and have repeated her mantra to each of our four children.
But Boston did change, at least a bit, from its original staid provenance to something slightly more modern, although still steeped in the past. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge once remarked, “The year 1850 stood on the edge of a new time, but the old time was still visible from it, and indeed prevailed about it.”
The reasons for this move into a new century were both population—the 1840s saw a huge influx of immigrants, many of them Irish—and the growth of transportation, which opened up Boston to a much wider swath of New England. In 1847, there was not even one “horse car line” in Boston, just stagecoaches. Lower Chestnut Street on Beacon Hill had so many stables that it was once named “Horse-Chestnut Street.” But things were starting to change. There were eight railroad stations in town, most of them opening in the 1830s and 1840s. One sure way to check the modernity of a city is to track the introduction of natural gas. The Boston Gaslight Company was established in 1827 and built in the North End. In 1828, the price of gas was $54 per thousand feet, but it had dropped to a mere $1.80 by later in the century.
Throughout this tumultuous age, however, Boston was to retain its unique character, one forged by its religious beginnings and married to its wildly successful run in the nineteenth century as America’s busiest port. It might be summed up as a reverence for the family name, old money (money was to be gathered, not spent), and old ways. And custom was all-powerful, as this story about Judge John Lowell portrays. One morning when he was at home in suburban Chestnut Hill around 1900, seated at the breakfast table, his wife and a nervous maid arrived and Mrs. Lowell confided nervously, “There isn’t going to be any oatmeal this morning, John.” The maid had burned it, and there was none left. He responded, lifting his head out of the paper, “Frankly, my dear, I never did care for it.”
Being placed in the public eye, especially for commercial purposes, was to be avoided at all costs. In 1933, when Mrs. Powell Cabot and Mrs. John Gardner Coolidge II agreed to promote Camel cigarettes in the press, Boston society regarded it as an act of “social nudism.” (One of the print ads showed Mrs. Cabot lounging on a yellow sofa with a modest décolletage, saying, “Flavor is just as important in tobacco as it is in food, don’t you think?”)
Given its emphasis upon and love of custom, Boston was still far from cosmopolitan. Speaking of the Cabot family, a historian declared they were “a strange dynasty, with customs but no manners.” One’s word was indeed gold in Boston, since the best families used few written agreements, even when a large amount of business was at stake. Boston’s Russell & Company and the famous Chinese merchant Houqua had no written agreements other than one small slip of rice paper that was discovered many years later. It said, “Forty thousand dollars. Houqua.” Perhaps the most concise definition of what it meant to be a gentleman in Boston was this: “A Boston gentleman never takes a drink before 3:00 or east of Park Street.” Translated, this means that one did not drink before the close of the stock market or anywhere in the business district. When Oscar Wilde visited in 1899 and attended a debutante ball, he commented that the lack of feminine pulchritude was so overwhelming that he understood why Boston artists were reduced to painting “only Niagara Falls and millionaires.” Charlie McCarthy had similarly unkind words for the Boston debutante, whom he compared to a groundhog in spring “who comes out, sees her shadow, and goes back in again.”
Boston culture might not have been changing with the times, but by the end of the nineteenth century, gas stoves were being introduced in many Victorian kitchens, replacing coal stoves, which took considerable time to heat up and clean, and required much advance planning for cooking. However, most cooking in Boston was still done on the coal cookstove. If I was going to turn back the kitchen clock for our own Victorian feast, I would have to find and install an authentic stove.
Fortunately, in the early 1990s, I had joined the St. Botolph Club on Boston’s famous boulevard, Commonwealth Avenue. It was there that I finally—almost fifteen years later—discovered the perfect Victorian cookstove, a massive sixty-three-inch-wide affair, one that had been sitting in the basement of the club unused for decades.
APRIL 2009. THE HISTORY OF FOOD TEACHES US MANY THINGS, but first and foremost, it teaches us that what we eat is based on supply and demand, and, second, that no matter how silly or odd the demand, someone will quickly find a way to supply it. One of the strangest examples of the marketplace at work is cockscombs, a garnish for vol-au-vents and other classic French preparations, as well as a delicacy that is eaten on its own, battered and fried.
Since cockscombs were in much demand as a nineteenth-century garnish, there was a large discrepancy between the supply and the actual inventory. An 1878 book entitled Wholesome Fare by Edmund and Ellen Delamere took a sharp look at this problem. “Some years ago it was calculated that not less than five and twenty thousand chicken entered Paris every morning. Ten thousand of these appeared on the tables of private families; the other fifteen thousand fell into the hands of restaurateurs, pastry cooks, rotisseurs, and their colleagues.” The authors go on to make the point that a much larger number of cockscombs were being served daily in Parisian restaurants and therefore, the question was, where did they come from?
It turns out that someone had invented a method for making artificial cockscombs by taking the flesh from the palate of a cow, cooking it, and then, using a custom-made stamp, punching out ersatz cockscombs. One could tell the difference, however: “Nature’s cocks’-combs are studded on both sides with papillae, or little warts; Lecoq’s, and his imitators’, on only one.” If one could not obtain a beef palate, one could also use the “white parts of a calf’s pluck.” (Pluck usually referred to the lungs, but it could also mean the heart, windpipe, or liver.) It was also noted that any blacksmith could fashion a decent stamp and then one would be in business. So even ersatz cockscombs were being invented to satisfy the strange desires of the consuming public.
This process of supplying the needs of consumers tends to start benignly enough, as in the case of the late nineteenth century. By 1896, there was already talk about homemade versus store-bought. Some items were considered better when purchased at a store, including water crackers. As one correspondent to the Globe commented, “Don’t waste your strength in making water crackers when you can buy them so easily and so much nicer than homemade.” And who would disagree? Industry can make life better and easier. But even a casual glance at the S. S. Pierce catalog from that era gives one a taste of what is to come, whether it is something as seemingly harmless as Bell’s poultry seasoning or Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix, or harbingers of future foods, like canned soups and vegetables, potted meats, and bottled sodas such as ginger ales and lemonades. Convenience always starts out as a good idea.
The perfect, and most egregious, example of commercialized food production is the promotion of margarine, a product that turned out to be substantially less healthy than the product it was replacing. It was invented in France in response to a challenge by Napoleon to create an inexpensive butter substitute. Original recipes included cow’s udders, sheep stomachs, and beef suet, but by the late nineteenth century, French margarine was using imported animal fats, cheap by-products of the Chicago meatpacking industry. Meanwhile, in 1910, American scientists had perfected the hydrogenation of vegetable oils—the process of turning them into a solid at room temperature. Even as early as the 1870s, margarine manufacturers made their product look more like butter by adding a yellow dye. (The dairy lobby pressured Washington to tax dyed margarine; as a result, many manufacturers sold the yellow dye separately to avoid surcharges.) The watershed moment came in the 1960s, when margarine was promoted as healthier than butter, a claim that turns out to be absolute nonsense. (This claim was based on butter’s seven grams of saturated fat per tablespoon, versus two grams for margarine; but margarine has three grams of trans fats per tablespoon, an ingredient that is highly suspect.)
OCTOBER BRINGS NOVEMBER, WHICH IS KNOWN IN NEW ENGLAND less for Thanksgiving than for deer season, when the .306s, .308s, and .32 specials get cleaned and sighted in once again. Gear is checked, including thermoses, walkie-talkies, four-wheelers, the supply of Doe-In-Rut Lures, and cold-weather garb. We look for and then test out our Buck Roar deer calls and hunting hats with the built-in flashlight under the cap. We spend half days here and there up in the woods looking for scrapings and hookings, hoping to find the perfect spot to place a deer stand—not too close to a deer run and with a good range of view over a hollow or field. And then we plan to meet, that first morning, at 5:15 a.m., down at my neighbor Tom’s garage—he’s the one with the 1950s style hat festooned with orange hunter’s tape—where he makes the coffee and fires up the kerosene heater. By 5:45 a.m. we are off, headed up to the top of the mountain. In the predawn darkness, you can hear four-wheelers climbing the sides of mountains and see pinpricks of headlights worming their way slowly uphill. Then we sit in our stands, cold but excited, hoping that this year will bring us the big buck that we dreamed about during the off-season.
Last year, a large buck with a spreading rack and thick, muscled shoulders did walk up under my stand while I was facing the other way, photographing a flock of wild turkeys. I heard a soft crunch, turned slowly, and almost—well, let’s just say that it is a good thing that I have a strong sphincter muscle. Life offers a few defining moments, crises that require clear thought and strong action. What was my response? I did nothing for five seconds and then, stunned, slowly put the camera away in my bright orange hunting vest, then silently reached for my gun, which was straddling my lap. Meanwhile, the buck had gotten a good snoutful of my scent. He pivoted and took off like a freight train, straight behind my tree. I stood, twenty-five feet up in the air, turned, and unloaded all five shells in my .308, hitting the odd birch and poplar and doing no damage whatsoever to the once-in-a-lifetime trophy deer. I did, however, get some nice photographs of a flock of wild turkeys. My two hunting buddies, Tom and Nate, heard the shots and came running, expecting to see a carcass. When I related what happened (leaving out the camera part), Tom said with an almost straight face, “Well, maybe you should have invited him up into the stand next to you!”
Hunters like Tom and Nate always think that the glory days are behind us; that a hundred years ago, there was plenty of game to be had. Well, think again. In 1897, Vermont had the first open season it had had for twenty years. Massachusetts had had restrictive hunting laws in place since 1693, when John Winthrop first forbade deer hunting between January and July. By 1898, killing deer was completely illegal in Massachusetts as well as in Connecticut at any time of year. Deer farms were starting to pop up in Connecticut, Georgia, and other New England states. Another proposal, this one from 1895, suggested that watersheds near large cities, used for supporting the urban water supply, be used as breeding grounds for deer, in essence becoming municipal game farms. According to an 1896 article in the Boston Globe, venison was selling for a very expensive 35 to 40 cents per pound (turkey and beef were roughly half this price), and the supply was scarcer than it had been in forty to fifty years. In Faneuil Hall around 1888, there were 128 stalls for vendors, and only two of them sold venison; whereas there were nineteen stalls for pork, forty-five for beef, and twenty for fish. One might also find bear, selling for up to 30 cents per pound, as well as raccoon and woodcock. Much of the venison supply, such as it was, was derived from illegal sourcing.
One promising note was that the deer were, generally speaking, larger than the animals running around the woods of New England today. Females were 90 to 200 pounds, and males weighed in at 150 to up to 300 pounds. (Today, a buck weighing over 200 pounds is rare, while just two deer shot in the 1897 season in Maine weighed in for a combined total of 700 pounds.) Much of the venison sold at Faneuil Hall was probably provided by individual hunters, mostly from Maine—in 1897, a local Maine guide estimated that there were 150,000 deer “waiting to be shot” (but this was probably just local boosterism). Maine was clearly a major source of the wild venison supply for Boston, New York, and other large New England markets. We know this since the Boston Globe published articles detailing the shipments of venison and listing the names of the hunters along with the number of deer that they provided for the shipment, which was never more than two.
Venison was not just a New England specialty; it had been a prized dinner table item for centuries. In fact, the phrase “to give the cold shoulder” originated in a practice once common in France as well as during the Norman rule in Britain. When a guest had outstayed his welcome, he was not served the expected warm haunch of venison. Instead, a dinner of a cold shoulder of mutton was placed before him as a sign that it was time to leave.
Early recipes for venison discussed spit-roasting for hours (“at least 5 hours,” according to one 1840 recipe). As for cooking times in an oven, recipes were all over the place, from two hours for an eight-pound saddle to just forty minutes in 1889 for a five-pounder. Just as today, there is little agreement about anything in the kitchen. The meat was frequently basted, sometimes with claret, other times with melted butter and currant jelly. By the late nineteenth century, most saddle of venison recipes were larded, which did not mean inserting long strips of fat deeply into the meat. What Victorian cooks had in mind was something rather different. Here is a description from the White House Cook Book of 1887: “Use a saddle about ten pounds. Cut salt pork into strips two inches and 1/8th inch thick, lard saddle two rows in each side.” The short thin pieces of salt pork were stitched into the meat shallowly, with both ends sticking out. Other approaches were simply to “bard” the meat, using strips of bacon or salt pork draped over the top during roasting.
Recipes for roasts often suggested wrapping the meat in a double thickness of paper, including white paper, brown paper, coarse paper, or writing paper. The paper was usually buttered or oiled, and it was often used for just part of the cooking—it was removed to allow the exterior to brown properly before the meat was cooked. It is clear that this method derived from cooking over a fire, either on a spit outside or next to a fireplace inside. The heat was often fierce, and one needed to shield the meat from burning. This is still true, but less so, in a cast-iron cookstove from the nineteenth century. Unlike ovens today, the level of radiant heat was much higher (cast iron retains heat much better than other metals), and therefore the browning ability of these ovens was greater. I know this to be true, since we roasted a larded saddle of venison both in a conventional modern oven and in my large coal cookstove. The former did not render any of the strips of salt pork; the wood cookstove, however, did a vastly better job of rendering the fat and browning the exterior. (However, a good convection oven set at 550 degrees will do a more than decent job.) So paper may have been useful under those conditions, although when tested in my wood cookstove, the paper simply reduced the browning and crisping.
Since my hunting expedition came up short, we purchased venison saddles from New Zealand at a specialty food store in Boston. They weighed fifteen pounds and measured over two feet in length, and were just too big for our wood cookstove (we had to use a conventional oven). But we made the best of it: we larded one side with salt pork and left the other plain, then roasted the meat in a conventional oven at 425 degrees. (We were to discover that the design of the needle was key—the thicker needles with a hinged jaw at the back end to hold onto the salt pork were vastly better than the thinner sewing-style needles with a small rectangular notch cut out of one end.)
The meat did not brown well, the salt pork did not render, and when cooked to 115 degrees, the outside meat was moist and tender, but the rare interior was fleshy and unappealing—not a success. A second test was similar, but we brought the internal temperature up to 130 degrees; the texture was chewy, the meat tasted livery, and the salt pork still had not melted.
We then stepped back and decided to more closely approximate the venison that Fannie would have cooked with. Happily, we found a purveyor, UnderHill Farms in Moundridge, Kansas, which could provide us with Fallow deer, which are similar in size to what one might have purchased in 1896. These saddles weighed in at eight pounds, which is the same weight described in Fannie’s cookbook. (There is a discrepancy between the sizes of deer shot in Maine and then delivered to the Boston markets and what Fannie calls for in her recipes. It makes me wonder if the Boston markets were already selling farmed deer, since an eight-pound saddle would be from a relatively small specimen.) This time, we used the wood cookstove (the saddle was small enough to fit in it), and the results were much improved—the salt pork had partially rendered and the exterior had taken on a richer, deeper color. The meat was also moist and tender and had great flavor.
Next, we cranked the cookstove to over 550 degrees, hoping that this would provide even more rendering of the salt pork and a better crust. We roasted the saddle for just thirty-three minutes, until the meat was 108 degrees at the bone and 150 degrees at the thin end, removed it from the oven, let it rest, and then carved it into thin slices. The crust was even better; the tips of the salt pork were crisp and brown, and the meat now had better flavor from the pork.
ROAST SADDLE OF VENISON
You will need to use a larding needle for this recipe. The best design uses a hinged “mouth”—SCI makes one for about $6—which holds the strips of salt pork in place as they are sewn through the meat; once the needle is pulled through, the hinged “jaw” on the back end opens up, releasing the salt pork. The more classic design, the ones that look like a regular sewing needle with a large eye through which the salt pork is drawn, is pretty useless. It is hard to pull the salt pork through the eye, and it does not release easily. We did find that freezing the strips of salt pork for about fifteen minutes was a good idea as warm strips are very mushy and hard to work with. Also, a conventional oven does not provide as much radiant heat as a cast-iron stove, which means that the salt pork will not render as well—so just crank up your oven as high as it will go.
1 saddle of venison, 7 to 8 pounds, trimmed of fat and silverskin
60 strips salt pork, 2¼-inch pieces, 3/16 inches wide and deep
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
1. Adjust rack to lower-middle position. Heat oven to 550 degrees or the highest possible setting. (A convection oven is the best bet here, but it will be less effective at crisping the salt pork than cast iron.)
2. Lay one strip of lardon in the trough of a larding needle. Starting at one end of the saddle, going with the grain of the meat, hold needle at a 45-degree angle, push needle half an inch deep and back up through the surface of meat, pulling salt pork through and releasing from needle. There should be about half an inch of salt pork protruding on each end. Repeat at half-inch intervals with remaining salt pork to cover surface of meat. Rub meat with oil. Season with salt and pepper.
3. Place in oven for 25 to 35 minutes, rotating halfway through, until meat reaches 125 to 130 degrees. Check temperature carefully and frequently. The thicker end of saddle will be rarer than thinner end. Rest 20 minutes. Carve and slice on bias into ¼-inch slices.
Currant Jelly
My wife is a jam maker and enthusiastic currant lover. She has now planted dozens of bushes, and our root cellar is full not only of currant jam, but of a vast inventory of raspberry, blueberry, wild blueberry, apricot, strawberry, and sour cherry. A recent count uncovered over one hundred jars—we are well provisioned in the event there is ever a nationwide jam shortage.
Collecting berries has a certain ritual to it. Many years ago, we discovered a patch of blackberries on a ridge about a half-hour walk from our Vermont farmhouse. It was next to an abandoned carriage shed, and the charm of it was that it was not always easy to find the spot—ridge lines are deceptive since they are never straight, merging into other ridges, often following a confusing, serpentine path. But each year, we finally made it and collected a small pailful or two for jam-making.
The problem with making jam is determining when a jam or jelly is properly cooked so that it ends up neither too thick nor too thin when set. The good news is that red currants are naturally high in pectin, which means that no commercial pectin needs to be added. Pectin can leave a gummy, hard-set jelly, which I find unappealing. However, each batch of fruit is different (slightly underripe fruit has more pectin than ripe fruit—one part underripe fruit to three parts ripe is a good rule of thumb if both varieties are available), and if one tries to make large quantities, the mixture is not all at exactly the same temperature. This often causes one to overcook part of the jam or jelly in order to bring up the entire mixture to the right temperature.
The first solution is to work with smaller batches. Second, I finally purchased a copper pan for jam-making from a store in England. It is 11 inches wide at the bottom, 14 at the top, and 4½ inches deep, with a nice sturdy handle. Since copper is such an excellent conductor of heat, we find that the jam mixture cooks more evenly and more quickly. Also, the flared sides mean that boilovers are not an issue, something that has to be watched when cooking in a straight-sided pot.
Older recipes are insanely sweet, but the Victorians were primarily concerned with long-term storage, and therefore higher sugar amounts—sugar is a preservative—were practical. Modern cooks, however, will find that one part sugar to two parts fruit is about right. One can also use much lower amounts of sugar if the jam or jelly is stored in a refrigerator for no more than a few months. My suggestion is to start with one part sugar to two parts fruit and then increase the sugar as you taste the mixture. Again, refrigerator storage is the best bet for lower-sugar jams and jellies. As far as canning goes, there is no need if the jam is to be stored for a few weeks in the refrigerator, but it is absolutely necessary when kept at higher temperatures and for longer periods.
Fannie suggests picking currants between June 28 and July 3, noting that they should not be picked directly after a rain. She picks over the currants without removing the stems, then washes and drains them. Mash a small quantity in the bottom of the saucepan and then repeat until all the berries are done. Cook until the berries appear white, strain through a coarse strainer, and then let the mixture drain through a double thickness of cheesecloth or a jelly bag. Measure the liquid, bring to the boiling point, and boil for five minutes, then add an equal measure of sugar. Boil for three minutes, skim, and pour into glass jars. She suggests that they be placed in a sunny window for twenty-four hours, then covered and kept in a cool, dry place.
We tested this recipe starting with six cups of red currants. They never did turn white—she must have been using a different variety. We got one cup of juice, added one cup of sugar slowly, and then boiled for about three minutes. The result? A beautiful jewel-colored jar of exquisite currant jelly—although it was on the sweet side. We reduced the sugar to ¾ cup and then Fannie’s recipe was spot-on.
We did wonder about the directive regarding leaving the stems on—turns out that this makes no difference. We also tried this recipe using frozen currants. They did not set up quite as well and the flavor was not quite as bright, so fresh fruit is definitely recommended.
RED CURRANT JELLY
Jelly is best made in small batches and watched carefully. Red currant jelly makes a good foundation for many meat sauces.
6 cups fresh currants on the stem
¾ cup granulated sugar
1. Over medium heat, place 2 cups currants in a large saucepan and mash with a potato masher until well broken up. Add remaining currants in batches and continue to mash until they are also well crushed. Increase heat to medium-high and bring to a boil over medium heat, reducing heat to maintain a lively simmer. Cook until all of the juice is released, about 5 minutes. Strain through a coarse strainer. Discard solids. Strain juice through a fine mesh strainer lined with a triple layer of cheesecloth, about 10 minutes; this will yield about 1 cup juice.
2. Add juice and sugar to a clean medium saucepan and bring to boil; cook until sugar is completely dissolved and temperature reaches 225 degrees, 4 to 5 minutes. Remove from heat.
3. Test liquid, using the Rodale Jelly test. Float a small metal bowl in larger bowl filled with ice water. Add a teaspoon of the jelly mixture to the bottom of the floating bowl. Let cool about 30 seconds, and run finger through mixture. It is ready when the jelly starts to run back together but stops. If it fails, cook mixture longer and test again every 2 minutes or so.
Potatoes Lyonnaise
Potatoes were serious business back in Fannie’s time since they were such an important part of the diet. Contemporary cookbooks spoke about determining the quality of a potato. One such author, Thomas Jefferson Murrey, suggested the following approach: “Take a sound-looking potato of any variety—cut or break it in two, crosswise, and examine the cut surface. If it appears watery to such a degree that a slight pressure would cause water to fall off in drops, reject it, as it would be of little use for the table. A good potato should be of a light cream-color, and when rubbed together, a white froth should appear round the edges and surface of the cut, which indicates the presence of starch. The strength of its starchy properties may be tested by releasing the hold of one end, and if it clings to the other, the potato is a good one.” We did test this last bit of advice and found, as with much historical kitchen advice, that it made little sense.
The “go-to” potato that Fannie Farmer would have used in 1896 was the Burbank, developed by Luther Burbank in 1876 in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. He took a suitcase-full out to California where they became widely planted; decades later, the Burbank was bred again in Denver, Colorado, resulting in the world-famous Russet Burbank. As with apple production, the number of varieties grown in the United States has diminished considerably since the nineteenth century. In Wisconsin alone, the record shows a large number of varieties that most of us have never heard of, including Alexander’s Prolific, White Beauty of Hebron, Monarch, Wisconsin Beauty, Seneca Red Jacket, and Mullaly.
In terms of cooking potatoes, I was surprised to find that many cookbooks suggested boiling potatoes with their skins on (for better nourishment), a technique that our test kitchen has promoted for many years. Our reasoning, however, was based on producing lighter, fluffier mashed potatoes, since less water is absorbed with the skins on. Again, Victorian-era cooks were on to this concept as well, since they suggested placing boiled potatoes on top of the range or in the oven to allow surplus moisture to escape. Cooked potatoes were often sliced and sautéed; they were cut into small pieces and placed in a gratin pan, covered with milk, finished with cheese and bread crumbs, and then baked in a hot oven, or even cut into squares and cooked with cream and boiled salt pork, then finished “au gratin.”
Potatoes lyonnaise is simple enough: onions are cooked in a skillet; precooked, cold potatoes are sliced and added; then the whole dish is finished with thyme and parsley. Not much to it, or at least that is what we thought at first. We found two recipes for lyonnaise potatoes in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Start with one thinly sliced onion briefly cooked in three tablespoons butter. Add three cold boiled potatoes cut in quarter-inch slices and sprinkled with salt and pepper. Stir the mixture lightly and then cook until the bottom layer is well-browned. All in all, a lackluster approach. Fannie’s second recipe for lyonnaise potatoes uses much less onion—a mere tablespoon, chopped—and the potatoes and onion are cooked separately. Again, a dull recipe with greasy potatoes (a lot more butter was called for here), not enough browning, and not worth the time or trouble.
We then looked to our own version of potatoes lyonnaise, as printed in Cook’s Illustrated; one and a half pounds of russets are boiled, cooled, peeled, halved, and then cut into quarter-inch slices. Onion is sautéed in a skillet, removed, the potatoes are added to the pan and browned, and, finally, the onions are added back to finish. We still wanted more flavor so we decided to cook the onions with white wine, butter, and a little brown sugar for about half an hour rather than just for a few minutes. Finally, cooking the potatoes in two batches instead of one gave us superior browning and deeper flavor. This rather bland, greasy offering had been transformed into a rich and crisp side dish.
POTATOES LYONNAISE
Most recipes for this dish are nothing more than potatoes, onions, and parsley, and the flavors are not well developed. We caramelize the onions to add richness, which makes this a dinner party recipe, not just an everyday affair.
For the potatoes:
2 pounds russet potatoes, unpeeled and scrubbed, smaller potatoes preferred, roughly 2½ by 3½ inches
Salt
6 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
For the onions:
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon brown sugar
2 pounds medium onions, halved pole to pole, root end removed, peeled and sliced ¼ inch thick pole to pole (8 cups)
1/3 cup dry white wine
½ teaspoon thyme, minced
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1. Place potatoes in large saucepan, cover with 1 inch water, and add 1 tablespoon salt. Bring to boil over high heat; reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until potatoes are just tender—a paring knife can be slipped into and out of center of the potatoes with very little resistance—25 to 35 minutes. To preserve shape, gently remove from water with tongs or slotted spoon. Refrigerate overnight until cold.
2. Meanwhile, heat butter and oil in 12-inch nonstick skillet over high heat; when foam subsides, stir in salt and sugar. Add onions and stir to coat; cook, stirring occasionally, until onions are golden brown and beginning to darken around the edges, about 12 to 16 minutes. Reduce heat to medium and cook, stirring frequently until onions are deeply browned and slightly sticky, about 14 to 18 minutes longer. Add wine and thyme; increase heat to medium high and cook, stirring frequently until dry, about 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from heat and season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover to keep warm. Reserve.
3. Once potatoes have cooled, carefully peel and cut potatoes in half lengthwise, and then slice into ½-inch-thick half-moons. Season each piece with salt and pepper on both sides, being careful not to break apart.
4. Heat 3 tablespoons oil in 12-inch nonstick (or cast-iron) skillet over medium-high heat, until shimmering. Add half the potatoes in a single layer, and cook, shaking pan occasionally until deep golden brown, about 7 to 11 minutes. Flip. Continue to cook on second side until deep golden brown, about 4 to 6 minutes; transfer to paper towel–lined plate, wipe pan with additional paper towels to remove oil. Add ½ tablespoon butter and browned potatoes back to cleaned skillet. Gently swirl to coat and then transfer contents to a rimmed baking sheet lined with a cooling rack and hold in warm oven. Wipe pan with paper towels; repeat with remaining potatoes, oil, and butter. (You can also do this simultaneously in two 12-inch nonstick skillets.)
5. Serve potatoes with onions and garnish with chopped parsley.
Serves 12 as small side dish.
Glazed Beets
Beets were not a very profitable crop, and therefore, much of what Bostonians consumed in the 1890s may have been locally grown, although they did receive root vegetables shipped in from the South in the spring. According to Miss Parloa’s New Cook Book: A Guide to Marketing and Cooking, “Beets, carrots, turnips, and onions are received from the South in April and May, so that we have them young and fresh for at least five months. After this period they are not particularly tender, and require much cooking.” There were two type of beets, those whose seed was sown early in the spring, and those that were planted in June as a fall crop and referred to as “winter” beets.
Nobody can accuse Fannie Farmer of doing anything continental or silly with beets. Her recipe for boiled beets suggests a cooking time of from one to four hours, noting that old beets may never become tender, no matter how long they are cooked. This range of cooking times is based on whether one is cooking freshly dug beets in the summer or the winter variety, which might have been stored for months and become quite tough. To finish them, Fannie simply added a few tablespoons of butter and a touch of sugar and salt to the sliced beets and tossed the ingredients together, reheating them for serving—nothing very exciting.
The first problem with Fannie’s recipe was the issue of size—we were probably using much smaller specimens than those available in 1896. The second issue was flavor; the beets were rather plain. To solve this problem, we sautéed the beets in butter, sugar, and salt rather than using these ingredients as just a coating. Further testing proved that higher heat was helpful in adding depth of flavor, as were four tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, which brought the dish into balance. A sprinkling of fresh parsley finished off a simple but flavorful recipe.
GLAZED BEETS
Smaller beets tend to have a nicer flavor and are more tender. The winter beets of the Victorian time were so tough and large that they had to be boiled for hours.
8 to 10 golf-ball-sized beets (2 to 2½ inches), greens discarded,
washed and patted dry
2 tablespoons oil
Kosher salt
Ground black pepper
2 tablespoons butter, cut into 2 pieces
Pinch clove, ground
3 tablespoons light brown sugar
6 tablespoons aged balsamic vinegar (10-year preferred)
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees, adjust oven rack to middle position. Place beets in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish. Drizzle with oil; season with 1 teaspoon kosher salt and ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper and toss to coat. Cover with foil and bake until beets are tender, shaking dish occasionally, 60 to 75 minutes. Remove foil, and continue to roast until pan is dry and beets begin to brown, about 15 to 25 minutes. Cool. Peel, cut in half, and then cut each beet into 1-inch wedges.
2. Melt butter in a 12-inch nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until foaming subsides. Add beets, clove, 1 teaspoon kosher salt, and ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper and cook until edges begin to brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Add brown sugar and cook, stirring frequently until sugar dissolves and coats the beets, about 30 seconds. Add vinegar and cook to a syrupy glaze, so that beets are coated, about 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from heat; add parsley and toss to coat. Serve immediately.
Serves 12 as small side dish.