Twain's Feast (17 page)

I rolled eight jarred but sweet and fat oysters in cracker crumbs, then fried them golden in butter. When they were nearly done, I poured six lightly beaten eggs over them; in a second pan, thick-cut slab bacon sizzled and spat. When everything was done, I laid a cross-hatching of bacon on each plate, and spooned eggs and oysters over it. The first plate went on a blanket laid over Eli’s lap. Erik, blessedly, was asleep.

The eggs tasted so endearingly rich that Eli asked if I’d added cheese; the raw, briny centers of the crisp oysters were an unexpectedly perfect complement. Below them the bacon made a salty, smoky foundation. Erik breathed quietly; Eli took another bite, closing her eyes to taste.

Hangtown fry may have started as an extravagance, but now it’s more of a straightforward comfort—something to make on rainy winter mornings or for dinner when you just want to curl up on the couch. That’s not, probably, how the prospectors saw it (and we didn’t wash it down with whiskey, which might change things). But Hangtown fry is good enough that it doesn’t really matter whether it shows off your newfound wealth or just gives simple comfort to your family, when your family is a family for the first time.

“I began to get tired of staying in one place so long,” Twain wrote in
Roughing It.
“I wanted to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted—I did not know
what
I wanted. I had the ‘spring fever’ and wanted a change, principally, no doubt.”

That’s just about all that Twain had to say about his reasons for leaving Nevada and heading off to San Francisco. And what more, really, did he need to say?
The road!
The American road, vast and singing and open; the road, ready and waiting for his quick and popping tread. The road: our national poem, tangled and eternal and in this case kind of a crock.

Because in his brief explanation, Twain neglected to mention several salient points. The first was that duels were common in the boomtowns near the Comstock Lode’s massive silver deposits, and these fights, between men with guns, did not always prove so amusing as he sometimes claimed.
⁷
Second, that in the boomtowns it was seen as a mark of highest honor to have “killed your man.” A third, closely related point was that it was—understandably enough—considered less desirable to
be
someone’s man. And finally, in light of the foregoing, that the May 1864 declaration by rival Virginia City newspaperman James Laird of his intention to kill Mark Twain was, to put it gently, worrisome.

The fight began over a sack of flour. For nearly a year, one Reuel Gridley (coincidentally, a former Hannibal classmate of Twain’s) had been hauling the sack from one Washoe town to the next. At each stop, Gridley jokingly auctioned off the sack to benefit the Sanitary Commission, the charity for Union soldiers that later evolved into the Red Cross. The winner of the auction never took the flour; it was just a novel way of raising money to help wounded soldiers.

When Gridley’s flour sack came to Virginia City, Laird’s
Virginia City Union
bid a hundred dollars. But Laird refused to pay—or so Twain claimed in the
Territorial Enterprise.
In retaliation Laird published an angry assault on Twain’s manhood. Twain demanded a retraction, in terms amounting to a challenge to a duel. Laird refused to apologize. After a few more increasingly hostile back-and-forths, Twain ran. Probably it was his first smart move during the whole business.

He’d visited San Francisco the year before, but this time he’d come to live. The city suited him perfectly, for though he described the homes as wooden and “old fashioned,” the truth is that they were anything but old. San Francisco was, in fact, the newest of cities, built on sand hills and crazed, seldom realized dreams of instant fortune. Before 1848, when gold was found near the Sierra settlement of Sutter’s Mill, maybe 850 people had lived in ramshackle houses among the dunes. Now there were over 56,000, a number that would again double by the end of the decade. San Francisco was a young, mostly male place, with so few women that the birthrate couldn’t maintain the population. Virtually everyone there was from somewhere else (and often very far indeed—the first, lesser-known wave of ’48ers hailed from Hawaii and Peru as often as from the far-off states of the Union, the nearest of which was Texas). New, wild, transient, irreverent—in many ways San Francisco was Twain’s spiritual hometown.

“I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union,” he recalled. Virginia City, where he’d taken up with a terrific group of newspapermen and writers at the
Territorial Enterprise,
had treated him very well. Still, he wrote, “after the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, [and] infested the opera.”

The “best hotel,” in Twain’s opinion, was the Occidental. The Occidental was becoming the unofficial meeting place of an early San Franciscan bohemia—Charles Henry Webb, Adah Menken, Ada Clare, and more had left behind Pfaff’s Cellar (and Walt Whitman) in New York to make a new home out west. Twain took a room at the Occidental with his great friend Dan De Quille,
⁸
furnished with “a huge double bed, piles of bedding, splendid carpets and fine fittings of all kinds.” De Quille later wrote that “Mark and I agreed well as room-mates. Both wanted to read and smoke about the same length of time after getting into bed, and when one got hungry and got up to go down town for oysters the other also became hungry and turned out.”

By this time cooks had followed the prospectors (or else disappointed prospectors had become cooks); the city boasted dozens of restaurants staffed by Americans, English, French, Germans, Dutch, Pacific Islanders, Mexicans, Chileans, Chinese, and more. But when Twain and De Quille got hungry, they were probably going to an oyster house. Oyster houses were hugely popular places for men to gather, and eat, and (not incidentally) have a smoke and a drink or ten while standing about on a sawdust-covered floor. They’d remain vastly popular throughout the century until, in 1892, Americans would eat 197,639,000 pounds of oysters—and that’s
dressed
weight, counting only meat. It was the age of the oyster house . . . and of oyster cellars, stalls, and counters.

But if they weren’t in the mood to go out, Twain and De Quille could have just tumbled downstairs. Though Twain loved the hotel’s rooms and companionship, he wrote most enthusiastically about the food. As he reported in the
Golden Era
(one of the several local journals he wrote for)
,
the Occidental’s proprietor relied heavily on locally caught fish and game, especially the beds of shellfish spread out among the eelgrass and clean bay water:

San Franciscans eagerly awaited the fowl—Twain noted in the
Morning Call
that the Occidental served quails at 6:00 A.M. on the opening day of hunting season (he praised the enterprise of the hunter before concluding, dryly, that “it would be wrong to suspect him of having captured the quails the day before”). But the main glory of the Occidental was the shellfish—mussels, no doubt, and clams, and oyster after seductive oyster.

Twain liked his mussels steamed. That’s simple (and good) enough: scrub the beards from black, glistening, tightly closed shells. Simmer wine; melt in a knob of butter. Slip in the mussels. Leave them just long enough to open, turning hot wine into an ocean of sauce. Serve in wide, steaming bowls, with a platter of bread. In San Francisco, in Twain’s day, bread always meant sourdough—even prospectors were proud of their spontaneously leavened starter, so that some would splurge on whiskey while refusing to pay for loaves. Then as now, steamed mussels went great with a drink, and Twain had plenty of those: “We returned drunk, but not disorderly,” was one typical report.

But if it’s easy to imagine what “San Francisco mussels, steamed” meant, oysters done up in “all kinds of seductive styles” leaves much more leeway. Oysters were one of the most popular foods in nineteenth-century America, often enjoyed dozens or hundreds of miles from the coast. The same things that let an oyster live for hours when the tide receded—a clamping adductor muscle to retain seawater, an ability to slow the metabolism to nearly nothing, even a curved lower shell that helped hold moisture—made it perfectly suited for long trips overland. By 1887, when some hundred fifty thousand miles of rail spiderwebbed across the country, the Ohio cookbook
Buckeye Cookery
could include some fifteen oyster recipes—including at least one for raw oysters served simply with lemon, vinegar, and horseradish. “Oysters in the shell must be kept in a cool cellar,” the authors recommended, “and occasionally sprinkled with salt water.”

But even in 1857, before railroads truly dominated American land and Americans’ tables (there were less than a fifth as many miles of rail as there would be thirty years later), canned oysters would allow an Indiana cook to declare a sauce made from nothing more than oysters, butter, and flour “the most delicious sauce in the whole catalogue of culinary compounds.” Americans ate oysters whenever, wherever, and however they could; they simmered them in soups, stuffed them into turkeys, froze them in ice cream, and baked them in shortbread and pies. In San Francisco, where oysters were cheap, “seductive styles” must have covered a lot of ground.

Twain doubtless reveled in the variety; he was known to be able to do tremendous damage to a spread of shellfish. “I never saw a more used-up, hungrier man, than Clemens,” a Boston friend would write years later. “It was something fearful to see him eat escalloped oysters.” Surely oysters were scalloped at the Occidental, baked with a sprinkling of sourdough bread crumbs and butter. A later cookbook author would credit the popular Manning’s Oyster House with inventing the salt roast (which has nothing to do with seasoning the oysters but rather with roasting them on the half shell on a bed of hot rock salt). And there was Hangtown fry, of course; I like to think of Twain—who still held some reasonably valuable silver-mine stock—indulging in something like it, reveling in being young and feeling rich. Fried oysters might also have been packed into a hollowed-out loaf of sourdough bread, the local version of an oyster loaf or “peacemaker.” Oysters were served in soups, stews, gumbos, and croquettes; they were broiled, deviled, stuffed into fish, and used to garnish chicken (and wild ducks and geese, especially in San Francisco, where wetlands still vastly outnumbered farms).

Then there were raw oysters: the real thing. Twain had eaten them before, of course; New Orleans, then as now, was legendary for its spreads of fat eastern oysters, fresh from the Gulf. And even the relatively limited rail networks sometimes brought oysters far from the coast. The year before Twain moved to San Francisco, the French government sent one P. de Broca to report on the American oyster industry; de Broca reported that “this delicious article of food has become so necessary with every class of the population that scarcely a town in the whole country can be found without its regular supply. By means of railroads and water channels, oysters in the shell, or out of the shell, preserved in ice, in pickle, or canned, are carried even to the remotest parts of the United States.” But there’s a big difference between live, iced oysters and oysters pickled or canned; and the farther you got from the ocean, the more likely the latter became. Twain later recalled that champagne and pickled-oyster stew had been “incredible luxuries” in Washoe. And the reverence accorded to Hangtown fry suggests how expensive hauling oysters over the mountains in barrels of seawater made them (as much as a dollar each by the time they reached Reno).

Now the Washoe desert was behind Twain. In San Francisco the oysters were fresh (and champagne so plentiful in the city’s brothels that vintners were known to bail out prostitutes). Here the snap of seawater replaced the tang of pickling brine or the tired and limp flavor of live oysters jounced over hundreds of miles of road. Raw oysters are more than fresh—they’re still alive, waiting in a curve of cupped shell, their minuscule hearts still beating a liquor of briny blood. That’s the purest way to eat an oyster; a pan roast can be great, but raw oysters make for rhapsody.

For Twain, youth and the taste of shellfish were a heady combination. Sure, San Francisco oysters and mussels were exquisitely fresh in their own right. But how wonderful for him to eat them late at night in the bayside city, a writer among writers as he honed his sardonic, uproarious voice.