Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [1]
So Twain dreamed of American dishes, from peach cobbler and simply dressed tomatoes to oyster soup and roast beef. But he dreamed first of breakfast. He imagined an angel, “suddenly sweeping down out of a better land,” and setting before an American exile “a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and genuineness; . . . a great cup of American home-made coffee, with the cream a-froth on top, . . . some smoking hot biscuits, [and] a plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup.” He concluded wistfully: “Could words describe the gratitude of this exile?”
I’d known at once that I’d make the breakfast; for me, cooking and reading blend like a chicken-fat roux. When Ishmael writes of savory clam and cod chowders, or of frying ships’ biscuits in the try-pots, I linger; I return to “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (Sherlock Holmes finds a gem hidden in a roasting goose) and “Breakfast” (Steinbeck eats breakfast) more often than the stories deserve. After roasting a pig, I’ll gnaw the tail and think of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autumn butchering. I’ve cooked snails from my backyard with butter, garlic, and prosciutto, raising the first from the broth to salute those that sent Italo Calvino’s young Baron Cosimo into the trees (my wife threatened to follow his example). I’ve cooked prawns from Hemingway, steaks from Joseph Mitchell, and gumbo from Least Heat-Moon.
So it seemed inevitable, after reading A Tramp Abroad, that I’d cook Twain’s breakfast. I’d make the first meal he thought of, when he thought of home.
Twain described his ideal steak as though he were mapping his own home country—he wrote of a county of beefsteak, of townships of fat, of districts separated by bone. When I looked at the meat on my counter, I could see why. This was no uniform, sterile cut; it had heft, authority, presence. The mottling of meat and fat declared that no two bites would be alike.
Wanting a steak as much as possible like those Twain enjoyed, I ordered a grass-fed, dry-aged porterhouse from a small local butcher. Raising cattle on grass makes both biological and environmental sense, requiring vastly less oil and water than is needed to grow enough grain for a large ruminant. More important for my purposes, Twain’s steaks were invariably from cattle raised on pasture. Until cattle were forcibly moved to a diet of corn, the sometimes rich, sometimes gamy taste of beef fed exclusively on grass was simply what beef tasted like.
Similarly, it’s likely that every steak Twain ever ate was dry-aged, hung in a cool, dry spot for the three to five weeks necessary for the proteins to begin to break down and the flavor to ripen. Wet aging—a cheaper, faster process that begins with packing meat in plastic—leaves the steak with more of its original weight; dry aging can give it an aroma as smooth as old wine.
I had an urge to brag. I imagined myself calling up relatives or knocking on neighbors’ doors. Instead I rubbed the meat with a fistful of kosher salt. Soon it was sizzling in the pan; I’d finish it in a hot oven.
“Some smoking hot biscuits,” Twain wrote. “Some real butter, firm and yellow and fresh.” I was using a biscuit recipe given to me by an archaeology graduate student on the Virginia corn-and-peanut plantation where I excavated during college summers. The recipe always reminds me of a thunderstorm that turned the air purple and sent lightning crashing along the James River as we feasted, after a long week of digging out colonial bottles and pipe stems, on angel biscuits, blue crabs, and beer. I’d considered making beaten biscuits—slamming the dough with a rolling pin until it blistered and needed no leavening. But using the Virginia recipe instead was a sympathetic nod to Twain’s nostalgia, which, by the time he wrote his fantasy menu, was both intense and introspective. He’d published the