Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [15]
Of course, transporting food long distances has been going on for millennia. But the Egyptian wheat that fed Rome, the spices of medieval Europe, and the cod that sustained the Iberian empires were all important precisely because they were easily preserved. Eating dried or salted foods is very different from eating a banana picked five thousand miles away. When you eat fresh meats or fruits or vegetables raised or grown more than a few miles from your home, you’re doing something that makes you different from nearly all other people who have ever lived; today we have to struggle to avoid doing it. Through most of history, when it came to fresh food, eating locally and seasonally was just what humans did.
By the mid-nineteenth century, technologies that could carry game and produce to distant markets ever more quickly, ever more reliably, were transforming America’s tables—and its landscapes. As author Ann Vileisis points out, America’s foodsheds—the areas that produce a given community’s food, just as a watershed provides its water—were rapidly expanding and overlapping. The foodsheds of major eastern cities saw particularly dramatic change. The Erie Canal had already opened the Midwest; soon steamboats would carry Southern vegetables from converted cotton plantations. After the Civil War, the spreading spiderweb of railroads carried game like prairie chickens fresh to markets hundreds, or even thousands, of miles from the grasslands the birds needed to live. In Twain’s boyhood the foodshed of the Quarles farm had included the surrounding prairie, forests, and fields. Now, as transportation technology radically expanded, New York City’s foodshed included the same places; it included, in effect, the Quarles farm.
We take this kind of thing for granted. But in Twain’s day it was a huge novelty, and novelty sells. So, for a few decades, Illinois was heaven not only for prairie chickens but also for prairie-chicken hunters. Thomas De Voe, author of a magisterial 1867 guide to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia foodstuffs called The Market Assistant, recalled that in 1821 a pair of aged prairie chickens had sold in New York for the spectacular price of five dollars (they might have been prized as a substitute for the quickly vanishing Long Island grouse). By the time Twain wrote the menu for his feast, prairie chickens were hunted by the literal train-load. Chicago markets measured them by the cord and ton, to the tune of some six hundred thousand birds every year. As early as 1861 in New York, the five dollars per pair had fallen to fifty cents; by 1867 enough birds regularly appeared between October and April to glut the city’s market. Some people even credited the first development of insulated shipping barrels and techniques of carrying frozen food to the hunger for prairie chicken. What’s more, a private “chicken hunting culture” was developing, with railroads offering special rates to parties of hunters; specially equipped wagons were sold complete with gun racks, dog kennels, and iceboxes.
One Illinois newspaper, recognizing that the birds had become emblems, named itself the Prairie-Chicken. The paper, declared the editors, would be “rich, spicy, popular, cheap and wholesome.” But not long after, Science magazine noted that most people could hope to encounter a prairie chicken only once it had been killed and shipped to market. The prairie chicken was beginning to vanish; soon it would again be a local dish, until it disappeared entirely from restaurant and even home tables.
However strongly he associated prairie chickens with their native grasslands, Twain