Why were they picking on her? Why Mary Mallon?
Someone must have said something. Another servant more than likely. It was jealousy, plain and simple. The servants, the laundresses, they always resented her. Didn’t much like emptying out the coal from her oven. Didn’t care to do the washing up either – and did a damn pitiful job of it most times too. Mary had a skill, a talent. That made her special; it brought her a little extra. And of course, in the kitchen, she was the boss. The rest never liked that either. They didn’t like it when she upbraided them for messing with her things, pilfering the food, sticking their dirty fingers in the ice cream.
These health officials called her dirty? They should have a good look at some of the dirty birds sticking their dirty paws into her food when they thought she wasn’t looking.
What to do now? The job? That was gone. She could kiss that off. The agencies were put wise – tipped off by that meddling Dr. Soapbox. They wouldn’t be sending any work her way any time soon. Even if she got out. Not ever. References? Might as well drape herself in the skull and crossbones.
What next? Who’d hire her?
Now they were calling her a killer – a murderess. They didn’t exactly put it that way – not quite. But that’s what they were saying – once you got past all that silky double-talk and fake cheer. Once that got around, she was properly buggered. They’d said they’d keep her name a secret, but who could believe anything they said?
She carried the sickness inside her body, they said. She spread it with her dirty hands. Who could believe such things? She’d never felt better in her life!
If she was so sick, how come it had taken five policemen to subdue her? Could a sick person do that? Could a sick person jump out a window, climb a high fence, then wrestle five policemen to the ground and curse the lot of them?
It was persecution, simple as that.
It was their rotten lot that was sick. They were the ones obsessed by shit and piss and indecent things – the ones who wanted to put the knife on her, cut out her gallbladder. They wanted to know about her family, her friends. What she got up to with any gentlemen. So they could spread their lies. Nosy Parkers. More than likely they’d like to track them down as well, maybe lock them up. No trial. No judge. One day safe in her kitchen – the next, locked up in solitary confinement: white room, white bed, white sheets, white robe. Questions every day. Strangers come to gape. And more questions.
She wasn’t going to tell them anything.
Not a fucking word.
Chapter Six
A Good, Plain Cook
Could Mary Mallon cook? If she walked into your kitchen right now could she whip up a nice meal from available ingredients?
The best indicator that Mary Mallon could cook well is her employment history. Even with an incomplete record, it’s clear that between 1900 and 1906, Mary was employed fairly steadily by well-to-do families, even during the summer months, when many domestic cooks struggled to find employment as their patrons deserted Manhattan for vacations on Long Island, Maine, and New Jersey. It’s hard to believe that Mary was what we call today a ‘ham and egger,’ a utility cook with a limited repertoire of lumbering Anglo/Irish standards and little else. The requirements of the time were demanding. Mary had a lot of competition. When she first came to the attention of authorities, the city and the country were in the middle of a foodie boom.
They even had a name for these food-crazed gourmands – this vanguard of foodie nouveau riche: ‘Lobster Palace Society’ – a floating demimonde of the sort later referred to as ‘Café Society,’ folks like Oscar Hammerstein, the boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett, the architect (and later murder victim) Stanford White, Bet-a-Million Gates, Diamond Jim Brady and his frequent companion, Lillian Russell. In ‘Lobster Palace Society,’ where everyone, it seemed, was encouraged to outdo one another in the new pastime of conspicuous consumption, the female icon, the desirable template for female beauty, was the decidedly hefty Russell, who weighed in at a porky 230 pounds. Though famed for her colossal eating and drinking binges, this hardly detracted from Russell’s popularity or perceived beauty – if anything, it enhanced it. Popular objects of desire of the day were Lydia Thompson’s ‘British Blondes’, women who looked like the defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers. In his book On the Town in New York, Michael Batterberry tells us that the portly poster girls would keep ‘in shape’ by wolfing down ‘midnight suppers of anchovies on toast, sirloin steak and potatoes, tripe and onions and wedges of Stilton’. It was not only okay to get fat, it was fashionable. Men’s clubs threw gigantic ‘Beefsteaks’, orgies of overconsumption which could last all day and into the night, marathons of steak and chop eating and oyster slurping accompanied by gallons of beer. More relevant to Mary Mallon’s day-to-day life, excesses in style were all the rage; service and servicewear could be elaborate, with theme nights being particularly popular. Evenings at Delmonico’s, Rector’s, and Sherry’s were marked by such innovations as meals served and eaten on horseback, parties where gigantic pools were erected so that food could float by on miniature re-creations of guests’ yachts, dinner parties for dogs. At more notorious events, strippers bathed themselves in champagne and emerged naked from cakes. No outrageous indulgence seemed too much.
The pressure was on. French chefs were enjoying special popularity, and poor ‘Brigit’, the fabled and much-reviled servant girl, was under pressure to compete – or at least emulate their examples. Hosting evenings, teas and dinner parties was the ticket to social status for the new rich. One can only imagine Mary’s torment when her latest mistress read about some Turkish-themed party in the society pages and demanded Mary learn ‘the cuisine of the Orient’. Cookbooks and fad diets and manuals on housekeeping and proper deployment and use of domestic help were all the rage. It must have been a challenge. A new ‘movement’ seemed to pop up every day, preaching on one hand simplicity, and on the other excess and extravagance. The public, it was said, was eating too much protein, not enough grain, too few vegetables. There were too many domestics, not enough of them. Poor Mary must have wanted to strangle her employers at least once a week. Kitchens were beset by new developments in technology, sanitation, with an influx of new, absolutely necessary gadgets being advertised and endorsed almost every day. Charles Ranhofer’s groundbreaking book The Epicurean had allowed every housewife with reading skills to think she could re-create previously out-of-reach French classics. Even the cookbooks and manuals advocating simple, time-saving recipes read like the instructions for a missile launch or complicated neurosurgery.
You might think that turn of the century diners were used to limited variety, clumsy and unsophisticated fare. You’d be wrong. Menus of the day offered raw shellfish, offal, French classics – alongside German and English/American stand-bys. Things like jellied pig’s knuckle sat alongside turkey wings à l’Italienne and risotto. Luchow’s on Fourteenth Street offered ragout fin en coquille, beef goulash with spaetzle, calf’s head en tortue. The Rorer Restaurant, a fairly prole establishment by comparison, offered three types of oysters, New England clam chowder, relishes, fried soft-shell crabs, hard crabs, fried chicken Maryland, broiled bluefish, baked whitefish au gratin, sandwiches of tongue, sardine, roast beef, corned beef, turkey, lobster and caviar! The Ladies Lunch at the Metropolitan Club featured such carnivore-friendly offerings as deviled kidneys, kidneys en brochette, mutton chops, curry of chicken livers, broiled sweetbreads jardiniere, roast squab, smoked tongue. Reiseweber’s on Columbus Circle, billed as an ‘Electric Grill and Gentleman’s Club and Bar’, served up a menu of seven sweetbread entrees, thirteen chicken dishes, fifteen potato sides, and a huge assortment of desserts, ice creams, fruits, brandied fruits and cheeses. The fish section alone contained sea bass, mackerel, sole, bluefish, halibut, salmon, frogs’ legs, and lobster. The Breslin, after a course of oysters or clams on the halfshell, saucisson de Lyon, caviar, and vermicelli soup, might offer a fish course of butterfish sauté meuniere, followed by cold dishes like
galantine of capon, gumbo strained in jelly, terrine de foie gras Strasbourg, pâté of game, fricandeau of veal with parsnips.
Fancier menus, created almost exclusively by French and European chefs, set the tone for second-tier, dazzling with an incredible array of continental piece montées, tallow carvings, pastry displays, ice carvings, ingredients like snipe, thrushes, woodcock, robins, preparations which paid homage to faraway lands and exotic cuisines – like turbot vol au vents, timbales of pike, chaydfroids of larks, bouche à la reigne, paupiettes of fowl, gratin of eel, fried brains, Nesselrode pudding, roebuck filets with noodles, crab cakes, coulibiac – this was pretty intensive stuff, a lot of which (the coulibiac for instance) would make any modern-day cook, with all his Cuisinarts and Hobart mixers and blending wands and paco-jets, blanche with fear.
This was not simple food being dangled in front of the eager noses of the new and eager middle class. Some of it – in whatever form – must have trickled down. Mary’s employers were unlikely to settle for their guests being served beef and potatoes or typical ‘English/Irish’ cuisine. Not every day, anyway. No way. At the very least, if Mary wasn’t reading the latest recipes, it’s likely she had to be able to follow them when the boss came over, head filled with croquembouches and vol-au-vents. She had to know what she was doing.
Matters were made less agreeable by the fact that the prevailing cuisine was European – with French being preeminent. The mantra of all French chefs and the first principle of all French cooking is, of course, to ‘use everything.’ One didn’t simply bone out a chicken, serve the nice white, skinless breast for dinner, then discard the rest – or feed it to kitty – as more modern and lazy generations of Americans did. When one served steak, in a restaurant or at home, the mark of a good and frugal cook was to find ways to use the rest of the animal – or whatever parts were at hand. French cuisine is great for exactly this urgent need to find ways to make the tough and unlovely bits attractive and delicious. Shanks and shoulders must be braised slowly, tongues, kidneys, hearts, tails, lungs, hooves, and snouts used whenever possible. Innovative but often difficult, time-consuming and painstaking procedures and recipes were developed to accomplish that end. Chefs became great chefs because they knew how to use every scrap, coax every bit of flavor and substance out of every bone, scrap and trimming in order to make money for their masters while still dazzling their customers. French cuisine grew up around this grim duty to make fiendishly clever use of everything that swam, crawled, slunk or pushed its way through turf. Look at some French ‘classics’: coq au vin (tough, over-exercised bird, slow-braised in red wine until tender – often thickened with blood), tête de veau (gelatinous, rolled-up face and skin of veal, stewed until tender) perhaps accompanied by sauce ravigotte (leftover egg yolks from meringue, emulsified with oil and garnishes), pieds cochon (pigs’ feet, bones torturously removed, stewed, reassembled, baked en gratin with mustard and bread crumbs, i.e., stale bread), boeuf bourguignonne (tough hunks of fatty shoulder meat, stewed until tender), tallow sculptures (discarded beef fat), escargots (nasty snails disguised with garlic butter). Even the vaunted Delmonico’s – which offered over a hundred different soups on any given day – played the game, operating within this kind of crafty/frugal mindset: throw a little of yesterday’s tomato soup together with today’s pea soup, and you have potage ‘mongole’ – three soups for the price of two! Keeping up with the Joneses, in Mary’s time, required serious knife skills and a fairly comprehensive knowledge of how to butcher, merchandise, and coax various critters into edibility. Baking, pickles, preserves, the making of ice creams, cakes, cookies, were bottom-line skills, fundamentals in even the simplest of households. Add the food craze of those kooky, crazy times to the mix and you have – at best – one serious pain in the rear end for even the most accommodating domestic cook in the home of a member of the new rich.
It might have been easier for an Irish cook – in a time when one seldom got two weeks’ notice and unemployment benefits did not exist – to continue pleasing one’s cruel masters with the simple standards of English/American workhorse dishes if they never entertained and if the cook also performed household duties. Many, if not most, homes had exactly that kind of arrangement. But Mary, notably, worked in larger households, where chambermaid duties, maintenance, laundry, and so on were taken care of by other servants. Mary got jobs and held them on the basis of cooking – and cooking alone. More was expected in such a situation. Both family and their guests, presumably, had to be dazzled – and this was increasingly difficult to do in a cash-rich, food-crazed world where everybody was not only eating, but reading about eating, rushing to restaurants and hotels and dinner parties and clubs. And this was – remember – New York!
As technology improved, Harvey Levenstein points out in Revolution of the Table, the middle classes used their kitchens and dining rooms to improve their social standing. If one’s cook was not exactly Escoffier, at least one could bury one’s guests in exotic ingredients. Even cookbooks and menus which appealed to Anglo-American practitioners, aimed at middle-class homes, suggested menus like this one from Maria Parloa:
Oysters on the halfshell followed by consommé à la royale . . . followed by baked fish with hollandaise . . . cheese soufflé . . . roast chicken with mashed potatoes, green peas and cranberry jelly . . . oyster patties . . . salad with French dressing . . . cheese and crackers . . . frozen pudding with apricot sauce, sherbet, meringue, sponge cake, fruit and coffee.
Assuming Mary had to make anything like this, one must also keep in mind that she had already served the family breakfast, lunch, and maybe even afternoon tea. Even assuming that Mary was indeed a ‘good, plain cook’ with a repertoire of Anglo-Irish classics, it cannot have been an easy life. In smaller homes, in the early part of her career, and in later, harder times, it is likely that she shared in some laundry chores. Mary, it was said, was an excellent seamstress – particularly talented at crochet work. So surely she had experience there.
We know for certain that she was very good at ice cream. Peach ice cream in particular was well remembered – even by her victims. Sadly, it was exactly this specialty that was the probable source of transmission for many of her victims. As Soper correctly points out, cooked food, by the time it reached its cooking temperature, would have killed any typhoid germs Mary might have transferred. Ice cream and raw peaches, however, would have been a very attractive medium. The relatively high number of fellow servants afflicted suggests that chambermaids and laundresses, passing through Mary’s kitchen, might have grabbed a piece of raw fruit, nicked a raw string bean, stuck a finger in a tub of ice cream on occasion – which would explain their higher rate of infection.
The turn of the century marked an explosion in prepared and prepackaged foods, taking some of the heat off the beleaguered cooks of the day. You could now have bread, meat, fish and the like prepared for you and delivered to the door. Baking powder had begun being added to flour, making leavening a lot easier. Canned soups and vegetables, cereals and mixes were advertised on attractive little picture cards which were distributed door to door by salesmen, soon to be replaced by even more popular magazines filled with ads for all the absolutely new necessary gadgets. Kitchen designs became simpler and more sensible, with easy cleaning in mind, and we can safely assume that by 1907, at least in the wealthier homes where Mary worked, she enjoyed all the modern conveniences: nonporous congoleum floors, tin ceilings, ceramic-lined two-chamber pot sinks, the latest in zinc-lined iceboxes – and most importantly, a gas stove. This last development, which appeared in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, was a marvel and widely in use by the turn of the century, particularly in the homes of the rich in urban centers. While Mary had certainly learned to cook on the massive, sooty coal- and wood-burning stoves of yesteryear, it’s likely that by 1907, she was well accustomed to the modern convenience of a cooler-burning, cleaner, and easier-to-use gas stove – with its easy-access water heater (for hot water washing). Ingeniously de
signed cabinets and work stations had become popular, usually sporting a fold-down work area with storage for tools and dry ingredients above and below. This was all wonderful– but it must have made it difficult on some of her summer jobs – and later wilderness years – when she worked for less affluent households and had to go back to hauling coal.
Cleanliness – a concept which Mary had been accused of ignoring – was hardly foreign to her. Sanitation was a mania in kitchens of her time. Carbolic, ammonia, alcohol and soap were as much a part of domestic cooking as meat or vegetables. Housekeepers were urged to practice monthly or at least seasonal cleaning, in which absolutely everything was stripped down, hand scrubbed, dusted and polished like on a navy vessel. Ceilings, floors, walls, moldings, the insides of drawers, tops of pipes – the insides and outsides of all appliances, the garrets, pantries, stairs, every single utensil, plate, glass, curtain, carpet, ottoman, gee-gaw and pillow had to be washed thoroughly. The two-chamber pot-sink, much like the sinks of our time, was kept filled with scaldingly hot water for cleaning and rinsing and polishing of flatware and dishes and the battle against dirt and contagion were hotly discussed and debated issues in home manuals and magazines and books. Yet Mary suggested, through her lawyer, that some of the kitchens she’d worked in where typhoid later appeared were not the cleanest, most well-appointed facilities in the world. No snob like a working-class snob. A coal stove, in a summer home in 1906, might have been an irritant to a domestic cook used to Park Avenue opulence.
Cooks who arrive to find an old dirty kitchen, ignored by generations of their predecessors, rarely improve the situation once it has been left to fester. They find it hard to resist the concept of ‘It was like that when I found it’. If the pots and pans in a kitchen are encrusted in years of baked-on carbon, most cooks shrink from chipping and scraping them down to their original luster – and in kitchens where pockets of filth and grease have been allowed to collect, they will often sweep and scrub around them. It’s a phenomenon any chef is well aware of – which is why so many are fanatical about every tiny detail. One slightly carbonized pot becomes the harbinger of general disorderliness, and each stain, each neglected accumulation of dirt is seen as a clarion call for the forces of chaos and filth.