Free Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain

Evenings at Delmonico’s, Rector’s, and Sherry’s were marked by such innovations as meals served and eaten on horseback, parties where gigantic pools were erected so that food could float by on miniature re-creations of guests’ yachts, dinner parties for dogs. At more notorious events, strippers bathed themselves in champagne and emerged naked from cakes. No outrageous indulgence seemed too much.
         The pressure was on. French chefs were enjoying special popularity, and poor ‘Brigit’, the fabled and much-reviled servant girl, was under pressure to compete – or at least emulate their examples. Hosting evenings, teas and dinner parties was the ticket to social status for the new rich. One can only imagine Mary’s torment when her latest mistress read about some Turkish-themed party in the society pages and demanded Mary learn ‘the cuisine of the Orient’. Cookbooks and fad diets and manuals on housekeeping and proper deployment and use of domestic help were all the rage. It must have been a challenge. A new ‘movement’ seemed to pop up every day, preaching on one hand simplicity, and on the other excess and extravagance. The public, it was said, was eating too much protein, not enough grain, too few vegetables. There were too many domestics, not enough of them. Poor Mary must have wanted to strangle her employers at least once a week. Kitchens were beset by new developments in technology, sanitation, with an influx of new, absolutely necessary gadgets being advertised and endorsed almost every day. Charles Ranhofer’s groundbreaking book The Epicurean had allowed every housewife with reading skills to think she could re-create previously out-of-reach French classics. Even the cookbooks and manuals advocating simple, time-saving recipes read like the instructions for a missile launch or complicated neurosurgery.
         You might think that turn of the century diners were used to limited variety, clumsy and unsophisticated fare. You’d be wrong. Menus of the day offered raw shellfish, offal, French classics – alongside German and English/American stand-bys. Things like jellied pig’s knuckle sat alongside turkey wings à l’Italienne and risotto. Luchow’s on Fourteenth Street offered ragout fin en coquille, beef goulash with spaetzle, calf’s head en tortue. The Rorer Restaurant, a fairly prole establishment by comparison, offered three types of oysters, New England clam chowder, relishes, fried soft-shell crabs, hard crabs, fried chicken Maryland, broiled bluefish, baked whitefish au gratin, sandwiches of tongue, sardine, roast beef, corned beef, turkey, lobster and caviar! The Ladies Lunch at the Metropolitan Club featured such carnivore-friendly offerings as deviled kidneys, kidneys en brochette, mutton chops, curry of chicken livers, broiled sweetbreads jardiniere, roast squab, smoked tongue. Reiseweber’s on Columbus Circle, billed as an ‘Electric Grill and Gentleman’s Club and Bar’, served up a menu of seven sweetbread entrees, thirteen chicken dishes, fifteen potato sides, and a huge assortment of desserts, ice creams, fruits, brandied fruits and cheeses. The fish section alone contained sea bass, mackerel, sole, bluefish, halibut, salmon, frogs’ legs, and lobster. The Breslin, after a course of oysters or clams on the halfshell, saucisson de Lyon, caviar, and vermicelli soup, might offer a fish course of butterfish sauté meuniere, followed by cold dishes like galantine of capon, gumbo strained in jelly, terrine de foie gras Strasbourg, pâté of game, fricandeau of veal with parsnips.
         Fancier menus, created almost exclusively by French and European chefs, set the tone for second-tier, dazzling with an incredible array of continental piece montées, tallow carvings, pastry displays, ice carvings, ingredients like snipe, thrushes, woodcock, robins, preparations which paid homage to faraway lands and exotic cuisines – like turbot vol au vents, timbales of pike,