Free Fannie's Last Supper by Christopher Kimball

middle-class English in origin. Even today, on many menus in London restaurants, the dessert section is usually labeled “Puddings.”
    The “richer-cooking” courses covered an odd mix of items from French (Charlotte Russe and Lyonnaise Potatoes) to English (Stuffed Leg of Mutton) to classic American (Parker House Rolls, Chicken Croquettes, Cream Pies) to a few rather odd choices, including Curried Lobster and Apple Snowballs. Finally, the “fancy-cooking” classes were where the recipe names became longer, the food felt continental, and Fannie started to pull out all the stops. In the French classics department, one got Veal Birds, Potage à la Reine, Vol-au-Vent, Gâteau St. Honoré, Birds in Potato Cases, macaroons, floating island, Bombe Glacée, Sweetbreads with Peas, and Gâteau de Princesse Louise. But, look out—you also got Pigs in Blankets and Cabinet Pudding (a molded mishmash of gelatin-thickened custard, lady fingers, and macaroons, served with a cream sauce and candied cherries). This seemed as if middle-class suburban Boston women were trying to be sophisticated without having spent any time eating the food on location, in Paris, for example. If that sounds a tad condescending, well, Boston was still rather provincial in 1896, and Fannie’s cooking classes reflected that limitation.
    Fannie also understood that home cooks wanted impressive food, restaurant food, continental food—anything that she could dress up, sex up, rename, or make tantalizing. She knew that the larger audience were middle-class and upper-middle-class women who had sufficient time and income to make their dinner table a place of distant locales, of experimentation, of the new and progressive. This meant puff paste, lobster Newburg, Baked Alaska, and any recipe with the word Delmonico or Reine in it, rather than Boston baked beans and gingerbread. It is quite telling, however, that Fannie could teach the basics of making a cake at one moment while in the next she might be explaining the finer points of preparing charlotte russe. If anyone needs confirmation of America as the ultimate melting pot or Fannie’s keen ability to give her students whatever the hell they would pay for, this was it.
    When Fannie got too cute with her food, she ran into culinary trouble. Butterfly Tea was a puff paste cookie in the shape of a butterfly and decorated with chopped nuts, glacéed cherries, angelica, cinnamon, and sugar. Russian Eggs were boiled, peeled, set into puff paste cases, and then covered with a creamed mushroom sauce. A Valentine’s Day menu was pink and white: Lover’s Sandwiches (salmon) and the Heart’s-Ache Pudding, both in the shape of hearts, with an addition of cream cheese-and-olive-stuffed walnut halves for Cupid’s Deceits. For St. Patrick’s Day, she tied popcorn balls with green ribbons, upon which were glued the words “St. Patrick” in letters made of macaroni dyed sauterne green. She was, in some way, a budding Martha Stewart, but lacking the benefit of good taste and sophistication. As Laura Shapiro aptly stated in Perfection Salad, this was “socially ambitious cookery.” Fannie had put “high-class food within the reach of ordinary housekeepers and made up-to-date novelties accessible as well—all in the context of progress.”
    This was all going on at the same time that Auguste Escoffier was doing the exact opposite, trimming back the excess frivolity of classic French cooking to focus on the foundations of a higher, more refined culinary experience; everything on the plate must serve the purpose of good taste and good sense without elaborate garnishes and unnecessary complexity. Just for a moment, consider the level of culinary training the best chefs acquired in France, compared to the handful of years Fannie spent as a student at the Boston Cooking School. Escoffier had served a six-year apprenticeship starting at age twelve at his uncle’s restaurant in Nice and then worked five years at Le Petit