Twain's Feast (22 page)

Once a simple, poor man’s soup, terrapin became a luxurious dish; Washington and Lafayette are said to have eaten it the night before the Battle of Yorktown, and Lafayette’s love for the dish is supposed to have helped draw him back to the States. John Adams ate it at least four times during the Continental Congresses, with one meal including “Turttle, and every other Thing—Flummery, Jellies, Sweetmeats of 20 sorts, Trifles, Whip’d Syllabubbs, floating Islands, fools—&c., and then a Desert of Fruits, Raisins, Almonds, Pears, Peaches.”

The “turttle” may well have been cooked with expensive Madeira like that Adams drank during the same meal “at a great Rate and found no Inconvenience in.” Such Madeira or good sherry was, from very early on, always used in upper-class terrapin recipes, which both added to and symbolized a stew’s exclusivity. An 1881 New York cooking class taught by Juliet Corson, one of America’s first cooking teachers, froze up momentarily when the students realized that she was about to add such a “precious cordial,” a “treasure-trove” that could be found in only two of the city’s clubs. One student openly protested, asking whether “such divine wine [was] to be amalgamated with a terrapin,” and class continued only after another argued that “noble food requires a royal dressing.” Terrapins, the author judged, were the Athenians of the fish world, especially compared with helots like the skate.

Corson’s students seem to have known everything about terrapin—biology, history, price, where to find and eat the best—except for how to cook it. The greatest distance the coastal specialty of terrapin soup traveled was not east to west but down to up: from the iron stewpots of poor blacks and whites to the silver tureens of the elite. And it was a rare man who could make the same trip.

In 1866 Twain had left San Francisco for New York.
¹¹
His short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” had already made him unexpectedly famous. But it was his next voyage that would establish him firmly and finally among the country’s most popular writers; in New York he boarded the steamer
Quaker City,
joining the first organized touring cruise in American history. He’d visit Europe and the Holy Land, traveling all the while with a party of mostly pious and respectable fellow passengers.

Along the way Twain and a few like-minded friends mocked the “pilgrims” mercilessly; they played cards, drank, and ran free through Paris and Italy and the ruins of Greece. Twain’s portrayal of the staid pilgrims would be among the first of awkward, humorless American tourists. It would also be among the most popular—during his lifetime
The Innocents Abroad
was his best-selling book.

But for a short while, en route to the Middle East, he’d become preoccupied with something smaller and more personal. A fellow traveler had opened a locket, revealing a picture of his sister. Twain was enchanted. The picture was “something more than a human likeness,” he proclaimed. The girl’s name was Olivia Langdon; within a year of Twain’s return in 1867, he and Livy were engaged.

Now, in 1877, the couple lived in Hartford with their young daughters Susy and Clara. But though these were happy years for Twain, he found himself increasingly absorbed by memories of his rustic childhood. He’d just published the semiautobiographical
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;
a year before that had come the wonderfully vivid sketch of piloting life serialized in the
Atlantic Monthly
as “Old Times on the Mississippi.” But he was writing, he knew, of vanished lives. He would never live in a steamboat’s cabin again, or a Washoe tent, or even a modest house in Hannibal, Missouri. His home now was a fabulous “steamboat Gothic” mansion on Nook Farm, a Hartford community that included artists, social reformers, and writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe; the house and its surroundings were perfect symbols of Twain’s new social aspirations.

So by December 1877, Twain was deeply torn. Memories of childhood and the frontier dominated his creative life. But he also hoped that writing about those memories would allow him to break from them, to join the elevated reaches of the eastern literary high society. Stories such as “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” and “The Personal Habits of Siamese Twins” told of doubles and alter egos. Earlier in the year he even published a straightforward travelogue of Bermuda under the name Sam Clemens; he struggled to find the right balance between the raw, powerful language that made him famous and what he hoped would be greater respect from America’s best-known literary writers.

An invitation to speak at a birthday dinner for abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier seemed a terrific opportunity. The roster of the guests was stunning: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, all assembled like a “row of venerable and still active volcanoes” at Boston’s Brunswick Hotel, along with less famous (but, in an immediate career sense, just as important) luminaries from the
Atlantic Monthly.
Twain planned to begin in his normal rustic style, pivoting at last into lavish praise of the three famous writers. But the event, he later reported, was a disaster; and when Mark Twain, one of history’s gutsiest public speakers, says he bombed, you know that something went really hair-raisingly wrong.

As he waited to speak, Twain ate and drank for over three hours. It was a banquet in high Victorian style, and it’s easy to imagine the scene: the elaborate floral centerpieces, the blue-and-white china, the polished silver and shining glass. An enthusiastic reporter from the
Boston Daily Globe
recorded the evening’s menu:

Twain was a long way from Hannibal—its raccoon and greens and corn pone, its hoecake and simply fried fish. At the Whittier dinner, course after course was accompanied by its own specialized silver; it was an era deeply in love with ice-cream knives and fish cutters, orange cups and banana bowls. Oyster forks had been around for decades; now there were asparagus tongs, grape shears, insulated water pitchers for making proper, Twain-approved ice water—everything, I think, but strawberry seeders, and I might be wrong about that. Before sitting back replete (and a bit drunk), Twain had gorged on seven courses, including a Maryland-style terrapin soup: turtle meat and hard-boiled terrapin eggs floating in a clear, buttery, sherry-infused broth. He likely ate with a formal terrapin fork, each of its three broad tines like a curved, frozen, silver flame.