Fannie's Last Supper by Christopher Kimball Read Free Book Online

thing served at any feast or serious dinner party. They were easy and abundant and Victorians loved them. Oysters were so popular that the beds at Wellfleet were fished out as early as 1775, so enterprising fishermen dumped oysters from Buzzard’s Bay into Wellfleet in the spring, thus ensuring fat, valuable “Wellfleet” oysters come fall. Eventually, hundreds of tons of oysters were dredged up from the Chesapeake and dumped onto New England beds so that they, too, could be given local names and higher prices. Oystermen also had a clever trick up their sleeve—“floating” oysters, which meant placing them on floats in low-salinity water. The oysters sucked in this fresher water, plumped up, and therefore weighed more, commanding higher prices. This process was banned in 1909, since the floats were often located near large population centers with polluted waters that offered the risk of contamination, resulting in outbreaks of typhoid.
    In eighteenth-century Boston, oysters were sold door to door—the oystermen would open the oysters right there, throwing the shells into a large shoulder bag. Later, handcarts came into use, as they did with other food items. The first cooked oysters were sold by Peter B. Brigham at the head of Hanover Street, and he quickly amassed a fortune. Oyster houses soon sprang up—they were most popular between 1810 and 1875—and became a convenient, all-purpose meeting place since there were no lunch counters in Boston or other fast-food establishments. Oysters were cheap, required little to no preparation, and the oyster houses stayed open late at night. All told, there were about a thousand establishments in Boston that served oysters by the mid-nineteenth century.
    Early oyster boats were as small as sixteen feet long, no more than dugouts made from white pine. In 1874, the oyster business came into the steam age when a small steam engine was installed in the sloop Early Bird owned by Peter Decker of Norwalk, Connecticut. By the early 1900s, the steam-powered oyster boat had started to decline in favor of gasoline engines, which took up less room and so could be used on smaller boats. Dredging an oyster bed in a sailboat required fairly advanced skills. The key was to drift over the bed, starting upwind with the centerboard down, and then to let the wind and tide take you over the prime real estate. The jib was trimmed to just short of luffing, and the main had to be trimmed just enough to keep the bow headed into the wind. Small hand dredges were used by oystermen standing on the side of the boat. The smaller sailboats were often outfitted with a hand-winder dredge (these were eventually run by steam power when steam engines came into use), but that meant one dredge per boat, a less efficient method than having four or five workmen, standing at the gunwales, using hand dredges. Once the industry moved away from sail power, larger boats used bigger hydraulic dredges.
    In Fannie’s time, virtually every menu started with a large platter of oysters served on a bed of crushed ice or a large block of ice that had a hollowed-out center trough. Special oyster plates that held four to six oysters and platters that usually held a dozen were also used, with a bed of ice covered with a doily, the rims decorated with holly or fern. Oysters were also fricasséed (served in a slightly thickened cream sauce), creamed, battered and fried as fritters (eggs, milk, and flour were used for the batter), or put into a stew (made from water, oyster liquor, and cream) or stuffing. Fannie also suggested serving oysters with brown bread, so we tested her recipe and made a few minor alterations. It was served in small rounds spread with salted butter.
    So our first course, oysters, was simple enough. Our second course, mock turtle soup, would test the limits of our culinary adventurism.
    CHAMPAGNE MIGNONETTE
    1 cup champagne vinegar
    2 tablespoons minced shallot
    ½ teaspoon coarse ground black pepper
    Combine