Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [135]
Twain would have recognized the false abundance of fast food at once. “The number of dishes is sufficient,” he wrote in Europe. “But then it is such a monotonous variety of unstriking dishes. It is an inane dead level of ‘fair-to-middling.’ ” He wanted food that had body and heft—that he could call mighty, rich, and ample. He wanted sputtering, smoking, fragrant, frothy, even clotted food, food that had vibrancy and energy and life, food straightforward enough about what it was to be called genuine, honest, and real. When we insist on uniformity—on having plenty of something instead of a jumbled, various, magnificent plenitude—one inevitable result is food that Twain would describe as monotonous, tiresome, and feeble, as a base counterfeit and sham. Bad food, he’d have known, comes from hurt and shrunken places.
When Twain was born, the bond between food and place was more obvious; wild foods were knit tightly into the fabric even of city cooking. Baltimore perch and canvasback ducks, Philadelphia terrapins, San Francisco mussels, New Orleans croakers and sheepsheads, even Boston beans flavored with maple—every one relied on wild lands beyond the city lines. As Twain’s life passed, more and more foods disappeared from American tables; choosing mining over fisheries, pulp mills over oysters, even corn over prairie and cantaloupe over trout, changed American food—and the American landscape—forever. Twain was born in a country of woodcock and died in one of Coca-Cola.
Today, of course, how we treat the land and water still determines what foods we eat. But just as often, choices about what we eat help to determine which American landscapes survive and thrive. There are enormous economic and political pressures to define food as, ultimately, a calorie-production system, the end product of a basically mechanized and mechanical process. But our choices aren’t inevitable.
And our choices matter. We can choose to support Massachusetts cranberry growers as suburban development pushes up against their bogs, and we can buy from people raising oysters in the nation’s cleanest bays. We can help to keep shrimpers on the water after they lose their boats in a hurricane; we can work in community gardens and help with a local clambake, fish fry, or even a coon supper. We can eat seafood from low on the food chain, preserving the ocean life that’s the one remaining wild thing most Americans ever see on their tables. We can support local bakers, restaurants, farmers, grocers—all the people whose work with food helps to make communities better, richer, more entirely themselves. And, maybe most important of all, we can recognize the scandal of food deserts—urban neighborhoods with as much as a twenty-to-one ratio of liquor stores to greengrocers—and work to ensure that everyone has at least the opportunity to choose good, healthy food, that everyone can access the true, varied abundance that farmers can produce on the American land.
All this helps make food what it was to Twain, whose best-loved meals gained savor from the parts they played in his life: a human project.
Next up is chess pie. Chess pie is an old Southern dessert of uncertain origin; the only thing I’m sure of is that it’s impossible to bake a better pie. It’s made of eggs, buttermilk, butter, and sugar. Lemon chess pies have lemon; chocolate have chocolate. Of course there’s a crust. That’s about it—but a good chess pie is sweet and moist and custardy, like the platonic ideal of cookie dough.
The one Erik and I like to make is also one