The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [53]
Like other New York gallants Robert B. Roosevelt belonged to the so-called club set of the late 1850s. With corks popping, often overdrinking and straining his constitution, he enjoyed discussing political, literary, and culinary affairs. R.B.R., in fact, developed a virtual mania for joining elite “societies,” perhaps because he was very sociable. Robert (or “Rob” as he was usually called) was very everything, in fact. Very blue-blooded, though he aspired to be a populist. Very mannered, though he used the rake’s characteristic tactics of cajolery and the nod and the wink. As a gourmet chef he proudly founded the Pot Luck Club, whose intellectual members cooked five-star meals, judged truffles, and drank the finest French wines. Every year he also chaired the annual dinner of the Ichthyophagous Club, helping educate aspiring gourmets about the “unsuspected excellence” of many neglected varieties of American fish. Usually, the naturalist Joaquin Miller (whom he called the “sweet singer of the Sierras”) was at his side. Fishing stories in a comical vein were told at these dinners. The British, R.B.R. used to say, while always filling the champagne glasses, had to learn there was more to life than cod. The roomful of fish lovers roared with delight. A few specialty dishes were Darne de saumon, garni d’éperlans à la Roosevelt and Filet of striped bass with shrimps à la Baird.58
Perhaps more than anybody else in his era, Robert B. Roosevelt argued for fish conservation because he enjoyed eating perch and trout so much. Turtle soup was another one of his specialties. Writing in his diary of the “turtle trial,” in fact, Robert was a contrarian, considering both Henry Bergh and the judge flat wrong. Sea turtles, he believed, weren’t insects or reptiles, but fish. Deeming the Pot Luck Club the “very head and centre of gastronomic, ichthyologic, zoo-logic,” he declared turtle too delicious a culinary delight to be an insect. “Then we have the sea turtle,” he wrote, “the glorious monster who sleeps in the mid-ocean in the amplitude of his thousand pounds of excellence.” Just hearing all that talk about sea turtles during the turtle trial, in fact, made R.B.R. want to “luxuriate in the green fat and the yellow fat.” Only an imbecile, he scoffed, could possibly eat turtles thinking they were insects or reptiles. “It had been claimed that turtles are snakes developed in Darwinian theory,” he recorded. “That a very intelligent and highly gifted snake, feeling sensitively the unprotected nature of a tail that dragged its slow length an unnecessary distance behind by taking much though added a shell to his body and converted the longest and slimmest of figures into the stoutest and roundest. That a turtle, and above all a snapping turtle, is but a snake in disguise…. I, for my part, cannot accept a serpent when I ask for a turtle; I repudiate the ‘snaix’ even under the head of a terrapin. Why should not a turtle be a fish?”59
Even though Robert B. Roosevelt found Manhattan’s social life fulfilling, he was continually drawn to the woods of rural Long Island. Trolling in the waters of the Great South Bay became his favorite hobby. Eventually, Robert purchased property along the bay, where the snipe and geese were plentiful, to build a country estate surrounded by pristine nature. But R.B.R.’s primary residence remained the five-story brownstone on East Twentieth Street in Manhattan, next door to what the National Park Service now oversees as the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace.* A door on the second floor connected the two residences, making them a single-unit dwelling.60 (There remains speculation in the Roosevelt family that Theodore Sr. moved to West Fifty-Seventh Street to get his impressionable children away from