Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [3]
I coaxed the raw, almost clotted cream from the bottle with gentle taps, spreading it thickly on the bottoms of two cups with the back of a spoon. Then I let dark streams of coffee ripple under the cream’s edge, raising it like a hot-air balloon’s yellow silk. The steak sputtered; the biscuits and buckwheat cake steamed. Breakfast was ready.
Among the German phrases Twain resolved to master:
“This tea isn’t good.”
“This coffee isn’t good.”
“This bread seems old.”
“Isn’t there a curious smell about . . .”
“Isn’t that something in the butter?”
No wonder that his perfect breakfast revolved around fresh, honest, genuine flavors. My breakfast table, loaded down with ripping-hot steak and biscuits and coffee, with warm syrup and cool cream, gave humbling testimony to the depth and power of Twain’s genius. Never again would I speak ill of Tom Sawyer Abroad, or of the last eleven chapters of Huckleberry Finn.
The steak was the color of well-oiled oak, and I knew from my first bite that it was the best piece of meat I’d ever had (much more a comment on the skills of the rancher and butcher, I stress, than on my cooking—in the hands of a professional, the steak might have killed me with joy). It tasted denser, more packed, than wet-aged steaks, which by comparison seem almost insubstantial. Though the aging gave the porterhouse a slightly gamy, almost smoky taste, the grass was distinctly present, giving even the painstakingly aged meat a contrasting suggestion of freshness. The biscuits were tall and hot, the butter clean as springwater.
Honesty compels me to record that the buckwheat cake sucked. Henceforth, “Do not doubt Mark Twain” would be my motto. When Twain called for buckwheat cakes, I would by God make buckwheat cakes, with batter properly salted and cooked to perfection in a bit of good butter, and no more of this Confederate buckwheat-cake claptrap. I contented myself with a sip of pure dark syrup.
The coffee was commandingly rich, the cream a revelation. Though the butter was vastly fresher and sweeter than what I was used to, it was still recognizably butter—a familiar taste, much improved. The cream was something altogether new to me, with a raw, immediate flavor that homogenized cream doesn’t even aspire to. I understood Twain’s anger at the thought of another cup of hotel coffee, topped with watery cream. Insipid! I imagined him spitting. Counterfeit! Baptized! Then I imagined his happiness at being handed the cup I held; I breathed in, and out. I sipped.
I tend to cook too much food, and I’d cooked too much that morning. But my wife and son and I tore in with appetites that would have done credit to Twain—cranky, ravenous, homesick Twain. Soon there was nothing left but plates of crumbs and a platter divided by a lonely border fence of bone.
I’d learned a lot while getting ready to cook, and more while cooking. I knew more about dry-aged meat than I had, and a little about what pasteurization does to the flavor of milk (consult your thesaurus: see “decimates”). I’d learned something about the grades of maple syrup, and when the Worcestershire I used in the butter-and-meat-juice gravy was invented (around 1840, reputedly when a keg of unpalatable sauce was discovered to have mellowed during its several years forgotten in a cellar; it is not known whether the first taster was drunk). Though it’s impossible to exactly replicate the flavors of a