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

ingredients and serve with oysters.
    BROWN BREAD
    Since we served this bread with oysters, it is less sweet than many other recipes and, of course, contains no raisins, a common ingredient at the time. You will need two 12-ounce coffee cans for baking.
    4 tablespoons melted butter, plus extra for preparing cans
    1 cup rye flour
    1 cup whole wheat flour
    1 cup fine ground white cornmeal
    2¼ teaspoons baking powder
    1 teaspoon salt
    ½ cup light molasses
    2¼ cups buttermilk
    2 12-ounce coffee cans, washed and dried
    1. Grease the bottoms of the coffee cans with butter. Line the sides of the coffee cans with parchment paper (cut to fit), and grease with butter. Place a steamer rack on the bottom of a large pot that is tall enough to accommodate the can with the cover on. In a large saucepan, boil enough water to fill the steaming pot about halfway.
    2. In a medium bowl, whisk together flours, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt. Stir in the molasses, buttermilk, and butter, and mix until combined. Spoon batter into prepared cans; do not fill cans more than two-thirds full. Cover tightly with aluminum foil. Secure foil to cans with a rubber band or twine. Place can on rack (or on bottom of pot), and pour boiling water to about halfway up the coffee cans. Return water to a boil and lower to a simmer. Cover the pot. Steam for 2 hours, adding more boiling water as needed, until bread is firm and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.
    3. Place cans on a cooling rack, allow to cool 10 minutes, then unmold. Allow to cool for 1 hour before slicing.

Chapter 4
Mock Turtle Soup
    A Walking Tour of Fannie Farmer’s Boston
    I t’s one thing to read about the history of a place from books and quite another to actually live in the same neighborhood as the object of your investigation. My first question was, how much of Fannie Farmer’s Boston was still left a century later? I called up a friend and my researcher for this project, Meg Ragland, and, a few weeks later, we met at the site of Fannie’s former home on Rutland Square to follow her footsteps to the Boston Cooking School, which was located on Tremont Street, right off the Boston Common. Since she had suffered from polio, Fannie probably took the trolley that ran down the center of Columbus Avenue. Could we still see the same sights that she had seen more than a hundred years before?
    But first, we examined the ward maps from 1895, which offer detailed accounts of every building in Boston, as well as listings of commercial enterprises they contained. By far the biggest categories included grocers (about 1,200 listings), hotels (700), produce dealers (250), restaurants (500, but these included coffee and oyster houses), confectioners (about 80) and, of course, liquor stores (500). So, Boston was full of people with a taste for liquor and sweets, living in lodging houses and hotels, eating and drinking out a lot. Most of the shopping was done in small, neighborhood grocery and produce stores. More interesting establishments listed in the ward maps of that year include two potato chip companies, a butter color supplier, cold-blast refrigerators, one color photography establishment, four suppliers of counting-room furniture, cracker bakers, and a half dozen manufacturers of grate bars, which pointed to the need for security.
    We began at Columbus Avenue and Claremont Park, a spot only a couple of blocks from Fannie’s residence. This part of Columbus included myriad hotels as well as private residences and lodging houses. It was just a block from the railroad, so hotel accommodations were in high demand.
    As we moved down Columbus, toward downtown, Meg pointed out that, originally, the South End had few storefronts. As the fortunes of the neighborhood declined, it became more commercial, and street-level storefronts were added onto the brownstones, sticking out like tacked-on shanties. Today, you can see that, architecturally, the ground-floor retail spaces have