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Summary
Summary
In the mid-1990s, Chris Kimball moved into an 1859 Victorian townhouse on the South End of Boston and, as he became accustomed to the quirks and peculiarities of the house and neighborhood, he began to wonder what it was like to live and cook in that era. In particular, he became fascinated with Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book . Published in 1896, it was the best-selling cookbook of its age-full of odd, long-forgotten ingredients, fascinating details about how the recipes were concocted, and some truly amazing dishes (as well as some awful ones).
In Fannie's Last Supper , Kimball describes the experience of re-creating one of Fannie Farmer's amazing menus: a twelve-course Christmas dinner that she served at the end of the century. Kimball immersed himself in composing twenty different recipes-including rissoles, Lobster À l'AmÉricaine, Roast Goose with Chestnut Stuffing and Jus, and Mandarin Cake-with all the inherent difficulties of sourcing unusual animal parts and mastering many now-forgotten techniques, including regulating the heat on a coal cookstove and boiling a calf's head without its turning to mush, all sans food processor or oven thermometer. Kimball's research leads to many hilarious scenes, bizarre tastings, and an incredible armchair experience for any reader interested in food and the Victorian era.
Fannie's Last Supper includes the dishes from the dinner and revised and updated recipes from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book . A culinary thriller. it offers a fresh look at something that most of us take for granted-the American table.
Author Notes
Chris Kimball founded Cook's Magazine in 1980; it has grown to a paid circulation of 1,000,000. He has been the host of America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country , which are the top-rated cooking shows on public television, reaching two million viewers per week in over 94% of American households. Kimball is a regular contributor to both the Today Show and the CBS Early Show . He has been written up in most major newspapers, many national magazines, including the New Yorker and Time , and regularly contributes to NPR's Morning Edition , including doing a regular Thanksgiving segment. He is also the host of Milk Street Radio .NOTE: Kimball's individual bio differs from Milk Street brand bio. Please decide whether you want to separate Kimball and his brand into separate bios or use the same one for everything.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kimball, founder of Cook's Illustrated and host of the PBS series America's Test Kitchen, spent more than two years of "research, recipe testing, and intense planning" in order to host a Victorian dinner based on the recipes of Fannie Farmer, author of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, which was first published in 1896. Kimball is as exhaustive in his research as he is in one of his own test recipes for Cook's Illustrated, and fans of his work will appreciate his attention to even the smallest morsel of information. Kimball is off on a culinary and historical adventure as he literally traces Fannie Farmer's steps around Boston at the turn of the century, regaling the reader with a history of Boston, observations of the Victorian character, manner of dress, and cooking implements and appliances available. In the meantime, his own team has been assembled and they are methodically testing recipes and ingredients in Kimball's 1859 red-brick Boston bowfront. All this work culminates in a foodie's dream dinner party, complete with Victorian plate settings, an all-star guest list, and 12 courses you won't find in any restaurant today. A must-read for history buffs, home cooks, and professional chefs alike. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The founder of Cook's Illustrated and host of America's Test Kitchen hosts an elaborate meala tasty time machine transporting readers back to the kitchens and dining rooms of Victorian America.Kimball's journey comprises numerous detours. We learn about the purchase and conversion of his Boston home, the discovery and renovation of an 1890s coal/wood stove, the training and practice of his support staff and the seemingly endless testing of and tinkering with recipes. (Cost seems not to have been much of a factor.) The author ends each chapter with the final version of the recipe he used. Kimball instructs us about the history of American cookery, utensils, food products and the choreography of the Victorian kitchen staff. He underscores the enormous effort it took to acquire food, prepare it and clean up afterwards, and he emphasizes the paradox of the class system in a democracy. The author also perused countless cookbooks from the era, read newspaper articles and recipes and studied old maps of Bostonall eventually influenced his decisions about the preparation of his mega-meal. Kimball tells the story of Fannie Farmer, whose kitchen was near his home, but he doesn't think much of the aesthetic or gustatory pleasures of many of Farmer's recipes (he uses terms like "inedible"and "particularly vile" to describe some of them). He recognizes, though, that she took a big step in the evolution of contemporary cooking. The day of the meal finally arrivedan event that PBS filmed and will air in November 2010and amid the hustle, bustle and incredible cookstove heat, people ate a lot and sang old Broadway hits afterward.Even though some of Kimball's final clichd observations and puffy epiphanies collapse like an ill-prepared pastry, he provides an appealing confection of cultural history, memoir and culinary instruction.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
SEIZED by a "strange and self-indulgent notion," Christopher Kimball resolved to spend two years recreating a 12-course high Victorian dinner party on an authentic period coal stove installed in his 1859 Boston town house, making everything from the calf's foot gelatin to the puff pastry to the food coloring. Served to a dozen celebrity guests - one course every 20 minutes, requiring more than 40 recipes - the feast would be filmed as a public television special. The result, chronicled in FANNIE'S LAST SUPPER: Re-Creating One Amazing Meal From Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook (Hyperion, $25.99), makes Julie Powell's feat of cooking one recipe a day from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in "Julie & Julia" look like Child's play. Probably best known as the bow-tied, bespectacled host of public television's "America's Test Kitchen" and "Cook's Country," Kimball first turned obsessive tinkering into an art form with Cook's Magazine, later reborn as Cook's Illustrated. His stock-in-trade for the past three decades has been relentlessly questioning every piece of received kitchen wisdom, making and revising classic American recipes dozens - if necessary, hundreds - of times until they reach their Platonic ideal. Kimball naturally turned to Fannie Farmer to provide the blueprint for his "culinary time machine" since her 1896 "Boston Cooking-School Cook Book" is considered the cornerstone of American Victorian cuisine. Much to his chagrin, however, his rigorous testing process eventually revealed that, despite the book's place in the canon, a "vast majority" of its recipes were, to put it bluntly, "more compost than compelling." The surprising fact is that Fannie Farmer wasn't much of a cook. Despite her book's staggering success (it sold more than 360,000 copies by her death in 1915), she considered herself primarily a businesswoman. More surprising still, she didn't write her cookbook at all, but upon becoming principal of the Boston Cooking School borrowed freely and without attribution from "Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book," the school's previous classroom text. As Laura Shapiro nicely puts it in "Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century," Farmer "stamped the material with her own personality, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that she drained it carefully of Mrs. Lincoln's." Although Kimball's original plan was to follow Farmer's suggested menu for a "Full Course Dinner," in the end he jettisoned almost all of her recipes, keeping only the order of the courses, each of which receives a chapter for itself and its side dishes - from oysters with Champagne mignonette through mock turtle soup garnished with crispy brain balls (yum) to a mandarin cake that takes a full two days to prepare. Each chapter is a story in itself, the recipes prefaced with tours of Farmer's Boston, ruminations on how technology revolutionized the Victorian kitchen, historical investigations of ingredients and amusing accounts of Kimball's defeat by Farmer's recipes, his search for new ones, both Victorian and modern, and his struggles to perfect them as the fateful day approached. Could it possibly be worth spending two years to prepare for one meal? Midway through the dinner, Kimball is dumbstruck by the taste of the "deeply resonant sauce" on the lobster à l'américaine. "This is why we cook," he tells himself - "to transform the ordinary ingredients of our trade . . . into something extraordinary, a combination that hints at a more perfect state of being." For Kimball, that glimpse of the sublime makes all his work worthwhile, lingering long after the meal's savor is only a memory. The rest of us may not want to sweat in the kitchen with "Fannie's Last Supper," but it will certainly provide a pleasant evening or two of armchair time travel. - DAWN DRZAL Fannie Farmer at her cooking school in Boston.
Library Journal Review
Inspired by the opulence of the formal dinner parties of late 19th-century America, Kimball (founder, Cook's Illustrated) sets out to host his own 12-course meal using period recipes and equipment. Fannie Farmer's 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book serves as the guide for the meal, although Kimball is quick to point out its shortcomings and take inspiration from other period and modern sources. The narrative shifts smoothly between details of prebanquet research, organization, and testing and entertaining digressions on topics ranging from Colonial Boston's food markets to the correct technique for boiling a whole calf's head to the inner workings of cast iron coal-fired stoves. Many of the recipes making up the final meal are included, the more exotic and time-consuming of these best admired rather than seriously attempted. VERDICT Recommended for culinary history fans, particularly Bostonians, or any collection where kitchen diaries are popular. A documentary film of the feast slated for a November broadcast on PBS may drive up demand.-Neil Derksen, Gwinnett Cty. P.L., Lawrenceville, GA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
