Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [16]
PRAIRIE CHICKENS
Clean and wash thoroughly in water in which you have put a little soda. Rinse in clear water several times, and if time allows, let them lay in water half an hour or more. Then wipe dry and fill with a good dressing. Tie down the wings and legs with a cord and stew, closely covered, with plenty of butter, or steam over hot water in a steamer until tender and then place them in a pan with a little butter, and brown. Serve with a tart jelly and garnish with parsley.
—“Aunt Babette’s” Cook Book (one f America’s first Jewish cookbooks), 1889
Springfield, Illinois, is the home of Abraham Lincoln and the “horseshoe.” A horseshoe is two thick, side-by-side pieces of sourdough toast, heaped with ground beef, mounded with fries, and finally drowned under cheese sauce. When I sample one at D’Arcy’s Pint, I’m ravenous—I haven’t eaten since the night before, and I’ve spent the morning walking all over Goose Lake Prairie, the state’s largest surviving grassland—and I scarf that sucker down.
It doesn’t taste much like any of its constituent foods: beef, potatoes, cheese. But it hits all the basic pleasure centers, the desires for salt and meat and fat and gooeyness and crunch. Humans evolved on grasslands; our gigantic brains, as well as our bipedalism, may have developed to aid us in foraging and hunting for food over large distances in a region given to paralyzing seasonal droughts. Somewhere deep in my own brain, there still resides the notion that I might soon need to head out there across the fields with a sharpened stick and hunt me down some elk, or wrestle a baboon for groundnuts. These activities, it stands to reason, will demand a store of protein and fat: they will require a horseshoe.
But even as my ape mind drives me to gulp down the horseshoe, a different part of my brain recognizes that it’s garbage. This is the part that, when it hears that horseshoes have never spread far beyond Springfield, asks, And what does that tell you? For in truth the bread and fries and ground beef and cheese necessary to a horseshoe are not difficult to procure elsewhere in this land of ours. Maybe the fact that the horseshoe technically qualifies as “local” to Springfield testifies only to the great good sense of people not living in Springfield.
That’s the part of my brain that understands that the grasslands, cradle and driver of human evolution, are gone from this part of the world mostly because of the kind of foul concoction that I am, at this moment, eating as though it’s my job. When an animal was once hunted by the millions, it’s natural to assume that that is why it isn’t exactly blotting out the sun anymore. But in the case of the prairie chickens, the real culprit was habitat loss. Once that wonderful checkerboard of corn and grass gave way to corn and soybeans, and nothing but corn and soybeans, there was no place for the birds to seek shelter for their nests.
And in 1947, just over a century after the invention of the plow that broke the prairies, another innovation appeared that would further transform the land, making it even more uniform—at once more productive and more sterile. That was the year that farmers began applying ammonium nitrate from World War II-era munitions plants to their cornfields. Now corn could be grown even on the poorer “gray” prairies of southern Illinois, where cultivated redtop grass (grown for use making dye) had sheltered a good-size remnant of prairie chickens. Once the redtop was gone, only birds on refuges like Prairie Ridge could survive.
Even more important, the new fertilizer destroyed the ancient rhythms of corn agriculture; the idea of land going “corn sick” and being left fallow for a few seasons to recover became a historical curiosity,