Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [41]
Years later, in Roughing It, he wrote that the decision to go west was a romantic one, driven by dreams of silver mines and Indians. But the truth is that his presence in Washoe was forced and unwilling. At times what he saw as barren land made him deeply uncomfortable; soon after arriving, he wrote to his mother that “it never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us.”
Early the next year, he’d write her again: “I wish I was back there piloting up & down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting.” He’d steered some eighteen great boats from St. Louis to New Orleans. He’d reveled in the languages of the river and in the markets of New Orleans—its coffee and hot rolls, its pyramids of plantains, pineapples, and figs. But all that was closed to him now. Back home his beloved river was a battlefield.
So here he was. And now, he found, he had come at last to the great good place. Below him were trout in their thousands, the difficulty of catching them only adding to his sense of a place entirely at peace with itself. Even the fish here were sated. When he looked up, the lake surface was painted in clouds; Twain floated on a liquid diamond a thousand feet thick.
This, he thought, was the masterpiece of the universe.
FRIED TROUT
Clean, wash, and dry small trout; season them with pepper and salt; roll them in dry flour, and then plunge them into enough smoking-hot fat to entirely cover them. As soon as they rise to the surface of the fat, and are light brown, take them up with a skimmer, lay them for a moment on brown paper to free them from fat, and then serve them at once.
In the country, trout are usually fried with salt pork.
—JULIET CORSON, Practical American Cookery and Household Management, 1886
Throughout Twain’s life the simple phrase “trout dinner” was synonymous with simple enjoyment, with pleasure at once luxurious and comforting. Whether he was in Germany or stagecoaching across the Nevada flats, when Twain wrote something to the effect that “we had a trout supper,” you can be sure that whatever had happened before, he ended the day contented.
But Twain didn’t include German trout on his menu, or trout from Missouri, or brook trout from back east, where mills and dams now dirtied the water and blocked once famous spawning runs. He didn’t ask for trout smothered in cream sauce, stewed with mushroom catsup, or preserved in a pot sealed with clarified butter. What he wanted was lake trout from Tahoe and brook trout from the Sierra Nevada range—fish he remembered frying with bacon fat and eating on the shore.
Twain was in Tahoe before prospectors spread rainbow trout throughout the Sierras and hatcheries began introducing fish from other waterways, states, and even continents. In 1872 fishery managers would introduce eastern brook trout from Pennsylvania to the mountains; in 1889 others released lake trout into Tahoe. During the next decade, they’d seed brown trout—hatched from eggs carried in iced moss from Europe—throughout the surrounding range. But when Twain was there, cutthroat trout remained what they’d been for centuries, even millennia: the true western trout, the only trout found from the crest of the Rockies to the Sierras’ eastern slope. His “lake trout, from Tahoe,” and “brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas” were actually a single subspecies, the Lahontan cutthroat.
This seems like a pretty big mistake to make, but it’s actually often hard to define different trout species. Many of the world’s trout, in fact, aren’t even trout: eastern brookies are char, and Lake Pontchartrain’s famed spotted trout are weakfish. On the other