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

swallowed up the steps leading to the second-floor parlors, the stores themselves appearing to be nothing more than crude afterthoughts. The experience of walking down Columbus Avenue in Fannie Farmer’s day would have been much grander.
    The big difference between Rutland Square today and one hundred years ago is that Fannie’s house would have been adjacent to the Boston and Providence train tracks running into the city. The streets that intersect the railroad line were, for the most part, named for towns that the railroad served along the line: hence street names such as Worcester, Springfield, etc. Of the 169 streets in the South End, 84 were named for cities and towns chiefly in New York and western Massachusetts, all places served by the railroad. Today, because of an urban renewal project, the trains run underground and the area has been turned into green space named the South End Corridor. However, the railroad still provides a barrier between the South End and Back Bay because most of the streets on either side of the corridor are dead ends, with no through traffic, just as it was in Fannie’s day.
    By taking a short detour to Copley Plaza, Fannie could have walked into the major food retailer of the day, S. S. Pierce, located across the street from the Museum of Fine Arts, a fabulous, highly ornamented terra-cotta brick Gothic Revival building designed by John Hubbard Sturgis, which was torn down in 1909. A few blocks later, at Clarendon Street, the Albermarle Hotel building still exists and offers a stunning example of Gothic architecture and, like many other Boston hotels at the time, the “French flat,” a continental system also called family hotels in which a tenant would occupy part or all of a floor rather than several floors in a house. Before the areas around Boston were built up, our city was said to have been the most densely populated urban area in America, and therefore these large, high-occupancy hotels were a natural development.
    Across the train tracks headed toward South Station, in the next block on the left, there are two buildings of note, the first being the Pope Manufacturing building. Albert A. Pope started his career in the 1870s by exporting bicycles from England. His first bike, and the first model ever made in the United States, was the Columbia in 1881. In the late 1890s, Pope began manufacturing electric cars as well, five hundred of them between 1897 and 1899.
    The next block would have been entirely devoted to the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad passenger depot. This large area also contained a freight house, as well as a few small buildings fronting Columbus Avenue. Because of the proximity to the depot, there would have been a run of restaurants. Finally, we walked across Tremont Street and into the Boston Common, past the old cemetery, and then up to the site of the Boston Cooking School, now occupied by a large Loews Multiplex. Fannie lived in a vital, thriving neighborhood, filled with boardinghouses, creameries, fruit sellers, small grocers, butchers, confectioners, and even a good selection of restaurants closer to town.
    JANUARY 2009. THE TESTING WAS PROCEEDING SLOWLY. WE DECIDED to make an authentic turtle soup as a frame of reference for our mock turtle version. Would the ersatz version taste anything like the original, and why would Fannie and other cooks of the period use a calf’s head instead of turtle meat? We finally managed to snag five pounds of frozen turtle meat, but getting hold of a calf’s head was more difficult. After calling around, we finally found a supplier, Previte’s Meats, who charged $9.99 per head (the feet, by the way, were a steal at just $1.99 each). The head had a “hole” in it, presumably a bullet hole. This was getting gruesome. When we picked up the order, we also noted that the employees took quite an interest in who was buying the head, peeking around corners, trying to be inconspicuous. Sort of like picking up one’s