Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [134]
In Twain’s day wild things were at the heart of American cooking; they took pride of place alongside garden tomatoes, apple cider, and fresh corn. But that would be true only until people turned their faces from the things they loved—until they let them slip.
As Twain said, “The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor.” I drop four wings into the hot fat; while frying in lard and clarified butter, chicken smells purely luxurious. Fifteen minutes later the first batch is cooling on a rack. Tasting the first wing is a cook’s prerogative, as unassailable as taking a giant spoonful of cake batter, and my first bite is impatient enough that I singe the tip of my tongue. But after a brief wince, I don’t regret the hurry. The skin and dredge have melded into a crunchy, subtly smoky shell; the chicken is savory with buttermilk, with just enough hot-sauce bite to give it authority.
Twain may have thought that only Southerners could cook fried chicken. And, granted, I’m using the technique laid out by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, Southerners both, in their Gift of Southern Cooking. Still, Twain can stuff it; I made this, and this is good.
While the next batch of chicken cooks, I clean six pounds of greens. Eli steals a moment from watching Mio to chop garlic. Collards, chard, kale, turnip greens, mustard greens: I put each bunch into a giant bowl of water, waiting for the dirt to loosen and fall easily away. When it does, I chop the leaves coarsely, the resulting pile soon overflowing our biggest stockpot. Twain said bacon and greens. But we have more of the good country ham I used to flavor the fryer—and country ham, if less veined with fat than Virginia bacon, tastes as layered and smoky and rich as any.
Greens don’t need to be tough and bitter; good, young ones need only a quarter hour of simmering. But even greens that start tough can be terrific. Their toughness is even a virtue—growing hardy, robust greens, fit for cooking with pork, isn’t like raising baby lettuce. Chard will volunteer wherever it’s thrown down (our old yard sported an uninvited, and seemingly invincible, five-foot specimen); if you couldn’t eat kale, you’d call it a weed. The fact that many greens are as vigorous as they are nutritious has made them the salvation of generations of Americans with a spare spot in the yard, or who know what to look for in meadows and ditches: De Voe enjoyed shepherd sprouts, pigweed (“much used by country people”), dandelion, milkweed, and evening primrose gathered from roadsides and pastures.
Whatever their source, when cooked in real, homemade stock, greens bloom with flavor. One kind is good. But when you have four or five—collards forming a foundation, kale adding body, mustard lending its peppery sparkle—each green becomes the others’ best sauce. Even those that start bitter end as something layered and complex: different yet wonderfully familiar, always new and always the same.
For me the glory of Twain’s feast is in its inclusiveness, in how it honors forest and farm, prairie and orchard, wetland and dairy. All of Twain’s foods came from distinct American places; all were, in some way, the essence of their sources. When Twain ate roe from shad netted in the Connecticut River, a Missouri partridge, a possum fattened on persimmons from the orchard it was trapped in, or mussels gathered off rocks at low tide, his meal depended on a wholly American place. The same thing was true when he ate butter beans, peas, sweet potatoes, and radishes from the garden—or blackberries and wild grapes from the forest’s edge, or hickory nuts from well within the woods. It was true when he drank coffee with fresh cream on a cliff above the ocean, or spread butter on hot wheat bread on a cold morning, or cut himself a piece of peach cobbler made with backyard-orchard fruit.
Saying that food is the essence of place can seem like a sentimental throwback, or like something we’ve totally lost. But here’s the thing: it’s still always true. It’s true whether you’re eating