Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [121]
—SUSANNAH CARTER, The Frugal Housewife, 1803
Mark Twain was a man who loved flavor and hated its lack. He loved fresh radishes, oily possum, and Southern corn bread; he detested watery cream, exhausted fruit, and the “sham” of unsalted butter.
So why on earth did he ask for “clear” maple syrup? The clearest syrup is Grade A Extra Fancy, usually from the year’s first good run of sap. Its color (the only basis for grading) has been compared to ginger ale; it’s the slightest, most subtly flavored of the syrups. Though it’s great in its own right, I’ll never understand why, if you want maple syrup, you wouldn’t go for the darkest, mapliest syrup you can get.
The answer could simply be that Twain was a man of his times. Back then, strangely enough, the most common complaint about maple syrup or sugar was that you could taste it. Officials at the 1844 New York State Agricultural Fair awarded first prize to a maple sugar whose “whole coloring matter [had been] extracted . . . leaving the sugar fully equal to the double refined cane loaf sugar.” Like most contemporaries, they didn’t want maple sugar, with its rich, distinctive blend of flavors—its notes of butter or vanilla or marshmallows or smoke or grass. They simply wanted sugar, white cane sugar from the West Indies, which tasted nothing but sweet and could be used in Twain’s “American mince pie” and “all sorts of American pastry” without making them taste much like maple. There was no hiding the presence of strong, dark, assertive sugar, which may have been best in a pot of his “Boston bacon and beans.”
True, an 1893 letter in Garden and Forest magazine claimed that most city people did “not want the kind of pure maple-sugar that is white,” preferring the true flavor of maple. But by then white sugar was much cheaper than it had been in previous decades, and cooks had begun to judge maple on its own terms, rather than as a substitute sweetener. When people wanted sugar for everyday use, there’s no question that most thought lighter was better.
Even Grade A Extra Fancy, if a bit less robust than I like, is genuinely layered; it can suggest cream, salt, hay, or dozens of other flavors. Twain was always an instinctive critic, his judgments as passionate as they were sometimes imprecise: Did a thing have flavor? Did it please nose, stomach, tongue? Then it was good. And clear maple syrup, light and clear, was good.
But by 1896, Twain could feel the color bleaching from the world around him—the flavor of life going watery and pale. He had often been haunted by despondency, even depression. Sometimes he made what sounded like jokes about longing for death, like the time he remembered the people who saved him from drowning in the Mississippi. “I can’t feel very kindly or forgivingly toward either that good apprentice boy or that good slave woman,” he wrote in the Autobiography he began in earnest in 1906, “for they saved my life.” Writing entries for Pudd’nhead Wilson’s calendar, he included the question “Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral?” and answered that “it is because we are not the person involved.” “It is sad to go to pieces like this,” he reflected, “but we all have to do it.”
But as he aged, Twain increasingly dropped the wryly joking tone. Life, he said, was a succession of “labor and sweat and struggle . . . [and] aching grief,” until at last men vanished “from a world where they were of no consequence.” Only death, he wrote, brought peace; only in death would he truly speak freely. When his brother Orion died, Twain wrote that the “release from the captivity of a long and troubled and pathetic and unprofitable life had been swift and painless.” In a prolonged, inevitable progression, friend after old friend passed away; it