[Photograph: Amazon]

Victorian-era cuisine is a far cry from anything on today's American dinner tables. Food in the mid-1800s was of limited variety, took a long while to prepare, and was occasionally truly revolting by modern standards. However, much can also be learned through studying and reproducing the cuisine and techniques of the time. Cook's Illustrated founder and editor Chris Kimball wanted to celebrate the food of Fannie Farmer, whose 1896 cookbook has been revered for over a century. He set out to re-create a twelve-course Victorian feast in his Boston home, for eleven special guests, using primitive equipment and only recipes of the time. His two years of research, recipe testing, and eventual victorious meal are recounted in Fannie's Last Supper: Re-Creating One Amazing Meal from Fannie Farmer's 1896 Cookbook.

Kimball is clearly infatuated with Victorian history, and with the origins of the foods prepared during that time. His book is centered around the recipes featured in his final meal, but he dedicates many pages to exploring other edibles, customs, and details about the way of life of 19th-century folk. He is clearly excited about the prospect of returning to a more labor-intensive but, arguably, more resourceful era of cooking, and sharing his adventure with audiences through a television special.

Some of the prepared foods are decidedly odd compared to what we would now consider American cuisine. Kimball used Farmer's recipes almost exclusively, though occasionally drew in other dishes from the same time period that sounded more palatable. Calf's-head soup, for instance, is chosen as a desirable appetizer—that is, more desirable than the recommended turtle soup. For desserts, Kimball looked to France for more progressive pastry recipes, rather than stay true to Farmer's rather pedestrian sponge cakes.

Yet much of the meal was as authentic as could be: frissoles, deep-fried pockets of home-made puff pastry filled with chicken and spices; grilled salmon made on an indoor grill; a delectable lobster dish; goose seasoned with strips of salted pork; and several jelly molds set with home-made gelatin. Kimball cooked up the meal using a fully-restored cast-iron, wood-fired oven as his main tool. He often reflects on the difficulty and time-intensiveness of these recipes, but is not once deterred from staying true to their original form.

By the time Kimball sits down to dine with his eleven friends, including Mark Bittman and José Andrés, he has spent countless hours accumulating and testing recipes, searching for the correct ingredients, and assembling a staff of cooks, waiters, and cameramen to help pull off his feast. One can't help but balk a bit at the extremely high expense of the meal, and Kimball addresses this concern a bit in his final pages. He concludes (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the experience of reflecting on the past and taking time to value our culinary heritage is well worth the time and money. He regrets that we no longer invest hours a day in meal preparation, choosing instead to spend free time in front of the television. I appreciated Kimball's insight into the lifestyle and priorities of 19th-century cooks, and am currently itching to try one of the truly tasty-sounding jellies that graced his final buffet. Though I do think I'll forgo boiling the calf's feet myself.

About the Author: A student in Providence, Rhode Island, Leah Douglas loves learning about, talking about, reading about, and consuming food. Her work is also featured in Rhode Island Monthly magazine.