Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [136]
I put the eggs in a big bowl; Erik beats the holy hell out of them.
“You measure, I mix!” he says.
“Right,” I say, and pour in the sugar; he beats it until eggs and sugar are pale as cream. Butter, buttermilk, lemon juice, vanilla—after each addition Erik goes to town, whisking until it’s vanished, the filling always getting richer, sweeter, better. My only concern will be washing the walls; this pie’s gonna be smooth.
“I know the stain of blackberry hulls,” Twain wrote. “I know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkin vines.” He could still hear the cracking as a melon split below the carving knife, could still see “the rich red meat and the black seeds, and the heart standing up, a luxury fit for the elect.” He knew how to choose ripe apples, peaches, and pears; he knew how to roast apples and walnuts before washing them down with cider. He knew the taste of fresh corn, butter beans, asparagus, and squash—knew them well enough that he’d call out poor produce with all the scorn he had, which was a lot.
It takes work to know food. It always has: the first market guides appeared in America in the eighteenth century, though the culinary world they described was of course very different from ours. An 1805 edition of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery declared that April was the time for young geese, January for hen turkeys, and that smelts were good until after Christmas. Glasse knew how to choose lobsters by weight, herring by their full eyes and the “lively shining redness” of their gills, and how to test an egg by touching the bigger end to her tongue (“if it feels warm, be sure it is new”). Bull beef, she said, was “tough in pinching,” while with cow beef “the dent you make with your finger will rise again in a little time.” Such market guides could assume physical access to food, an ability to engage with it using all the senses. True, part of the reason that they insisted on that access was that some butchers and fishmongers and dairymen were cheats (a personal connection doesn’t guarantee an honest person). Still, the result was something worth holding on to: a complete sensory experience before cooking ever began, looking and smelling and touching and even tasting to find what was good.
Knowing food takes attention and deciding to know something about the things in our kitchens: When and where apples grow. How to choose fish. How to store mushrooms; how chopping and slicing and crushing change garlic. It takes repetition, making a soup again and again and again, each time honing the seasoning, adjusting the broth. It can mean growing a pot of thyme and rosemary, or eating all the kinds of briny or lemony or coppery oysters you can get your hands on. It means experiencing flavors with full attention.
It also means sharing them. Twain grumbled about hotels that “pass the sliced meat around on a dish . . . so you are perfectly calm about it, it does not stir you in the least.” But he had a suggestion: “perhaps if the roast of mutton or of beef,—a big generous one,—were brought on the table and carved in full view,” it might give “the right sense of earnestness and reality to the thing.” Even carving at the table could transform a meal, making the eaters participants, turning the experience into something communal and worth remembering. That, I think, is what he’d recently encountered in a private Venetian home; “if one could always [eat] with private families, when traveling,” he reflected, “Europe would have a charm which it now lacks.”
Cooking at home isn’t always easy (or even possible). It takes time, and planning, and sometimes (not always) more money than ordering takeout or heating up something frozen. But even if what you’re making is nothing much—five cloves of garlic, a half cup of olive oil, a pound of