Dispatches From The Field: Joe On Chris Kimball's Latest

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.

Joe writes:

"Chris Kimball, host of America's Test Kitchen, spent two years researching and preparing to make one 12-course Victorian meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 cookbook. This book is part history lesson and part cooking show. Turn of the century Boston was an interesting place: one of America's busiest ports, Boston was awash in exotic ingredients. The turn of the century was also the meeting place of many conveniences we still know today (gas stoves, powdered gelatin) but also steeped in multi-layered Victorian rules of etiquette as well as a more traditional, locally-centered way of eating.

The book will be fascinating for fans of America's Test Kitchen or Cook's Illustrated magazine, which Chris Kimball also edits. He explores Fannie Farmer's recipes, deconstructing them and adapting them to current tastes, while retaining the integrity of the original. The book will be interesting for fans of history, as well, as the late 1800's and early 20th century were a period of rapid scientific growth that fundamentally changed the way of life for most Americans, not unlike what is happening today.

This book is a perfect companion to the books currently out about returning to a more local, more traditional way of cooking. Much of our food today is mass-produced and unhealthy, and this book explores the beginnings of the massive corporate food industry: why it started (convenience for the cook!) and where it came from. It may not seem like exploring one extravagant 12-course Victorian meal is relevant in today's economical climate, but Kimball does a good job of balancing the wild extravagance with the historical reasons of where it came from and how it evolved into what we know today.

The book reads like a culinary thriller and by the time he serves the meal, I was breathlessly turning pages! An exciting thing is that this meal was filmed and will be airing this fall on PBS, in conjunction with the release of the book. Kimball shows the joys of cooking. It is not merely to survive, but to do so with style and happiness!

Each section of the book ends with recipes (and web addresses for more recipes). Some of them look very long. Others look amazing. Part of me wants to try to make gelatin from scratch, if only to see a pot full of calf feet boiling away on the stove! (But then again, I'm really glad he included a recipe to do the same thing with a packet of gelatin, which is how Fannie Farmer would have done it, since packet gelatin was a novelty, and as he said over and over again in this book, the Victorians loved their novelties!"

Meet Chris Kimball Monday, October 18 at 7:30 pm at our Historic Lodo store.

Chris Kimball, the founder of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, with a paid circulation of 900,000, is also the host of America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country, the top-rated cooking shows on public television. Kimball will discuss and sign his wonderful new book Fannie’s Last Supper: Re-creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook ($25.99 Hyperion). “Chris’s ‘Fannie’ project is the most ambitious cooking undertaking I’ve ever witnessed outside of a restaurant opening. And as one of the devourers of the ultimate meal, I can tell you it was worth it, at least for me. (I would travel 200 miles for the jellies alone.) But the account of the making of the meal, told here in winning style, is just as impressive: part history and part contemporary journalism, it’s a fascinating story, and absolutely unique.” —Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything

Free numbered tickets for the booksigning line will be handed out beginning at 6:30 pm. Seating for the presentation prior to the booksigning is limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis to ticketed customers only.

Request a signed copy: books@tatteredcover.com