Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [78]
But as he traveled through Europe, his excitement faded. European manners, he came to believe, were often a mere cover—a polished disguise for aristocratic decadence. “It will not do for me to find merit in American manners,” he began, with deadpan affect, “for are they not the standing butt for the jests of critical and polished Europe? Still I must venture to claim one little matter of superiority in our manners”—namely, that ladies could walk wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted; in London, Twain claimed, they would swiftly be approached and insulted by so-called gentlemen. In America, he said, a woman might “encounter less polish than she would in the old world, but [would] run across enough humanity to make up for it.” Even artists were wildly overrated, especially the revered old masters. “There are artists in Arkansas to-day,” he declared, “who would not have had to paint signs for a living if they had had the luck to live in the time of the old masters.”
All of which says something about his mood when he sat down in an Italian hotel room, toward the end of his travels, and wrote his menu. European home food, Twain readily confessed, was often excellent—he called dinner with a Venetian family “a luxury which very seldom fell to our lot on the continent.” But food in European hotels, where he ate most meals, was “a sorrowful business. A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe,” he judged; “but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.”
Again and again the food in hotels and way stations left him frustrated. After breakfast one morning, he reported that he had “made a rare & valuable addition to my bric-a-brac collection. . . . It was an egg. There was a something about it which satisfied me that it was an antique.” He decided that the best way to tell Rhine wine from vinegar was to consult the label. Even German beer could play false: “We bought a bottle or so of beer,” he wrote; “at any rate they called it beer, but I knew by the price that it was dissolved jewelry, and I perceived by the taste that dissolved jewelry is not good stuff to drink.”
He remained, of course, a man open to pleasure where he found it; he didn’t close his eyes or mind to what was good. He loved Emmentaler cheese, and Faschiertes beefsteak with yellow of egg (minced or ground beef; probably it was bound together with egg yolk before cooking). He called green, egg-size plums the “pleasantest fruit in Germany,” thinking them “better than oranges”; that, he mused, “is why the plum, which is with us a worthless fruit, holds such a place in [German] literature.” When he could get good ones, away from the hotel’s decayed specimens, he liked German pears, cherries, raspberries, apples, peaches, and strawberries, as well as broiled salmon, Wolfsbrunnen trout, and duck.
Sometimes food and life joined with a savor as intense as on the shores of Tahoe, or in the San Franciscan night. In Switzerland, Twain recalled,
we had such a beautiful day, and such endless pictures of limpid lakes, and green hills and valleys, and majestic mountains, and milky cataracts dancing down the steeps and gleaming in the sun, that we could not help feeling sweet toward all the world; so we tried to drink all the milk, and eat all the grapes and apricots and berries, and buy all the bouquets of wild flowers which the little peasant children had for sale; but we had to retire from this contract, for it was too heavy.
Another time, during a rafting trip, he stepped ashore at noon and bought bottles of beer