Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [11]
How best to cook this dark, rich meat? The short answer is “add fat.”1 Naturalist Frances Hamerstrom, who studied the birds in Wisconsin for decades, always resented having to stuff their skins for use as specimens rather than using them to enrich the meat while roasting. Ranhofer dipped his in butter or oil before broiling, or he served the roasted birds with gravy, fried bread crumbs, and applesauce, or he prepared them “a la Tzarina,” which meant including a forcemeat of game and cream. On occasion he indulged in baroque, Gilded Age productions involving molding prairie-chicken breasts with jelly before garnishing with truffles, cock’s combs, mushrooms, and poached chicken kidneys.
Twain, I like to think, would have wanted his simply roasted in a hot oven, quickly enough that the meat wouldn’t go dry. True, in later years the dinners served at his Hartford home owed a great deal to the rich, elevated food served at Delmonico’s—considered the finest restaurant in America from the time of its founding in 1827 through the end of the nineteenth century—and other dining palaces. It is, regretfully, necessary to report that one 1887 dinner at Twain’s house involved creamed asparagus, creamed sweetbreads, and creamed shad sauce over shad-roe balls, and that the tomatoes were molded into jelly, with mayonnaise on the side (afterward came ice cream sculpted into flowers). But Twain was a man of many contradictions, and the fact is that when he thought of his favorite things, he thought first of ingredients instead of preparations, tastes instead of recipes. His most impassioned food writing is about basic things, roasted meats and fried chicken and freshly picked vegetables. The prairie chickens he remembered and wanted again, I believe, were those he’d helped to hunt and ate simply roasted.
With the rising sun, the booming ground in front of me has come fully alive. The cocks pace and charge and fly; the two hens stroll, seeming to ignore the mock combats. One cock hangs at the lek’s eastern edge, strutting as enthusiastically as any but never approaching the other birds. Eventually the larger group works its way toward him. The lone cock waits for his chance; suddenly he strides forward, swiftly cuts a hen away from the others, and hurriedly escorts her into a patch of tall grass. Everyone in my blind wants to adopt him. When he returns to the lek, we give soft group cheers. Vivid yellow meadowlarks sing a few feet in front of the blind; owls and northern harriers stalk the tall grass behind the lek. But behind all that, behind the grasses, the corn ground is quiet and gray. The lek is a jungle island in an acid sea.
It’s literally awesome to think of the scale of the old prairies. Lewis and Clark started crossing them in May, at the very beginning of their transcontinental journey; they came to the far edge of the grasslands in June of the following year. Imagine the labor it took to cross that vast distance and it’s easy to understand why the first European explorers—men who knew what crossing the Atlantic meant—used words like “ocean” and “sea” when they spoke of the grass.
It’s humbling to imagine those thousands of miles, and what filled them. Nowadays people think of prairies as empty and monotonous. But what they’re really thinking of is the cornfields that replaced the tallgrass. Corn ground is acre upon acre upon acre of row after row after row, all planted in one variety, of one thing, all at the same time. Corn ground is more a growing medium than it is soil, having been drenched in enough pesticide and herbicide to kill all the microbes that let the soil live. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan calls such land “food deserts”—producers of a volume of calories that must be processed by industry or used to feed livestock prior to human consumption. Anything growing on corn ground—except for corn—is