Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [84]
Substituting one wild food for another is just one way of breaking the bonds between food and place, one step on the road from eating backyard chicken on Sunday to the KFC Double Down Sandwich (currently being test-marketed and consisting, as God is my witness, of bacon, two kinds of cheese, and special sauce between two fried chicken breasts). Wild foods have natural, undeniable terroir. Eating them is an opportunity—if one that’s too often missed—to think about a piece of the world: its tides, its winds, its land, its limits. But substitution does exactly the opposite. It creates an illusion of eternal plenty, blinding eaters to how their choices shape the world.
Genuine bluepoint oysters from native beds on the south shore of Long Island, for example, went extinct in the 1860s; even though he included them on his menu, it’s entirely possible that Twain never ate a native oyster from Blue Point. Dealers simply sold new varieties, seeded from Chesapeake stock, as the genuine article. But this did more than cheat an eater; it encouraged in him an almost childish belief that he could eat whatever he wanted, forever—that he could have everything, all the time. The evidence on the plate said that surely there were still massive reefs of oysters at Blue Point. And surely you could still have Chesapeake canvasback ducks, fattened on wild celery and rich with their own gravy; surely those weren’t mallards or redheads (only Delmonico’s, the Times claimed in 1888, was consistently honest about the replacement).
It’s a pattern that’s been repeated again and again; in her wonderful Kitchen Literacy, Ann Vileisis describes some of the many substitutions. Shad shipped from Florida masked diminished Connecticut River runs. Maine’s Kennebec River salmon gave way to fish from the Columbia, and later Alaska. Before prairie chickens were shipped from grasslands by the millions, the occasional specimen substituted for Long Island grouse. More recently, in California, failing to distinguish between subspecies of abalone (each of which grows to a different size, lives at a different depth, and reproduces at its own distinct rate) hid the fact that previous favorites had already been fished almost to extinction. The sudden collapse of the abalone fishery wasn’t actually as sharp as it appeared; instead, people were seeing the last collapse in a line of collapses, as one subspecies after another vanished.
Of course, eating wild food can be done right. Maine’s lobsters and Alaskan salmon are examples of wild seafood that thrive under intelligent management plans; both help make their homes places that are distinctively different. But when a wild food stops being a true feature of place—something that’s harvested locally, eaten locally, and, most important, understood locally—it’s in serious trouble. Eating wild foods has to mean respecting them, the land and water they come from, and their natural limits; most wild stocks simply can’t survive becoming long-distance novelties. When they do, they’re likely to vanish—and to prompt a new long-distance trade to fill the local gap. Then, instead of a great local tradition, you’re left with a fossilized habit like an Upper Midwest fish fry serving only Atlantic haddock, or a Maryland crab house serving crab cakes that begin with opening a Chinese can.
Terrapins were luckier than Maine salmon or black abalone; before overharvest could wipe them out entirely, Prohibition banned the sherry and wine always used in the most popular recipes. Not long after, the Depression led many wealthy Americans to cut back on the kitchen staffs formerly tasked with killing the turtles. Together the two events probably saved northern diamondbacks from extinction. The next major hunting threat would come from China, but even that ended in 2006 with a law banning intentional harvest. Today, though poaching remains an issue, the biggest problem is shoreline development. With fewer sandy beaches around the bay, paths and driveways make tempting spots for a terrapin eager to return to the water.
That’s probably why Erik