Free Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain Page A

chaydfroids of larks, bouche à la reigne, paupiettes of fowl, gratin of eel, fried brains, Nesselrode pudding, roebuck filets with noodles, crab cakes, coulibiac – this was pretty intensive stuff, a lot of which (the coulibiac for instance) would make any modern-day cook, with all his Cuisinarts and Hobart mixers and blending wands and paco-jets, blanche with fear.
         This was not simple food being dangled in front of the eager noses of the new and eager middle class. Some of it – in whatever form – must have trickled down. Mary’s employers were unlikely to settle for their guests being served beef and potatoes or typical ‘English/Irish’ cuisine. Not every day, anyway. No way. At the very least, if Mary wasn’t reading the latest recipes, it’s likely she had to be able to follow them when the boss came over, head filled with croquembouches and vol-au-vents. She had to know what she was doing.
         Matters were made less agreeable by the fact that the prevailing cuisine was European – with French being preeminent. The mantra of all French chefs and the first principle of all French cooking is, of course, to ‘use everything.’ One didn’t simply bone out a chicken, serve the nice white, skinless breast for dinner, then discard the rest – or feed it to kitty – as more modern and lazy generations of Americans did. When one served steak, in a restaurant or at home, the mark of a good and frugal cook was to find ways to use the rest of the animal – or whatever parts were at hand. French cuisine is great for exactly this urgent need to find ways to make the tough and unlovely bits attractive and delicious. Shanks and shoulders must be braised slowly, tongues, kidneys, hearts, tails, lungs, hooves, and snouts used whenever possible. Innovative but often difficult, time-consuming and painstaking procedures and recipes were developed to accomplish that end. Chefs became great chefs because they knew how to use every scrap, coax every bit of flavor and substance out of every bone, scrap and trimming in order to make money for their masters while still dazzling their customers. French cuisine grew up around this grim duty to make fiendishly clever use of everything that swam, crawled, slunk or pushed its way through turf. Look at some French ‘classics’: coq au vin (tough, over-exercised bird, slow-braised in red wine until tender – often thickened with blood), tête de veau (gelatinous, rolled-up face and skin of veal, stewed until tender) perhaps accompanied by sauce ravigotte (leftover egg yolks from meringue, emulsified with oil and garnishes), pieds cochon (pigs’ feet, bones torturously removed, stewed, reassembled, baked en gratin with mustard and bread crumbs, i.e., stale bread), boeuf bourguignonne (tough hunks of fatty shoulder meat, stewed until tender), tallow sculptures (discarded beef fat), escargots (nasty snails disguised with garlic butter). Even the vaunted Delmonico’s – which offered over a hundred different soups on any given day – played the game, operating within this kind of crafty/frugal mindset: throw a little of yesterday’s tomato soup together with today’s pea soup, and you have potage ‘mongole’ – three soups for the price of two! Keeping up with the Joneses, in Mary’s time, required serious knife skills and a fairly comprehensive knowledge of how to butcher, merchandise, and coax various critters into edibility. Baking, pickles, preserves, the making of ice creams, cakes, cookies, were bottom-line skills, fundamentals in even the simplest of households. Add the food craze of those kooky, crazy times to the mix and you have – at best – one serious pain in the rear end for even the most accommodating domestic cook in the home of a member of the new rich.
         It might have been easier for an Irish cook – in a time when one seldom got two weeks’ notice and unemployment benefits did not exist – to continue pleasing one’s cruel masters