Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [77]
Even in Twain’s day, the death of the turtle could prompt serious angst among unpracticed cooks. An observer at the Corson cooking class admitted to hating the thought of the turtle’s “martyrdom” and rationalized that “if there was a better way of taking away her life, humanity would have dictated that method,” before finally giving way to practicality: “to decapitate a turtle by saying ‘Dilly! Dilly!’ to him or her does not always succeed in getting them to show their heads.” Meanwhile, a souvenir cookbook from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition argued that boiling or roasting them alive was preferable in any case and warned home cooks to “be careful not to cut off their heads before boiling, since it will make them watery.” Putting aside the question of exactly how careful you have to be to avoid cutting off a turtle’s head, even if it left the meat as watery as water I think I’d chant Dilly! Dilly! all day before I’d drop a live goddamn turtle into a boiling kettle.
Of course, my attitude here marks me as a person who can afford to make that kind of decision. If I don’t eat turtle tonight, then tonight will be like every other night of my life; I can always call Lanesplitter Pizza and order a large Garbage Special. A few centuries ago, the Delaware wouldn’t have had the luxury of turning down an available protein source, especially one that could be pried from marsh mud in winter; many enslaved Africans certainly did not. What’s more, Native American earthenwares couldn’t sustain a hot and furious boil. If the easiest way of cooking an animal that could retract into its shell was to put the whole, live animal into the coals, then that’s what most people were going to do. Having a direct relationship with wild foods can mean respecting them, treating their sources with care. But it also means that they’re foods, things needed and sought for a person’s immediate sustenance.
After killing a turtle came preparing it for the stewpot; since gall or sand would spoil the meat, the big challenge was cutting out the gallbladder and sand bag whole. If the killing had been a matter for some angst, cutting it up inspired grandiose wariness, as though approaching the bladder were like stalking a grizzly. “Even a pinprick of gall will spoil the whole thing,” quailed the Post. The Times reporter failed to man up: “Here was your terrapin, almost ready to give a foretaste of bliss, and only a puncture of the gall bladder between what was supremely excellent and what was horribly nasty! The class was serious at once, and looked on, breathless” (the successful extraction of the bladder led to “mutual hand-shaking” all around). Statesman and gourmet Sam Ward struck a Hemingwayesque, sentimental-tough-guy stance: “A little gall does not impair the flavor, . . . but the sand bag requires the skillful touch of a surgeon, the heart of a lion, the eye of an eagle, and the hand of a lady.”
Terrapin stew retained its local reputation even after long-distance shipment became common (the ideal Maryland winter dinner, the Post said in 1880, included turtle, roasted canvasback ducks, oysters, and crab salad, along with potatoes, vegetables, fried hominy cakes, and celery). At its best, terrapin could be a revelation to a newcomer, a symbol of the region’s delights. Corson’s New York cooking class ended with a midwestern student eating turtle for the first time: “After his second spoonful instantaneous measures were mooted by him either for the introduction of the chelonian to Illinois or his migration, with his wife and family, to this, the land of the terrapin.”
Four months after the Whittier dinner, Twain was as far from the Land of the Terrapin