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By Root 599 0

in A Tramp Abroad, Twain would rant about seeing a modern house in the Alps, a “prim, hideous, straight-up-and-down thing, . . . so stiff, and formal, and ugly and forbidding, and so deaf and dumb to the poetry of its surroundings, that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic, a corpse at a wedding, a Puritan in Paradise.” I wish we had him to comment on Tahoe’s casinos, which are, objectively, some of the worst places in the world and which brag on billboards about how completely their food doesn’t belong, their lakeshore restaurants serving Maine lobster and Chilean sea bass and other seafood from half a world away. It’s true that some of the world’s best chefs have set up shop in Las Vegas casinos (even the Vegas egg cooks are legendary, to the point that scientists have done studies on their preternatural timing and control). I just really hate casinos—for me, eating food created by Mario Batali within a stone’s throw of the slots would be like spotting a rainbow in the Port Authority men’s room. And it’s worse when you’re in a place like the Tahoe lakeshore, which the casinos just utterly deform.

When Twain knew Tahoe, nothing was out of place, nothing other than exactly as it should be. And Tahoe trout, cooked over a campfire, was not something borne on sweltering ships, hauled by stagecoach, or packed over mountains. Trout belonged.

CREAM TROUT

Having prepared the trout very nicely, and cut off the heads and tails, put the fish into boiling water that has been slightly salted, and simmer them for five minutes. Then take them out, and lay them to drain. Put them into a stew-pan, and season them well with powdered mace, nutmeg, and a little cayenne, all mixed together. Put in as much rich cream as will cover the fish, adding some bits of the fresh yellow rind of a small lemon. Keep the pan covered, and let the fish stew for about ten minutes after it has begun to simmer. Then dish the fish, and keep them hot till you have finished the sauce. Mix, very smoothly, a small tea-spoonful of arrow-root with a little milk, and stir it into the cream. Then add the juice of the lemon. Pour the sauce over the fish, and then send them to table.

—ELIZA LESLIE, The Lady’s Receipt-Book, 1847

I’d like to pause, briefly, to praise ice water. Twain was devoted to the stuff. The very last item on his feast menu was “ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.” He conceded that the European term, “iced water,” was at least more accurate than the American, which described water made from melted ice. Nevertheless, he said, most European water was “flat and insipid beyond the power of words to describe,” and that most hotels “merely give you a tumbler of ice to soak your water in, and that only modifies its hotness, doesn’t make it cold. Water can only be made cold enough for summer comfort by being prepared in a refrigerator or a closed ice-pitcher.” So when, on a blazing afternoon, he came to a pool of the “pure and limpid ice-water” flowing from a glacier, he stretched himself out, dipped his face in, and “drank till [his] teeth ached.” He scoffed at the European notion that ice water hurt digestion. “How do they know? They never drink any.”

Years later he told an audience, “I think that there is but a single specialty with us, only one thing that can be called by the wide name ‘American.’ That is the national devotion to ice-water. All Germans drink beer, but the British nation drinks beer, too; so neither of those peoples is the beer-drinking nation. I suppose we do stand alone in having a drink that nobody likes but ourselves.” Americans, devotees of the refrigerator and the “cold ice-pitcher,” were also devotees of ice. In Massachusetts, or even Virginia, ice cut from frozen winter ponds could be packed in sawdust and stored in icehouses, to be brought out in the hottest days of August. But New Orleans and Atlanta had to look farther away; ice was probably never more prized than during a Southern summer’s swelter.

The keys, as with so much else, were the steamships