Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [56]
But if they weren’t in the mood to go out, Twain and De Quille could have just tumbled downstairs. Though Twain loved the hotel’s rooms and companionship, he wrote most enthusiastically about the food. As he reported in the Golden Era (one of the several local journals he wrote for), the Occidental’s proprietor relied heavily on locally caught fish and game, especially the beds of shellfish spread out among the eelgrass and clean bay water:
To a Christian who has toiled months and months in Washoe, . . . whose soul is caked with a cement of alkali dust, . . . [whose] contrite heart finds joy and peace only in Limburger cheese and lager beer—unto such a Christian, verily the Occidental Hotel is Heaven on the half shell. He may even secretly consider it to be Heaven on the entire shell, but his religion teaches a sound Washoe Christian that it would be sacrilege to say it.
Here you are expected to breakfast on salmon, fried oysters and other substantials from 6 till half-past 12; you are required to lunch on cold fowl and so forth, from half-past 12 until 3; you are obliged to skirmish through a dinner comprising such edibles as the world produces, and keep it up, from 3 until half-past 7; you are then compelled to lay siege to the tea-table from half-past 7 until 9 o’clock, at which hour, if you refuse to move upon the supper works and destroy oysters gotten up in all kinds of seductive styles until 12 o’clock, the landlord will certainly be offended, and you might as well move your trunk to some other establishment. (It is a pleasure to me to observe, incidentally, that I am on good terms with the landlord yet.)
San Franciscans eagerly awaited the fowl—Twain noted in the Morning Call that the Occidental served quails at 6:00 A.M. on the opening day of hunting season (he praised the enterprise of the hunter before concluding, dryly, that “it would be wrong to suspect him of having captured the quails the day before”). But the main glory of the Occidental was the shellfish—mussels, no doubt, and clams, and oyster after seductive oyster.
Twain liked his mussels steamed. That’s simple (and good) enough: scrub the beards from black, glistening, tightly closed shells. Simmer wine; melt in a knob of butter. Slip in the mussels. Leave them just long enough to open, turning hot wine into an ocean of sauce. Serve in wide, steaming bowls, with a platter of bread. In San Francisco, in Twain’s day, bread always meant sourdough—even prospectors were proud of their spontaneously leavened starter, so that some would splurge on whiskey while refusing to pay for loaves. Then as now, steamed mussels went great with a drink, and Twain had plenty of those: “We returned drunk, but not disorderly,” was one typical report.
But if it’s easy to imagine what “San Francisco mussels, steamed” meant, oysters done up in “all kinds of seductive styles” leaves much more leeway. Oysters were one of the most popular foods in nineteenth-century America, often enjoyed dozens or hundreds of miles from the coast. The same things that let an oyster live for hours when the tide receded—a clamping adductor muscle to retain seawater, an ability to slow the metabolism to nearly nothing, even a curved lower shell that helped hold moisture—made it perfectly suited for long trips overland. By 1887, when some hundred fifty thousand miles of rail spiderwebbed across the country, the Ohio cookbook Buckeye Cookery could include some fifteen oyster recipes—including at least one for raw oysters served simply with lemon, vinegar, and horseradish. “Oysters in the shell must be kept in a cool cellar,” the authors recommended, “and occasionally sprinkled with salt water.”
But even in 1857, before railroads truly dominated American land and Americans’ tables (there were less than a fifth as many miles of rail as there would be thirty years later), canned oysters would allow an Indiana cook to declare a sauce made from nothing more than oysters, butter, and flour “the most delicious sauce in the whole catalogue