Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [2]
The butter was from a local farmers’ market, churned and shaped into an irregular log only the day before. I dipped in the tip of a knife, touched it to my tongue, and . . . well, you know what’s better than sweet, fresh butter? Not a whole lot. Fresh butter melting on a steak, maybe.
“A plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup.” This was a harder one. Making flapjacks would complicate the timing of the steak, biscuits, and coffee, which I planned to brew in a French press at the last minute. I found a solution in The Confederate Housewife, a compilation of recipes printed in Southern newspapers during the Civil War. Though the buckwheat-cake recipe was serenely confident, concluding with a simple, imperious “try it,” the truth is that the instructions seemed off, calling for neither leavening nor salt. Still, the cake had the advantage of being baked, instead of cooked on a griddle; I’d be able to finish the entire meal in the oven, making the timing immeasurably easier. Besides, I mostly wanted the cake to serve as a base for dark maple syrup.
Twain wanted his syrup “transparent,” probably the grade called light amber, or “fancy.” But I like maple syrup dark. One of my earliest memories—not just food memories but memories—is of boiling sap in a lean-to at my Connecticut-hippie nursery school. It’s an intensely sensory memory of melting snows, and cold spring air swirling into the smoky boiling house, and steam pouring from a slowly sweetening kettle of syrup. Most of all it’s a memory of maple—maple sipped from a wooden ladle, maple boiled until it seemed, to my four-year-old tongue, to be dark as night and sweet as the heart of the tree.
The hell with transparent syrup.
Steak, buckwheat cake, and biscuits went into the oven together. When the smells of baking breads and roasting meat began filling the kitchen, I turned to the coffee.
“A great cup of American home-made coffee, with the cream a-froth on top.” I didn’t go so far as to roast my own beans, which might have been what Twain meant by “home-made.” But I did take care with my French press, pouring in water a few degrees below boiling, relishing the blooming of the fresh, coarse grounds. The beauty of a French press is that every bit of coffee spends precisely the same amount of time steeping as all the rest; in a drip machine, some grounds are wet long enough to go bitter while others stay dry until the very end, which isn’t long enough for them to yield all their flavor. I stirred down the grounds and spent a happy ninety seconds inhaling the ever-richer steam. I wanted it strong, dark as earth, the antithesis of Twain’s Recipe for German Coffee: “Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil; rub a chicory berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former into the water. Continue the boiling and evaporation until the intensity of the flavor and aroma of the coffee and chicory has been diminished to a proper degree; then set aside to cool. . . . Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement.”
But though the coffee was important, the cream was probably closer to Twain’s heart. Throughout his trip he railed against European cream, calling it pale, sickly, and counterfeit. He suggested that the hotels made it by diluting single cans of condensed milk in the fifty-eight-thousand-gallon Great Tun of Heidelberg. And he viewed European cows with suspicion. Germans “work the cows in wagons—maybe they can’t give good milk,” he reflected in his journal. “I’d like to put one in a hydraulic press and squeeze her.”
Today raw milk or cream is illegal in nearly half of the states, and European raw cheeses are legally required to be aged for more than sixty days before being imported. The overwhelming