Free Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain Page B

with the simple standards of English/American workhorse dishes if they never entertained and if the cook also performed household duties. Many, if not most, homes had exactly that kind of arrangement. But Mary, notably, worked in larger households, where chambermaid duties, maintenance, laundry, and so on were taken care of by other servants. Mary got jobs and held them on the basis of cooking – and cooking alone. More was expected in such a situation. Both family and their guests, presumably, had to be dazzled – and this was increasingly difficult to do in a cash-rich, food-crazed world where everybody was not only eating, but reading about eating, rushing to restaurants and hotels and dinner parties and clubs. And this was – remember – New York!
         As technology improved, Harvey Levenstein points out in Revolution of the Table , the middle classes used their kitchens and dining rooms to improve their social standing. If one’s cook was not exactly Escoffier, at least one could bury one’s guests in exotic ingredients. Even cookbooks and menus which appealed to Anglo-American practitioners, aimed at middle-class homes, suggested menus like this one from Maria Parloa:
     
    Oysters on the halfshell followed by consommé à la royale  . . . followed by baked fish with hollandaise  . . . cheese soufflé  . . . roast chicken with mashed potatoes, green peas and cranberry jelly  . . . oyster patties  . . . salad with French dressing  . . . cheese and crackers  . . . frozen pudding with apricot sauce, sherbet, meringue, sponge cake, fruit and coffee.
     
         Assuming Mary had to make anything like this, one must also keep in mind that she had already served the family breakfast, lunch, and maybe even afternoon tea. Even assuming that Mary was indeed a ‘good, plain cook’ with a repertoire of Anglo-Irish classics, it cannot have been an easy life. In smaller homes, in the early part of her career, and in later, harder times, it is likely that she shared in some laundry chores. Mary, it was said, was an excellent seamstress – particularly talented at crochet work. So surely she had experience there.
         We know for certain that she was very good at ice cream. Peach ice cream in particular was well remembered – even by her victims. Sadly, it was exactly this specialty that was the probable source of transmission for many of her victims. As Soper correctly points out, cooked food, by the time it reached its cooking temperature, would have killed any typhoid germs Mary might have transferred. Ice cream and raw peaches, however, would have been a very attractive medium. The relatively high number of fellow servants afflicted suggests that chambermaids and laundresses, passing through Mary’s kitchen, might have grabbed a piece of raw fruit, nicked a raw string bean, stuck a finger in a tub of ice cream on occasion – which would explain their higher rate of infection.
         The turn of the century marked an explosion in prepared and prepackaged foods, taking some of the heat off the beleaguered cooks of the day. You could now have bread, meat, fish and the like prepared for you and delivered to the door. Baking powder had begun being added to flour, making leavening a lot easier. Canned soups and vegetables, cereals and mixes were advertised on attractive little picture cards which were distributed door to door by salesmen, soon to be replaced by even more popular magazines filled with ads for all the absolutely new necessary gadgets. Kitchen designs became simpler and more sensible, with easy cleaning in mind, and we can safely assume that by 1907, at least in the wealthier homes where Mary worked, she enjoyed all the modern conveniences: nonporous congoleum floors, tin ceilings, ceramic-lined two-chamber pot sinks, the latest in zinc-lined iceboxes – and most importantly, a gas stove. This last development, which appeared in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, was a marvel and widely in