Eating with Fanny

Being a foody, I recently checked out a copy of Fannie Farmer’s “Original 1896” Boston Cooking-School Cook Book from the library.   I wanted to find out what people ate at the turn of the nineteenth century.  It led to an interesting and surprising voyage in a culinary time-capsule.

Fanny Farmer was born in 1857.  An illness (perhaps polio) during high school rendered her lame, and in those days, unmarriageable.  She turned to cooking, and became a cooking teacher, eventually forming her own cooking school, and eventually wrote her cookbook. By the time she died in 1915, 360,000 copies of her book had been sold.   It has been revised continuously throughout the years, selling millions of copies.  I remember there was a well-used copy in my home growing up.

Looking at the 1896 edition, I found some surprises.

There is a chapter for recipes “especially prepared for the sick”.  The introduction asserts that “statistics prove that two-thirds of all disease is brought about by error in diet”.  Perhaps the incorrect proportions were used, Farmer maintains, or the food was improperly cooked.  So much for germs, airborne diseases, and bacteria, not to mention cancer, strokes and heart attacks.

She emphasizes food presentation in serving the sick – select the daintiest china, finest glass, and choicest silver, making changes as often as possible, she says.   I agree with her that aesthetics are important to sick people – why just slop the food on a plastic plate just because a person is very sick.  That’s just plain unfair. 

The good foods for the sick are all of the mealy type, what we used to term as porridge in the old days.  (Remember the Three Little Bears – wasn’t there some porridge in that story?)  Flour gruel is one of the suggested dishes for sick people, made of 1 tablespoon of flour, 2 cups of milk, and some salt.  Farina gruel (which I actually remember from my childhood along with the requisite enema my mother so lovingly administered) is made out of boiling water, farina, milk, egg and salt.   For the adventurous, using Indian meal instead of flour or farina results in “Indian Gruel”.    I wondered if the food Fanny was suggesting made people sicker. 

There are also many liquid foods to offer the sick.  Barley water is highly recommended. Toast water is made with toast.  (The toast is made, of course, in the oven, not the toaster – we learned how to do this the old way back in 1958 in cooking class. )  The toast is crumbled, soaked in water, strained through cheese cloth, and seasoned.  Seasoned with what, one might ask?  Fanny is mute on this topic.

Sick people’s food gets a little more exciting as you go down the list, which includes eggnog. There are several eggnog recipes, and they all include brandy.  

Boiled beef essence is also good for sick people, she maintains.  In those days beef essence didn’t come in a cube or a carton or a can.  It is rendered by cooking steak round for 3 minutes, cutting the “bleeding” piece into 1 inch and 1 ½ inch cubes, then “gashing” each piece two or three times on each side.  After that, you express the “juice” (blood, actually) with a lemon squeezer and put it into a cup.  Finally, you set this dish in hot water – but not too hot as to actually cook the meat or “coagulate” its juices.  Sounds pretty grim. 

Have you ever heard the expression “milquetoast”?  It is refers to a weak, ineffectual or bland person (male).  The word is derived from a character in a 1924 comic strip The Timid Soul.  It probably refers to the nature of milk toast, which was an important food in 1896, based on the number of Fanny Farmer’s recipes for it.

The basic milk toast recipe is to add water to flour to make a paste, add milk and cook, and salt and butter, then dip slices of toast in it.  Remove the toast to a serving dish.  Pour the remaining sauce over the toast, and serve.  Sounds fairly unhealthy?  Maybe it was the milk toast that made people sick in those times.   

There is a robust section on donuts, but that was before Dunkin’ Donuts took away peoples’ will to make donuts at home.   People had all the time in the world I the age before multi-tasking.   They make themselves sick frying in deep fat (animal?), and if needed, refer to Fanny’s recipes for the sick afterwards.

There is an interesting chapter on soup garnishings (egg balls, noodles, flour dropped into boiling grease, etc.) and force-meats.   I have not heard mention of force-meats in at least 50 years, and was interested in learning what it was.

A force-meat is a concoction that is made as follows:  cook stale bread crumbs and milk to a paste, add egg and fish (or chicken or clam or salmon, etc.) pounded and forced through a puree strainer.  It is then shaped into small balls and plopped into to the soup to cook in it.  

There are some very interesting recipes in the book that I would like to try.  One is champagne sauce, to use on fish or meat.  You start with Espagnole sauce, which is made with what we now call “Italian” seasonings, and brown stock, itself made with beef and seasoned copiously.  Reduce it, add two tablespoons of mushroom liquor (where am I going to get this?), a half cup of champagne, and one tablespoon of powdered sugar.   

Now I know where my mother got her prune whip recipe, one of my least favorites of my mother’s fine cooking.  It’s here in the Fanny Farmer cook-book.  You add the whites of 5 eggs to prunes that are “picked over” and washed.  (What did they find on them to have to pick them over?)  Remove the stones of the prune (those are the pits — very smart move), and rub them through a strainer, adding sugar.  Then  beat in the whites of the egg until stiff, bake twenty minutes, then feed to unsuspecting children who hate the dish.  I can still recall the taste 60 years later.  (I think my siblings actually liked prune whip, which I’m sure encouraged my mother to keep making it.)

When I wasn’t getting attacked in my childhood by the prune whip (or the enemas), I could take a rest and sample the various lovely “chafing dish” recipes Farmer suggests.  Welsh Rarebit was staple in our post-World War II suburban Jewish home.   It has nothing to do with rabbit.  My mother made it just the way Fanny said to, and we all loved it.  Mother may have put a little beer in it, as is required for Fanny’s Welsh Rarebit II recipe.   Welsh Rarebit could make boring American cheese into something exciting, but was probably not that healthy.  (Cream and butter are also in the recipe.  Maybe partly explains why my siblings and I have weight problems.)

So if Fanny Farmer didn’t kill you with her food recipes, she could nurse you back to health with the dainty silverware, the gruel and the raw beef.

I hope you have enjoyed this little jaunt through earlier times.  Bon Appetite to you.