Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [70]
Until canneries began shipping them nationwide, lobsters remained an almost entirely coastal food. This was largely because they were much more difficult to keep alive during shipment than oysters; in 1842 the first lobster sent from New York to Chicago died in Cleveland. The lack of extensive demand meant that early canneries used huge lobsters; in the 1870s it took the meat from only two average lobsters to fill a one-pound can. But within a few decades, as the larger specimens were fished out, as many as eight lobsters were needed to pack the same container. Soon they were too rare and expensive to be sold like Sunkist tuna. Lobsters grew scarce because they were an elite and desirable food, but they also became an elite and desirable food because they were scarce.
By the time I was growing up in Connecticut in the eighties, you got lobster by either paying through the nose or catching it yourself. I was lucky—my family had a small string of five traps in Long Island Sound. That meant, when everything was going well, all the lobster I could eat. It also meant that I came to see the shocked, rubber-banded creatures in seafood shops’ holding tanks as belonging nearly to a different species from the snapping, flapping, furious bugs crowded into a trap’s corners. Lobster meant dunking slick claw and robust tail meat into butter; it meant picking out tiny troves from the body and legs. But it also meant the smell of bony bunker fish strung on a coat hanger as bait and the splash as a wooden trap dropped onto a swell—an oddly plural splash, as ten slats hit the water all at once. And, regrettably, it meant the sound of lobsters clanking in the steamer as they died, a sound that drove my eight-year-old sister to two years of vegetarianism and wearing nothing but black.
Obviously, we were just hobbyists, heading out a few times a week to pull our traps on flat, safe water. There wasn’t any physical or financial peril. Still, when the lobsters were nearly wiped out—killed by the runoff from mosquito spray after an outbreak of West Nile virus—it was heartbreaking, like learning that a childhood home had burned down.
Like lobsters, diamondback terrapins began the nineteenth century as a common food; like lobsters, they ended it among its elite. And, unsurprisingly, the more expensive and rarefied terrapin became, the less likely a given eater was to know the first thing about the source of the semiaquatic turtle in his soup bowl. Twain knew prairie chickens, trout, oysters, mussels, raccoons, and possums well; he’d lived on the same land, drunk and swum the same waters, breathed the same wild air, even chased them through their forest haunts. Philadelphia terrapin soup was different. Though he loved a particular mode of cooking them, Twain, I think, was as distant from terrapins and their salt marshes as most modern Americans are from New England lobster—which is to say completely distant. Just as some people today are surprised to learn that lobsters aren’t actually bright red while crawling around the ocean bottom, I’m not sure that Twain could have picked a live diamondback terrapin out of a turtle lineup. He probably knew very little about how they lived, or were caught or shipped.
Though Twain had spent some time in Philadelphia as a printer’s apprentice in 1853, Philadelphia isn’t of the Chesapeake, or the salt marsh, in anything like the same way that San Francisco is of its bay. For Twain, terrapin soup was, in the end, a city thing. Though it was often a food of the poor, he probably