Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [104]
—AMELIA SIMMONS, American Cookery, 1796
In November 1868, Twain had written a letter to his dear friend Mary Fairbanks on “Thanksgiving Day.” “It is MY Thanksgiving Day,” he’d said, “above all other days that ever shone on earth.” Livy had agreed to marry him, and he was ecstatic; he swore off drink and resolved to become a Christian. He thought they might live in Cleveland. But now, in 1885, after nearly twenty years of marriage, he was in his house on Hartford’s Nook Farm, and here he was well and truly home.
Though he often regretted that his free days of wandering had passed, the seventeen years that Twain lived in the house on Farmington Avenue were among the happiest of his life. He raised his daughters there (a third, Jean, had been born in 1880); it became a gathering place for friends as well as family, with neighbors and guests coming for lavish banquets or simply Friday-night billiards and beer. From the Viennese music box that played during dinner to the library where he’d read to the children, to the bed with its headboard of carved cherubs, the entire house gave Twain a palpable, “all-pervading spirit of peace & serenity & deep contentment.” For him it was “the loveliest home that ever was.”
The Victorian era idealized domestic life; one of a household’s major showcases was the dinner table, where elegant hospitality and efficient household management melded into a (hopefully) seamless whole. Sideboards, the grandest and most representative furnishings of the era, were often designed to suggest Gothic cathedrals. When serving dinner to guests—many Nook Farm neighbors were also writers and artists—Livy displayed her skills as a mother and a wife; Twain’s status as an upper-middle-class Victorian gentleman was at stake.
So dinners were often self-consciously lavish. Katy Leary, the family’s maid for some thirty years, later recalled that most were built around canvasback ducks or a fillet of beef:
We had soup first, of course, and then the beef or ducks, . . . and then we’d have wine with our cigars, and we’d have sherry, claret, and champagne, maybe . . . we’d always have crème de menthe and most always charlotte russe, too. Then we’d sometimes have Nesselrode pudding and very often ice cream for the most elegant dinners. No, never plain ordinary ice cream—we always had our ice cream put up in some wonderful shapes—like flowers or cherubs, little angels—all different kinds and different shapes and flavors, and colors—oh! Everything lovely!
Afterward the men stayed at the table with champagne while the ladies went to the drawing room for coffee.
From the roast to the champagne to the molded ice cream, it was all an extravagant, luscious display. Even the enormous quantities of butter reflected the host’s ability to pay for a considerable amount of refrigeration, while also (in my view at least) reflecting a reassuringly right-thinking attitude toward cooking. The table itself was strikingly beautiful; Louisiana author Grace King recalled a gorgeous display of cut glass, twisted silver candlesticks, and an “exquisite cut glass bowl . . . filled with daisies, ferns and grasses,” while every setting included a bunch of white roses. The night of King’s visit, they ate fresh salmon with white-wine sauce, sweetbreads in cream, broiled chicken, green peas, and new potatoes, followed by strawberries and powdered sugar along with the charlotte russe. “Never in [New Orleans],” she wrote, “have I seen such beautiful dishes, or such exquisite flavoring,” a compliment that would have gone straight to Twain’s heart.
But such banquets were exceptions. Leary certainly remembered them as special occasions, often prompted by Twain’s suggesting, “Well, I think it would be nice maybe if we give a dinner party” (these are Leary’s words; it’s a bit hard imagining her employer being so tentative). More usually, Twain and Livy would sit to a simple lunch of boiled chicken or potatoes hashed with cream. Such a lunch might be the first meal of their day, eaten soon after they made their