“The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”

GOAT CHEESE PUMPKIN PIE

I’ve been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe for as long as I can remember, but the lack of food in his stories always frustrated me, mostly because I suspected that he would write about it beautifully. One of his lesser-known stories, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” proved my suspicion to be correct. It is one of the only stories in which Poe writes in detail about what his characters are eating, and it is every bit as good as I always dreamed it would be. (Most likely this is also why it is one of my favorites.)

The story, which takes place in the mid-nineteenth century, details the trip of an unnamed narrator to an asylum in France, where a revolutionary new method for treating mental illness, called “the soothing system,” is being practiced on the patients. After taking a tour of the asylum, the narrator is invited to dinner, where things begin to take an odd turn.

The narrator is led into the dining room, where “the table was superbly set out. It was loaded with plate, and more than loaded with delicacies.” Rather than being impressed, however, the narrator is nauseated, calling the display “absolutely barbaric,” noting that “there were meats enough to have feasted the Anakim” and saying, “Never, in all my life, had I witnessed so lavish, so wasteful an expenditure of the good things of life.” There is “veal à la Menehoult” and “cauliflowers in velouté sauce” paired with glasses of “clos de Vougeot.” There is French-style rabbit, and the centerpiece is “a small calf roasted whole, and set upon its knees, with an apple in its mouth, as is the English fashion of dressing a hare.” The narrator, upon seeing the calf being carried over by three waiters, is horrified, and mistakes it for the “monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum”—The Aeneid’s “immense, misshapen, marvelous monster whose eye is out.” Something is truly not right here.

As far as food goes, though, the best of Poe is yet to come. The doctors start discussing their patients, many of whom are convinced that they are different types of food. There is the patient “who very pertinaciously maintained himself to be a Cordova cheese, and went about, with a knife in his hand, soliciting his friends to try a small slice from the middle of his leg,” as well as “the man who took himself for a bottle of champagne, and always went off with a pop and a fizz.” Lastly, there is “Jules Desoulieres, who was a very singular genius, indeed, and went mad with the idea that he was a pumpkin. He persecuted the cook to make him up into pies—a thing which the cook indignantly refused to do.” The speaker then adds that she is “by no means sure that a pumpkin pie à la Desoulieres would not have been very capital eating indeed!”

To me, this dinner party sounds like a whole lot of weird fun, but the narrator feels otherwise. He becomes progressively more uncomfortable and suspicious when his host tells him that they are no longer using the revolutionary new soothing system, but a much more rigorous and severe treatment developed by a Doctor Tarr and a Professor Fether. The host explains that they had to stop using the soothing system when the patients, having been given too much freedom, one day turned on their doctors and nurses, locking them up as mental patients and replacing them as staff for over a month. At that moment, a great ruckus erupts, and what do you know? The real doctors and nurses burst into the dining room, exposing the narrator’s hosts as the actual mental patients!

As slapstick and silly as the story is, there is genuine fear behind Poe’s tale. The nineteenth century was a time of major reform in asylums and the rights of the mentally ill. Only four years before this story was written, Dorothea Dix stood in front of the Massachusetts legislature, telling them that the sick and insane were being “confined in this Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.” She begged for reform, and slowly it came. That same year, Dr. John Galt opened the first publicly supported mental institution in the United States, where he aimed to treat patients with talk therapy and pharmaceutical drugs rather than simply confining and neglecting them.

At the same time, the public was uneasy over the growing number of acquittals in court cases involving violent crimes where the perpetrator was deemed mentally insane. Anger that the mentally ill were not being held accountable for their crimes was rising, as was the fear that every criminal would feign insanity in order to avoid jail time. Isn’t it a relief that we’ve gotten all of this completely under control in the last two centuries?

Ever since I read this story years ago, I’ve dreamed about combining two of those mental patients into a single pie, the Cordova cheese and the pumpkin. Cordova cheeses are generally soft goat’s or sheep’s milk cheeses, often cured in a vegetable ash rind. I imagined mixing this into a pumpkin pie to make a slightly more savory version of the Thanksgiving classic that I’ve never loved. Here it is: half pumpkin pie, half cheesecake, with a slightly salty almond-rosemary crust that is buttery and sweet but serious. Plus, now you don’t even have to stress about your pumpkin pie getting those annoying ugly cracks in the top that make you feel like a giant failure (or is that just me?). Just throw it in the fridge overnight and it’s perfectly smooth and ready to go the next day.

“THE SYSTEM OF DOCTOR TARR AND PROFESSOR FETHER”

Goat Cheese Pumpkin Pie

Serves 8

Almond-Rosemary Crust

2 (5.25-ounce) packages Anna’s Almond Thins (or any similarly thin almond cookie)

2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary

1 teaspoon kosher salt

10 tablespoons (1¼ sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled a bit

Goat Cheese–Pumpkin Filling

1 (15-ounce) can pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)

8 ounces soft goat cheese, at room temperature

4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled a bit

1½ cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

1½ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice

½ teaspoon kosher salt

Make the Crust:

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Pulse the cookies, rosemary, and salt in a food processor until combined. With the processor running, slowly drizzle in the melted butter and run until well combined. The dough should hold together when pinched.

Press the dough firmly into a 10-inch round by 2-inch deep tart pan with a removable bottom. Place a cookie sheet on the bottom rack of the oven to catch any butter that leaks out and bake the crust for 15 minutes. When the crust is cool enough to touch but still warm enough to be pliable, fix any imperfections and set it aside to cool.

Make the Filling:

Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl and puree with a handheld blender (or use a countertop blender) until very smooth; it takes a good amount of whipping at high speed to get all the clumps out. Scoop into the cooled, baked piecrust and smooth the top. Cover and refrigerate for at least 6 hours, or preferably overnight, before serving.