Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [83]
But Chesapeakes were becoming scarce. The official 1891 harvest was 89,000 pounds; by 1901 it had dropped to 1,583. To make up the difference, local dealers began shipping in terrapin from Texas and (even worse, gourmands believed) the Carolinas. Baltimore’s Hotel Rennert insisted that it bought only genuine Chesapeakes, and some other restaurants were honest about the source of their turtles. But given the scarcity of Chesapeakes and the lower price of Carolinas, there was every incentive in the world to lie.
Just as round pieces of skate wing will sometimes pass as sea scallops, the change from Chesapeakes to their less-desirable cousins often went unnoticed. But the introduction of freshwater turtles from Illinois was the final straw for one well-known Baltimore gourmet, who began insisting on seeing a live northern diamondback in the dining room before he’d order terrapin. Maybe others should have followed his example; the Times warned in 1888 that when the proprietor of a cheap restaurant served terrapin, he often served his patrons “with a delusion and a snare in the shape of red-legged turtles which come from the flats of New Jersey.” One local Maryland dealer said in 1898 that of the half million dollars spent by Baltimoreans on terrapin that year, no more than fifteen thousand went to buy genuine local Chesapeakes.
Not everyone thought that was a problem. The same dealer, who was himself bringing in “golden diamond-backs” as a substitute for Chesapeakes, claimed that “there ain’t nobody in a hundred . . . what can tell the difference between these here goldens and the diamonds. There’s a lot of people with a barrel of money who think they know, but I know they don’t.” Not even purchasers from wealthy clubs had noticed that they were paying top dollar for Carolina terrapin. “If the real terrapin dies out,” the man went on, “he won’t be so badly missed. There are lots of others just as good, as far as the epicur[e] is concerned.” As long as there was something that could be sold to make Baltimore or Philadelphia terrapin soup, where it came from and where the original population had gone were both beside the point.
But a few years earlier, another dealer had been troubled by what he saw happening. It’s so rare to find someone speaking openly against his own wallet that I want to let him speak for himself:
I am constantly surprised . . . that no one has pointed out the alarming decrease in the choicest food products of this country. I remember very well that when Dr. Brooks of Johns Hopkins University used the extirpation of the buffalo on the Western plains to illustrate the diminution of the oyster supply along the Atlantic coast, everybody laughed as if it were a huge joke. . . . But we are living to see that it is the literal truth. At one time there were oysters in plenty all along the New-England coast, but the Pilgrim fathers and their descendants caught them so thoroughly that not an oyster can now be found north of Long Island Sound. In Long Island Sound they are very largely the result of transplantings from Maryland. On the Jersey coast and in the Delaware Bay the bottoms produce nothing like the quantities they used to yield. In the Chesapeake Bay, which has more natural oyster ground than all the rest of the world, the crop this year will not be 5,000,000 bushels, against 17,000,000 bushels twelve years ago. What is the result? The oyster is no longer the poor man’s food, and the prices will continue to increase. In Europe, oysters have gone up so that they are now cultivating mussels, because they can be sold cheaper.
And what else was at risk, a Times reporter asked him? “Canvasback ducks, red-head ducks, and the better kinds of game. All are increasing in price and decreasing in quantity. How will it all end? The buffalo was exterminated. Why not the oyster and the terrapin and the canvas-back duck and the other things that are worth living for?