Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [6]
James Fenimore Cooper on American food: “As a nation, their food is heavy, coarse, ill prepared and indigestible, while it is taken in the least [artful] forms that cookery will allow.”
Twain on Cooper: “Cooper’s eye was splendidly inaccurate.”
Fresh. Local. Lovingly prepared. Intimately tied to the life of a place. These were Twain’s standards, as they are for many food lovers today. I was amazed by the currency of the menu, at its relevance; Twain might have been writing a love letter to today’s growers of native New Mexico peppers, makers of Creole cream cheese, and raisers of American Bronze turkeys: people dedicated to preserving the unique species and ingredients and recipes that have made American food special. He seemed to speak to all those who search for, and relish eating from, tables anchored on the land—and to share their longing.
Because the truth is that not even Twain’s angel from a better land could assemble the entire feast today. To be sure, some are still with us. Whole books have been written about Southern-fried chicken, clam chowder, and many of Twain’s pies; heritage gardeners raise Weeping Charley tomatoes, Long Scarlet radishes, and Cherokee White Eagle corn, varieties long since vanished from land given over to industrial-scale farming. Some of the specific preparations are still with us—American broiled chicken, Southern-style corn pone with chitlins, northern-style oysters roasted in the shell—though sometimes in renditions that would have Twain shouting, Counterfeit!
Many more are entirely gone. And with a pang I realized that many of those were the most purely local, rooted foods on Twain’s menu, those that reminded him not only of his country but of a lake, a river, or a mountain. It was when Twain thought of wild things that he knew, precisely and without hesitation, both what he wanted and where it could best be had. Sierra Nevada brook trout. San Francisco mussels. Prairie hens from Illinois. These were the foods that defined American places in the days before cheap railroad transport blurred the culinary lines between New York City and Twain’s boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri. They spoke to Twain of special times, places, and people.
To me they spoke of prairies and marshes, of rivers and bays, of forests and mountains, of landscapes that once literally gave American life flavor. Now I read Twain’s menu more carefully, and this time I was choosing—choosing foods rooted in the lands and waters he knew. I wanted to find out what had become of the prairie chickens near his uncle’s farm, the mussels and oysters he feasted on in San Francisco, the trout he ate near Tahoe before accidentally setting the forest ablaze in a roaring conflagration. I wanted to know about the maple syrup and cranberries harvested near his Connecticut home—the former still a wild food, the latter only recently coaxed into cultivation. I’d find out what these foods meant to a single man during a life well and fully lived, a life that had taken him from the Mississippi’s shoals and murky currents to Nevada’s crazed shanties. I’d find out how each food once helped to make a place a place.
Once more I read through the menu. Croakers, from New Orleans. Philadelphia terrapin soup. Canvasback duck, from Baltimore.
I wanted to know what we still have. I wanted to know what we were losing, and what we might be getting back. I wanted to know what was gone.
One
IT MAKES ME CRY TO THINK OF THEM
Prairie-Hens, from Illinois
MY WIFE, ELI, looks a bit wary when I bring up Twain. She’s happy enough about some of my ideas, such as visiting Tahoe; when I start in