Chapter 9
It’s 1896: Let’s Go Shopping
The year Fannie published her cookbook, 1896, was a shopper’s paradise. One could walk through the doors of S. S. Pierce, the preeminent grocer of the day, and purchase Formosa oolong, Penang cloves, authentic Parmesan from Italy, a bottle of Château Lafite or Château Margaux (they would set you back $20 to $30 per case, roughly $1,000 to $1,500 in today’s dollars), six types of preserved cherries, green turtle soup, Jamaican ginger, California peaches, hothouse cucumbers, potted ham, medicated toilet paper, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Havana cigars, cherry blossom toothpaste, truffles, jarred French peas, and Tanglefoot sticky fly paper.
But this bounty, all neatly displayed and offered for immediate home delivery, was a far cry from Boston’s beginnings—a time before Faneuil Hall and Quincy Markets, before the railroads brought oranges from Florida and canned fruit from California, before ships were unloading mushrooms from Paris and olive oil from Italy. The most venerable method of purchasing foodstuffs was through vendors—butchers, fishmongers, and farmers—who went door to door. This old English custom endured well into the eighteenth century, and many Bostonians opposed the building of central markets, since it meant the inconvenience of a shopping trip and an end to unregulated commerce. What is so vile and detestable about something so simple as a public place to sell meat, vegetables, fish, and fruit? The answer is one that explains the American Revolution, or at least the enthusiasm many wealthy colonists felt for risking their life, liberty, and possessions against overwhelming odds and the most powerful navy in the world. It is simply this: The colonists hated any notion of taxation, regulation, or central authority if these interfered with their daily lives. They came to America to be left alone.
By 1634, the city of Boston decided that it was indeed time for a central, city-funded marketplace, and the perfect spot was down at the docks. The original market in Boston was called, of course, Dock Square market, although it was also referred to as the corn market. At first, it was open only on Thursdays. It was established on the site of the old state house by order of the court, and it was not much more than an open field—it was not until the eighteenth century that Boston markets had indoor facilities as well. Fishermen could sell cod and mackerel; farmers came down the Charles River in boats with vegetables; and the farmers from Roxbury and Dorchester could transport their goods by wagon over the thin strip of land that connected Boston with the mainland.
As many of the early colonists feared, there was soon a need for a court to settle market disputes. Thus the Pie Powder Court was founded, named after the baking flour covering the feet of its members. By midcentury, however, two clerks of the market were appointed in place of the court—Jeremy Houchin and James Penn—and their job was to inspect the market for cleanliness, regulate weights and measures, and settle disputes. They were paid “one third part of all forfeit” for their efforts, with the remainder paid to the poor. By 1658, a two-story Town House was erected. It was used for public business—a court, a library, and a meeting place for an artillery company—but the ground floor was open and used for the merchant exchange. It soon became the home of the first formal New England town meeting at which officials were elected. (They used the old Anglo-Saxon term for sheriff, which is a contraction of “shire reeve,” reeve meaning “peace.” They kept the peace in the shire or town.)
By the end of the century, the market was open three days a week. A bell was rung at its opening, 6:00 a.m. in the summer and 9:00 a.m. in the winter months. The practices of freewheeling peddlers and door-to-door salesmen continued, since the public markets scared off many vendors because of the need for licenses, fees, rents, and fines. And consumers enjoyed the convenience of this early colonial form of the Home Shopping Network.
Over the next few decades, a series of fires closed the market, and other markets were built in the downtown area, but, all in all, Bostonians did not cater to centralized, regulated markets. In fact, in 1736, a mob disguised as clergymen (mobs in colonial Boston had a penchant for disguising themselves) destroyed the central Dock Square market. Enter Peter Faneuil.
In 1738, Peter Faneuil, a Boston merchant whose wealthy family had emigrated in 1691 from France, came into a great deal of money through his uncle Andrew, including holdings in Great Britain, France, and Holland. The will stipulated that the family fortune only pass through to someone who worked for the uncle and never married. (A brother, Benjamin, fell in love, so Peter stepped up to the plate.) In 1740, Faneuil offered to fund a market at Dock Square as long as the city agreed to authorize and maintain it. Without his knowledge, his offer was quickly written up as a petition and signed by scores of prominent citizens. Nevertheless, the proposal passed by just seven votes—a testament to the forces that supported unregulated commerce—and a petition was circulated and passed noting that peddlers were still allowed to sell their goods wherever they pleased. (Faneuil also complained bitterly that nobody could properly pronounce his family name, a problem that persists to this day. It is correctly pronounced “Fan-nel,” with the accent on the first syllable.)
Faneuil attached conditions to his offer. He demanded that the hall be built of masonry to help withstand fire, and that the site be maintained forever as a market, to avoid the fate of South Market, which had been converted into a storehouse and rented. The architect was a Scottish artist, John Smibert, a friend of the Faneuil family. He designed a classic English Renaissance structure forty feet wide by one hundred long, with an arcade on the lower floor to serve as the market and a large hall above. The latter became the new public meeting room for Boston, the old Town Hall being too small for the growing seaport. It was located at Dock Square, and was therefore on the waterfront. (Visitors to modern Boston will note that Faneuil Hall is no longer on the water, due to the expansion of Boston’s footprint into the harbor over the years.)
Faneuil Hall was topped with a domed cupola that housed a bell for signaling the start and end of the market day as well as a thirty-eight-pound grasshopper weather vane, modeled after a similar creature that sat atop London’s Royal Exchange. The weather vane was built by Deacon Shem Drowne out of hammered copper and gold leaf; the eyes were green glass doorknobs, and it also had long metal antennae. It soon became the most famous weather vane in the country.
What is often lost in all of this grand history is that Faneuil Hall was pretty much a disaster. It took three months to rent the first stall. Finally, it was rented to Anthony Hodgson, who sold butter, cheese, and flour (the butter was from Ireland and Cheshire cheese from England). The market was actually closed twice for a year or so in its early history, owing to lack of interest from both sellers and buyers. The anti-market faction, which referred to Faneuil Hall as the “Grasshopper Market,” seemed to be winning the battle against a centralized shopping center.
To add insult to injury, the hall burned in 1761, even though it was made mostly of masonry. In 1762, the new Faneuil Hall was erected and, in 1805, doubled in size by architect Charles Bullfinch. By the early nineteenth century, the market had finally come into its own. Inside the hall on the first floor, one contemporary writer described the scene. “Here are sausages in festoons; roasting pig that would have made Charles Lamb’s mouth water; vegetables in parterres, and fruits from every clime. Here one may have fish, flesh, fowl, or good red herring.” Outside, around the hall, there were vendors with wagons and pushcarts, sometimes as many as three hundred teams converging around the market. (The horses were sent to nearby stables while the market was open.) They paid no rent, so the colonists’ vision of an unregulated marketplace had really come to life even though Faneuil Hall was a success. Actually, there was more to buy outside the hall than inside. (Some farmers, however, simply sold their goods at wholesale prices to the merchants within the hall instead of spending the day by their wagons selling to the retail trade.)
With the success of Faneuil Hall, Boston soon needed additional market space and so, in 1826, Quincy Market, named after former mayor Josiah Quincy, was erected, built of granite, two stories high and 535 feet long. Vendor stalls were installed downstairs on each side of the grand corridor (leased from the city), and on the second floor was Quincy Hall, for meetings. The entire project, including new streets around the market as well as the North and South Market Street warehouses, and stores flanking the new hall, cost the city over $1 million. At first, these surrounding establishments were more likely to sell dry goods and nonperishable items such as clothing, leather goods, hats, cigars, stoves, and snuff; sail and awning makers also rented space on the top floors of these buildings. Produce vendors appeared in the warehouses later in the century.
By 1880, Quincy Market was a huge success, one of the few public commercial enterprises in Boston that could make that claim. Produce merchants in the halls had annual sales of $20 million from cheese, poultry, meat, fish, seafood, vegetables, and fruit. Fifty to a hundred carcasses of beef, mutton, and veal were sold every day, and goods were imported from Florida and the Pacific Coast. One could purchase “a pound or a hundred quarters of beef; a pound of sausage or a thousand dressed hogs; a peck or a thousand barrels of apples; a pound or a ton of butter; a dozen oranges or a hundred boxes; a pound or a cargo of fish, fresh or salted.” By the 1880s, refrigerated storage (no longer ice, but a cold brine system of refrigeration) was available at a facility near the market, and Boston vendors were shipping goods across the Atlantic and to the West Coast. Over time, other smaller markets opened up as well.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the fruits, vegetables, meats, and poultry sold at these markets were mostly local. Small establishments and the city markets offered everything from poultry (chicken, partridge, quail, woodcock, snipe), seasonal fruit (peaches, pears, melons, “morocco” grapes), confectionary products (cream cakes, mince pie, Washington pie, vanilla jumbles, harlequin, éclairs, charlotte russe), and seafood (scallops, smelt, clams, whitefish, salt cod, haddock, shad roe, mackerel). But in the period after the Civil War, the railroads opened up the Midwest, a more fertile area than New England, and this was the beginning of a long decline for New England farmers. From 1850 to 1914, the number of farms in the New England states had not increased, nor had the number of people working on them. In fact, the amount of acreage under cultivation actually decreased.
One good example of the growth of nonlocal foods is the turkey business. By 1890, very few Vermont turkeys were showing up in Boston markets, although they were supposedly of the highest quality. By this time, the birds were being shipped in from “out west,” which meant Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and Iowa. The reason? Corn was cheaper in the Midwest, and the turkey farms were bigger. Fannie Farmer noted a similar trend in terms of produce: “A few years ago native vegetables were alone sold; but now our markets are largely supplied from the Southern States and California.” By the late nineteenth century, however, foods were not just coming from the Midwest; they were coming from all over the world.
The preeminent Boston grocer, the founder of the original gourmet market, was Samuel S. Pierce. The year was 1831, and the location was Court and Tremont streets. Samuel Pierce thought that this was a good location for a food market, since it was equidistant from the West End, the Bullfinch mansions (which were torn down to make way for, among other things, the ugliest building in the world, Boston City Hall), the residential district around Summer Street and Church Green, and the growing Beacon Hill. This same building had housed the headquarters of General Washington, and one of Mr. Pierce’s early customers was Daniel Webster, whose law office was located in the same building.
The term grocer is a derivation of the French groser, referring to someone who purchases items in “gross,” or wholesale. As the trade monopoly of the East India Company came to a close in the late nineteenth century, this opened up the market for local entrepreneurs—wholesalers who bought in bulk, measuring out small household units of flour, meal, molasses, tea, and spices for their customers. However, two things really set S. S. Pierce apart. The first was home delivery of groceries, originally by wheelbarrow, then by horse and cart, and finally, by teams of six matched grays that were imported from Ohio. The second was an eye toward gourmet products, since Boston was becoming a much more sophisticated and wealthy town as the twentieth century approached.
By 1896, S. S. Pierce had outgrown its original location and had to move its headquarters down Tremont Street to a spot across from the Parker House and King’s Chapel. Many might suppose that this was nothing more than a small storefront, but Pierce had to employ ninety horses and two hundred men to move the four thousand types of items in his inventory. By that time, one could purchase the expected: grapes, lemons, vermicelli, vinegar, molasses, almonds, prunes, Moxie soda (Moxie was first marketed as a “nerve food” in the 1870s and was quickly transformed into a soda favored by Calvin Coolidge; it is still made today), pickles, and biscuits. But the list of available items also included the first pick of mushrooms grown in caves in old quarries near Paris, and isinglass, the precursor to modern gelatin (originally made from the bladders of Russian sturgeon, and later made more cheaply from cod). When this extremely expensive import (up to $18 per pound) was temporarily unavailable, Pierce sent his own agents to Russia for a new supply, dragging it on dogsleds through the “frozen forests” before it could be shipped back to Boston.
The extraordinary effort that S. S. Pierce spent in sourcing its products was also evidenced in its approach to customer service. The Bon Voyage Basket was a famous offering that was delivered to a ship’s passenger just prior to sailing. In one famous case, however, the basket did not, in fact, reach the ship before departure. The first port of call was Bombay, where the basket was finally delivered to the customer by a representative of the company as soon as the ship reached port. A similar story involves a shipment of green turtle soup that had not arrived on the morning of a dinner party in Poughkeepsie. A Pierce employee was immediately dispatched, and he arrived with the soup in hand one hour before the party started.
Pierce was also an early adopter of canned goods; its first recorded sale of canned corn was in 1848. It should be noted that in the nineteenth century, this new method of preservation was considered a marvel, and foods sold in this manner were not necessarily looked down upon, as most canned foods are today. One happy customer wrote to S. S. Pierce noting that his grandfather’s homegrown fruits and vegetables were always a source of great pride at his table, but that the canned variety sold by Pierce compared favorably to his own fresh produce. The heart and soul of S. S. Pierce was its catalog, which was entitled The Epicure. It contained food writing, recipes, and, of course, a description of items, including prices.
And what was for sale at S. S. Pierce in 1896? There were twenty-three pages of listings, with about 180 items per page, including tea; coffee at 40 cents a pound; maple and fruit syrups; a long list of sugars, including loaf, granulated, crushed, cut loaf, golden yellow, confectioner’s, German beet sugar, maple sugar, rock candy crystals, and red frosting sugar; a range of flours, including three brands we still recognize today, Pillsbury, Hecker’s, and Swan’s Down; a wide selection of oats, including McCann’s Irish and Quaker rolled; Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix; Graham flour (the brainchild of Sylvester Graham, a health-food advocate and founder of the first health-food store); infant foods, including malted milk; condensed milk; beef extracts for making stocks and sauces; spices (Penang cloves, Java cassia, Jamaica ginger, Tellicherry, Nepaul, curry powder); herbs, including Bell’s poultry dressing; chocolate and cocoa (the better brands ran up to 90 cents per pound); dried, crystallized, and glacéed fruits; nuts; crackers and biscuits, as well as American and foreign cheeses. American cheese was rather inexpensive—25 cents a pound or less—whereas the imports cost up to $1 a pound. Corn included hominy, samp, white cornmeal, and cornstarch. There were copious listings for pantry staples such as pickles; macaroni (they were only selling lasagna, spaghetti, vermicelli, and noodles at this point); catsups and sauces (including catsup made from walnuts and mushrooms, soy sauce, and A1 and Tabasco sauces); vinegars; olive oil from Italy at 65 cents per quart and labeled under the house brand; and imported vegetables, including a wide assortment of truffles, as well as Brussels sprouts, artichokes, and cepes. There were loads of pâtés; all sorts of canned meats, including potted ham, chicken, tongue, and turkey; canned soups; and American canned vegetables and fruits, many of them imported from California. Fresh fruits were put up in jars with a light syrup, and preserved fruits were sold separately in airtight glass jars, including six kinds of cherries (maraschino, canned, crystallized, fresh in glass jars, preserved, and sweet pickled). And in a nod to locally sourced foods, a Quaker community out in Harvard was contracted to raise herbs for the Boston store.
As for household supplies, there was wax, candles, soaps (Dobbins electric soap and Hoxie’s mineral soap), polishes (Kimball’s liquid polish and Burnishine), blacking, sardine knives, matches, twine, brooms, clothespins, and five different brands of toilet paper, medicated with aloe or witch hazel. One could find imported whiskies, including Jameson’s and Canadian Club, as well as domestic bourbon, brandy, beer, rum, and gin. Nonalcoholic beverages ran the gamut from squashes (citrus juice and soda water), to lemonades, ginger champagne, ginger ales, fruit syrups, shrubs (fruit, vinegar, and water, although some were alcoholic, since they were allowed to ferment), and sarsaparillas, as well as a full range of bottled waters, including Poland, Hygeia, Manitou, Schweppes, Vichy, Saratoga, and Bethesda.
With the growth of S. S. Pierce, smaller grocery stores emerged to service local neighborhoods, the goods being mostly packaged foods, imported teas and coffees, and staples such as flour and sugar. Larger retailers were also starting or expanding their grocery sections; one such store, Bailey’s, often undercut S. S. Pierce with lower prices. In time, these larger establishments put the fresh-air markets out of business, since they delivered, they were clean and orderly, they were usually closer to home, and they had larger inventories.
Back in Boston in the 1890s, most of the food shopping was done in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, where almost 1 million people came to market. However, by 1899, the market was so overcrowded that proposals were afoot to build new markets, such as the one suggested for the former railway depot site at Park Square. Unlike S. S. Pierce, these markets allowed farmers from thirty to forty miles outside of Boston the chance to set up shop and sell directly to consumers.
Shopping was not done just by professional cooks or the middle-class housewife with list in hand. By the 1890s, some upper-class women were also going about doing their own shopping, as described in a November 17, 1895, article in the Boston Globe. These “ladies of leisure” would go to market in carriages driven by liveried coachmen, keeping their shopping lists in “leather and gold notebooks.” (Other well-to-do women came by public transportation or walked, of course.)
The experience of shopping for Thanksgiving in 1896 was recorded by one intrepid Boston Globe reporter, who wrote about the tremendous last-minute rush for turkeys with “sounds worthy [of] the realms of Beelzebub” as bargain-hunting shoppers descended on Quincy Market to secure the main event in the biggest meal of the year. The streets were lit with both torches and electric lights and the birds formed fences and walls along the lines of the curbstones, hung from their feet by ten-penny nails pounded into improvised wooden scaffolding. As the evening progressed, the prices fell from 20 cents a pound at 8:00 p.m. down to 15 to 17 cents by 9:00 p.m., which was closing time for the market itself. Outside, the vendors kept up their “seductive oratory” until almost midnight. By 11:00 p.m., turkey had dropped to 10 cents per pound and a vendor with just one chicken in inventory hawked it at a mere 5 cents per pound, saying, “Here you go now, ladies and gents. This is the last bird I possess in the world. He’s yours for 12 cents, and if you don’t find him the tenderest chicken in Boston, I’ll give him to you for nothing.”
One of the best accounts of life in Boston in the late nineteenth century appears in One Boy’s Boston by Samuel Eliot Morison, who describes the types of stores found on Charles Street. There were two fish markets; a hardware store; a fruit store (Solari & Porcella); Chater’s Bakery, which had a lunch counter where one could purchase a bowl of soup or a ham sandwich for 5 cents; Greer’s Variety Store, which sold green pickles in a large goldfish bowl for 1 cent each; Murphy’s Grocery; John Cotter’s saloon; a shoe repair shop; and a tailor. Morison goes on to talk about food shopping, indicating that the “man from Pierce’s” would show up every morning to take an order. Staples such as flour, sugar, potatoes, and apples were brought by the barrel, and all the breads and cakes (except for parties) were baked in the house. Meat, poultry, eggs, and fish were ordered by his grandfather personally at Faneuil Hall or Quincy Market on Saturday mornings. As it was in Europe, food shopping was a daily affair, in part due to the lack of cold storage space; iceboxes were still rather small in the late 1800s, and many households did not even own one.
Victorian Boston was, all in all, a vastly better and more convenient place to shop than Boston today. The farmer’s market was not a small-time, anything-but-mainstream concept, but the bread and butter of food shopping. And vendors had the benefit of faster and refrigerated transportation, so they could import fruits, vegetables, and even fish from across the country, and also purchase mushrooms, olive oil, pasta, chocolate, and many other delicacies direct from Europe. It was a wonderful time to be a home cook, especially if one had sufficient disposable income.
JUNE 2009. WHILE I WAS WORKING ON THIS PROJECT, A NUMBER of books and magazine articles had appeared saying, in effect, that cooking was dead. I would inevitably get sucked into reading these diatribes, the virtuous food writer either waxing poetic about the past or launching into a polemic about the evils of fast food or the effect of agribusiness on the American dinner table.
I kept thinking, don’t my Vermont neighbors count? They not only do a lot of cooking but also do a lot of canning and preserving. I also knew that the magazine Taste of Home had over 3 million subscribers and its pages were filled with recipes, not long lifestyle pieces. These were mostly midwestern cooks who baked more than their share of cookies, breads, pies, and cakes. So was this the bicoastal food mafia talking—people who ate out at least five nights a week—or was home cooking really dying? And what was I doing cooking a twelve-course, twenty-eight-recipe menu in an age when the media had declared the culinary arts to be purely a spectator sport? What was next, the death of sex?
There is no question that the time spent cooking at home has gone down a lot over the last hundred years. The key driver of this decrease is the movement of women out of the home and into the workplace. In 1900, only 20 percent of women were in the labor force, versus over 60 percent in 2000. For most women, life at home was neither easy nor pleasant. In Fannie’s day, a woman spent on average forty-four hours a week making and cleaning up after meals and another seven hours in general cleaning; and then, on top of that, there was child care. Families were larger—20 percent of American households had seven or more family members—thus more to cook and clean up for. Another big factor in time spent cooking was the availability of electricity. As late as 1930, only 10.4 percent of farms were electrified. A wood cookstove and no electric appliances translated to a great deal more time preparing food.
By 1950, however, this picture had changed dramatically, with over 90 percent of rural areas now having electricity, thanks to the Rural Electrification Administration. Electricity also meant the availability of mechanical refrigerators: by 1950, 80 percent of American households owned one. By midcentury, the typical American cook was spending only twenty hours per week cooking, down from forty-four hours in 1900.
Given the huge technological changes since 1900, much of this reduction in time spent cooking was probably a very good thing indeed. And why the hell don’t food writers ever admit that spending six hours a day cooking and cleaning in the kitchen is not ideal? Hey, I love from-scratch cooking as much as the next cook, but I am extremely grateful for many of the technological wonders of the modern kitchen. For starters, we have gas or electric stoves and ovens, which require a whole lot less time, thought, planning, and maintenance than a wood or coal cookstove. And how about dishwashers for reducing cleanup time?
Food preservation is not an issue at all these days, owing to electric refrigerators and the ability to purchase small portions of almost anything. Cooks in Fannie’s day were still spending a lot of time breaking down or preserving large quantities of seasonal foods for use later. Much of our food has already been sorted out, cleaned, and packaged; for example, turkeys no longer require plucking. We can purchase foods that reduce cooking time enormously—who among us would really like to spend half an hour shucking peas for dinner? Or beating egg whites by hand or even with a mechanical, hand-turned Dover eggbeater? And that is not even considering what the food processor, the microwave, electric knife sharpeners, blenders, pressure cookers, bread machines, and electric deep fryers have done for us in terms of reducing preparation and cooking time.
So unless one believes that six hours a day in the kitchen inevitably leads to moral superiority—it needs to be said that the Victorians were absolutely thrilled to spend less time in the kitchen—then using technology to cut down on drudgery should be a plus, not a minus. Is washing dishes by hand innately more virtuous than using a dishwasher? (I do admit, however, to an irrational belief in the moral superiority of those who take time to prepare their own food as opposed to eating out all the time—but I am still not going to use a wood cookstove on a daily basis, and am deeply grateful for hot water out of the tap.)
Perhaps of even more importance is the fact that the cost of food has dropped enormously since 1900. Back then, the average household was spending about 30 percent of its total annual income on food, 20 percent in 1960, and about 10 percent today. When food is cheap, you spend less time preserving and reusing it—it is no longer a scarce resource. (This does have a curious dark side, however. From 1985 to 2000, the price of fruits and vegetables rose 118 percent, whereas sugar and sweets have risen just 46 percent, fats and oils, 35 percent, and carbonated soft drinks just 20 percent. For households that are watching their food dollar, the cost of fresh produce is outpacing the cost of fats and sugars, the foundation for most convenience foods.)
Another common yardstick for decrying the lack of home cooking is the amount of money spent on dining out. Fifty years ago, 25 percent of the food dollar was spent outside the home; today, just under 50 percent. So one can claim that expenditures on eating outside the home have increased 100 percent! Conversely, one might say, over half of all food dollars are still spent inside the home. That sounds better. Americans are still spending slightly more on food consumed at home than at restaurants.
Drilling down into the statistics, one finds that of the expenditures outside of the home, 22 percent goes to food purchased at snack bars, movie theaters, amusement parks, and sports arenas. These are hardly replacements for meals. In fact, one might note that we are simply eating a lot more food outside of the regular three meals per day. The point is simple: although the percentage of the food dollar spent at home is dropping, the distribution of those expenditures is over a larger number of choices, snacking being a major category. That means that the percentage of food dollars spent on food consumed at home may not paint as disastrous a picture as we think.
Other trends further queer the statistics. Let’s take midday dinner, which, in the late nineteenth century, was still the big meal of the day (as it still is in some parts of Europe). With women moving quickly into the workforce and the rise of industrialization, the midday dinner disappeared; folks were now eating at lunch counters and food carts. This was not a matter of Americans choosing to cook less; it was simply a matter of fewer women left at home to do the cooking during the day. Commuting also destroyed the midday meal, since it became increasingly difficult to go home for lunch. So the time spent cooking may have dropped considerably since 1900, but with absolutely no loss in quality or pleasure in terms of the one large meal of the day.
In a July 29, 2009, article in the New York Times Michael Pollan says that only twenty-seven minutes a day are spent cooking at home, plus another four minutes for cleanup. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey 2008 reports that the average amount of time spent cooking during weekdays is about thirty minutes. But wait a minute! The bureau also found that roughly half the American population over age 15 does no cooking whatsoever—meaning that the average time spent cooking, for those who do cook, is roughly sixty minutes. Since 2003, this amount has only changed by three minutes. So we have gone from cooking six hours a day in 1900 to just one hour today, but much of that decrease is simply because it takes a whole lot less time to prepare food and clean up afterward than it used to and because, for all intents and purposes, we have gone from three meals a day prepared at home to one.
So let’s put aside the “time spent cooking at home” discussion, since it is almost impossible to judge cooking time from one century to the next. Sure, we are cooking less, but much of this may be due to increased efficiency and the focus on just one meal per day. And how many of us would like to spend one-third of our waking hours just getting food on the table? That’s what cows and horses do—they have to spend most of their time grazing just to get enough to eat. Maybe that’s why they don’t read books, go to movies, or spend time on Facebook.
Of course, anyone can play the “cooking is dead” game. Here are some carefully selected statistics that make the case. From 2000 to 2005, there were huge increases in prepared foods sold at supermarkets, including salads (52 percent), frozen prepared meals (32 percent), and desserts (25 percent). In this period, flour sales were way down (46 percent), as were sugar and chicken (16 percent). Pretty clear that the sky is falling, right? Well, now let me argue the opposite side: that cooking is holding its own very nicely. Spending on baking ingredients has actually increased 18 percent from 2000 to 2005—butter alone went up 1 percent. Frozen prepared foods actually declined by 15 percent during this period—a hopeful sign. Sales of lettuce, tomatoes, and potatoes all fell by less than 10 percent. And if I were asked about the huge decrease in flour sales, I would simply point out that the French buy their bread and pastries at retail, so why shouldn’t we?
Sales of cookware have also been on the upswing. In 2004, American cookware manufacturers shipped $992 million worth of product; in 2008, the total was $1,269 million. This is after a steady decrease during the prior five-year period. The International Housewares Association’s Consumer Advisory Board conducted focus groups in 2006 indicating that consumers eat dinner at home five or more times per week, and half the participants said that they were eating at home more often than they did a year ago. Internationally, cookware sales rose 9 percent in 2008. One industry analyst commented, “The growing interest in cooking and cooking programmes has had its influence specifically by changing people’s behavior, as ‘dining-in’ becomes the new ‘eating-out.’ ” This was even true in Poland, where cooking shows are extremely popular. This trend will probably be extended by the prospect of a long-term weak world economy.
So in the spirit of a renewed interest in home cooking, we moved on to the vegetable course. Fannie had a few suggestions: asparagus tips with hollandaise sauce, celery salad, dressed lettuce with cheese straws, string bean and radish salad, or a simple preparation of mushrooms, cauliflower, or artichokes. (This vegetable course may, in fact, be the precursor to the inevitable salad course that is, these days, currently sandwiched between the main course and dessert.) The notion of artichokes was appealing, since they were the most unusual choice. Frying battered artichokes was the most compelling recipe offered by Fannie, the others being stuffed artichokes (stuffed with a chicken forcemeat and topped with a “thin white sauce”) and boiled artichoke bottoms, also served with either a hollandaise or béchamel. It seems that every time Fannie was confronted with a plain, simple ingredient, she threw a white sauce or hollandaise on it. Hardly cuisine minceur!
We had also put together the kitchen team for the dinner. Erin, my test kitchen director, was to be chef de cuisine. Four of our editor-cooks from America’s Test Kitchen would be joining Erin, including Keith Dresser, Andrea Geary, Dan Souza, and Yvonne Ruperti (Andrew Janjigian would bake the brown bread off-site); Marie Eleana and her son Ryan would handle cleanup. The waitstaff was chosen by Mike Ehlenfeldt, who had worked at Hamersley’s Bistro with Erin. His wife, Cindy, would work the room, along with Jake McDowell, Debbie McDowell, Emile Arktinsal, and Melissa Klein. A rehearsal was planned for Saturday, October 24, so that we could cook through the whole meal to sort out timing and orchestrate the actual serving of the courses.
IN 1896, THE GLOBE ARTICHOKE WAS BOTH RARE AND EXPENSIVE in Boston. At a February 1896 meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Anna Barrows, managing editor of American Kitchen Magazine, commented, “Many of the wealthy find in the expensive varieties of fruit and vegetables, like the mushroom, the globe artichoke, and the products of the hothouse, an opportunity to spend money lavishly and to gratify their aesthetic tastes.” In other words, it was mostly a European commodity, a taste that sophisticated diners may have enjoyed over in France, England, or Italy, and then brought back to the United States.
As well as being awkward to eat, artichokes were also very expensive. The National Cook Book (1896), coauthored by the famous cookbook writer Marion Harland, noted that large, fine specimens of artichoke might fetch 50 cents in the New York markets. This was at a time when fresh salmon was running around 25 cents per pound. This was because most artichokes in the East were imported from France. However, this was not for lack of trying on the part of American farmers. They were grown in California and Louisiana as early as the eighteenth century, but initially were not a successful crop. According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, “In the 1890s, Italian farmers in northern California’s Half Moon Bay planted the crop, and beginning in 1904 boxcar loads of artichokes were sent east from California to supply the needs of artichoke lovers on the East Coast—at that point, mainly Italian immigrants.” By 1896, specimens from California could be had in the East late in the season.
The Green Laon artichoke was the most favored variety of imported artichoke, and was grown in the United States as well. The artichoke was named after the town of Laon, about ninety miles northeast of Paris, at the heart of which was a citadel and fortress. Its residents were noted gardeners, also producing asparagus from the sixteenth century on. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, growers from southern Europe took over a good deal of the artichoke production.
By 1899, the artichoke was receiving renewed culinary attention and respect. Fannie’s recipe started with boiled artichokes, which were then cut in quarters, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and parsley; dipped into a batter of bread flour, milk, and eggs; then deep-fried in fat and drained. But because of the heavy batter, the artichokes were heavy and pedestrian. We fiddled with the batter, making it leaner, but the finished coating was still thick and the artichokes tasted flat. The best solution was to soak the cooked artichoke halves in buttermilk and then make a light coating of flour, baking powder, and salt. Getting as much of the flour mixture in between the leaves also helped to provide a more interesting, crispier result. The last refinement was to score the leaves so that they would open up like petals of a flower.
FRIED BABY ARTICHOKES
The secret to this recipe is forcing the artichokes open so that they produce a fan of crisply breaded leaves. When done just right, you get a nice pairing of great crunch followed by the moister stem of the choke.
6 lemons, halved, plus 2 whole lemons for wedges
18 baby artichokes
4 teaspoons salt, plus more for seasoning fried artichokes
3 quarts peanut oil
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt, plus more for seasoning
2 cups buttermilk
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1. Squeeze juice from 3 halved lemons into large bowl of water and add halves to water as well (reserve the remaining 3 halved lemons for step 2). Cut off the top quarter and snap off the fibrous outer leaves of the artichokes until you reach the yellow leaves. With a paring knife, trim dark green exterior from base of artichokes as well as the exterior of stems. Trim a thin slice from the end of stems, and peel stems. Drop trimmed artichokes into bowl of acidulated water until ready to cook.
2. Drain artichokes and transfer to large Dutch oven of boiling seasoned water (4 quarts water, juice of 3 halved lemons, 4 teaspoons salt). Cook until tender, 7 to 12 minutes. Remove and place cut-side down on paper towel–lined plate to drain. Once cool, cut each artichoke in half lengthwise.
3. In large, heavy-bottomed Dutch oven fitted with clip-on-the-pot candy thermometer, heat oil over high heat to 375 degrees. While oil heats, whisk flour, baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt together in large bowl. Whisk buttermilk and parsley together in second large bowl. Working in batches, submerge artichoke halves in buttermilk mixture, making sure that buttermilk gets in between leaves. Working one at a time, transfer soaked artichoke halves to flour mixture and gently coat and open leaves to ensure that flour mixture coats all leaves; transfer to tray. Repeat with remaining artichokes. Note: artichokes can be breaded up to 1 hour before frying.
4. Working one at a time, hold each artichoke by the stem with tongs upside down, slowly submerge leaves into hot oil, and hold for about 5 seconds so that the leaves are forced open. Release into oil to continue frying, stirring occasionally until golden brown, about 1 to 3 minutes. Working quickly, repeat process with remaining artichokes, frying in batches of 8 to 12. As they are ready, using slotted spoon, remove from oil and transfer to paper towel–lined plate, then transfer to wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet in warm oven to hold while frying remaining artichokes. When ready to serve, sprinkle evenly with kosher salt. Serve with lemon wedge.
Serves 12 (3 halves each).