Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [57]
Twain doubtless reveled in the variety; he was known to be able to do tremendous damage to a spread of shellfish. “I never saw a more used-up, hungrier man, than Clemens,” a Boston friend would write years later. “It was something fearful to see him eat escalloped oysters.” Surely oysters were scalloped at the Occidental, baked with a sprinkling of sourdough bread crumbs and butter. A later cookbook author would credit the popular Manning’s Oyster House with inventing the salt roast (which has nothing to do with seasoning the oysters but rather with roasting them on the half shell on a bed of hot rock salt). And there was Hangtown fry, of course; I like to think of Twain—who still held some reasonably valuable silver-mine stock—indulging in something like it, reveling in being young and feeling rich. Fried oysters might also have been packed into a hollowed-out loaf of sourdough bread, the local version of an oyster loaf or “peacemaker.” Oysters were served in soups, stews, gumbos, and croquettes; they were broiled, deviled, stuffed into fish, and used to garnish chicken (and wild ducks and geese, especially in San Francisco, where wetlands still vastly outnumbered farms).
Then there were raw oysters: the real thing. Twain had eaten them before, of course; New Orleans, then as now, was legendary for its spreads of fat eastern oysters, fresh from the Gulf. And even the relatively limited rail networks sometimes brought oysters far from the coast. The year before Twain moved to San Francisco, the French government sent one P. de Broca to report on the American oyster industry; de Broca reported that “this delicious article of food has become so necessary with every class of the population that scarcely a town in the whole country can be found without its regular supply. By means of railroads and water channels, oysters in the shell, or out of the shell, preserved in ice, in pickle, or canned, are carried even to the remotest parts of the United States.” But there’s a big difference between live, iced oysters and oysters pickled or canned; and the farther you got from the ocean, the more likely the latter became. Twain later recalled that champagne and pickled-oyster stew had been “incredible luxuries” in Washoe. And the reverence accorded to Hangtown fry suggests how expensive hauling oysters over the mountains in barrels of seawater made them (as much as a dollar each by the time they reached Reno).
Now the Washoe desert was behind Twain. In San Francisco the oysters were fresh (and champagne so plentiful in the city’s brothels that vintners were known to bail out prostitutes). Here the snap of seawater replaced the tang of pickling brine or the tired and limp flavor of live oysters jounced over hundreds of miles of road. Raw oysters are more than fresh—they’re still alive, waiting in a curve of cupped shell, their minuscule hearts still beating a liquor of briny blood. That’s the purest way to eat an oyster; a pan roast can be great, but raw oysters make for rhapsody.
For Twain, youth and the taste of shellfish were a heady combination. Sure, San Francisco oysters and mussels were exquisitely fresh in their own right. But how wonderful for him to eat them late at night in the bayside city, a writer among writers as he honed his sardonic, uproarious voice.
“My boy,” said Old Mr. Flood as he turned his attention from eggs to shellfish, “people who are unaccustomed to oysters sometimes behave real queer after putting away a few dozen.” He told of a group of Brooklyn boys, “weevily fellows, pale, stoop-shouldered, and clerky looking, three runts, no life in them at all,” who were given permission to eat all the oysters they could hold. Later that afternoon, said Flood, “those Brooklyn boys were laughing and shouting and