Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [54]
I made my first Hangtown fry soon after Erik was born. Eli wanted something rich, nourishing, and memorable—a comfort food we’d never tried before. I spent much more on eggs than I had to, thinking as I did so of a fantastic rant by one Mr. Flood, a New Yorker who, by the time he turned seventy, had given up eating anything but seafood. “When I was a boy on Staten Island,” Flood recalled in 1944, “hens ate grit and grasshoppers and scraps from the table and whatever they could scratch out of the ground, and a platter of scrambled eggs was a delight. Then the scientists developed a special egg-laying mash made of old corncobs and sterilized buttermilk, and nowadays you order scrambled eggs and you get a platter of yellow glue.” Eggs from Vacaville’s Soul Food Farm obviously have full access to grasshoppers and grit and whatever they can scratch from the ground; if he could have tried them, Flood might have danced. Their yolks are a deep gold, approaching amber; recently five Soul Food Farm yolks survived over a minute of whisking by Erik, which any parent of a four-year-old will recognize as evidence of almost metaphysical strength. By comparison a factory-farmed egg is tasteless and watery and insipid.
I rolled eight jarred but sweet and fat oysters in cracker crumbs, then fried them golden in butter. When they were nearly done, I poured six lightly beaten eggs over them; in a second pan, thick-cut slab bacon sizzled and spat. When everything was done, I laid a cross-hatching of bacon on each plate, and spooned eggs and oysters over it. The first plate went on a blanket laid over Eli’s lap. Erik, blessedly, was asleep.
The eggs tasted so endearingly rich that Eli asked if I’d added cheese; the raw, briny centers of the crisp oysters were an unexpectedly perfect complement. Below them the bacon made a salty, smoky foundation. Erik breathed quietly; Eli took another bite, closing her eyes to taste.
Hangtown fry may have started as an extravagance, but now it’s more of a straightforward comfort—something to make on rainy winter mornings or for dinner when you just want to curl up on the couch. That’s not, probably, how the prospectors saw it (and we didn’t wash it down with whiskey, which might change things). But Hangtown fry is good enough that it doesn’t really matter whether it shows off your newfound wealth or just gives simple comfort to your family, when your family is a family for the first time.
OYSTER OMELET
Add to a half cup of cream six eggs beaten very light, season with pepper and salt, and pour into a frying-pan with a tablespoon of butter; drop in a dozen large oysters cut in halves, or chopped fine with parsley, and fry until a light brown. Double it over, and serve immediately.
—ESTELLE WOODS WILCOX, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, 1877
“I began to get tired of staying in one place so long,” Twain wrote in Roughing It. “I wanted to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted—I did not know what I wanted. I had the ‘spring fever’ and wanted a change, principally, no doubt.”
That’s just about all that Twain had to say about his reasons for leaving Nevada and heading off to San Francisco. And what more, really, did he need to say? The road! The American road, vast and singing and open; the road, ready and waiting for his quick and popping tread. The road: our national poem, tangled and eternal and in this case kind of a crock.
Because in his brief explanation, Twain neglected to mention several salient points. The first was that duels were common in the boomtowns near the Comstock Lode’s massive silver deposits, and these fights, between men with guns, did not always prove so amusing as he sometimes claimed.7 Second, that in the boomtowns it was seen as a mark of highest honor to have “killed your man.” A third, closely related point