Twain's Feast (23 page)

Guest after guest rose in praise of the Volcanoes. Whittier, Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes were giants who knew themselves to be giants, and it was an era completely unembarrassed by lavish flattery; soon the accumulated pomposity threatened to inflate the Brunswick Hotel and float it high over Boston. Then it was Twain’s turn. He ascended to the podium, paused, and launched into a tall tale of his days in the Nevada country, when he’d come upon a miner recently besieged by three impostors pretending to be Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes. “Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap, red-headed,” Twain recalled the miner reporting. “Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon. He weighed as much as three hundred and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prize fighter. . . . They had been drinking, I could see that.” Twain thought it was clear enough that the three were impostors; his plan was for the Twain of the story to slam them as pitiful impersonators of the “gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage.” But he took too long to reach that point—and by the time he had, the literary fellowship gathered at the Brunswick Hotel was severely unamused.

“I didn’t know enough to give it up and sit down,” Twain recalled almost thirty years later. “I was too new to public speaking.” But the truth is that he’d been lecturing for more than a decade and was a flabbergastingly daring speaker. He once told a packed house the same dull anecdote six times in a row, until they saw the “delicate satire” and erupted. Another time he walked onstage and stood, smoking, saying nothing,
for over ten minutes,
until finally the room exploded with laughter and applause. In public-speaking terms, that’s Super Bowl MVP stuff. The man knew how to work a crowd, how to read it, how to make uncomfortable silences work
for
him—to draw out pauses until they were primed to hold whatever he wanted to fill them with.

But at the Whittier dinner his instincts failed him. He looked out over the silent ruins of a fine Victorian banquet, the white table-cloths now stained and rumpled, covered with crumbs and coffee cups. The guests wore black vests; they sat in long, quiet rows. Someone toyed with a pastry fork; someone drained a last minuscule drop of claret. After a “frightful, . . . awful, . . . desolating silence,” the next speaker had to get up. The poor hopeful is now remembered only as Bishop—the author of a recent well-received novel, who (in Twain’s telling at least) was about to walk into the public-speaking equivalent of a chain saw:

It’s not clear whether or not Bishop had to be hospitalized.
Atlantic Monthly
editor William Dean Howells pulled Twain from the room, then twisted the knife: “Consider what you have done for Bishop. It is bad enough in your case, you deserve to suffer. You have committed this crime, and you deserve to have all you are going to get. But here is an innocent man. Bishop had never done you any harm, and see what you have done to him. He can never hold his head up again. The world can never look upon Bishop as being a live person. He is a corpse.”

Twain was mortified. One paper called his speech a “high-flavored Nevada delirium tremens,” tossing him straight back to the western deserts he’d tried to escape. Twain wrote to Howells that “I feel my misfortune has injured me all over the country; therefore it will be best that I retire from the public at present.” Less than four months later, Twain and his family left for Europe: they would be gone for more than a year.

Baltimore and Philadelphia were both famous for terrapin soup; by including the Philadelphia version on his menu, Twain joined a debate that, Ward McAllister said in 1890, had “been agitated for thirty years or more.” The major point of contention was cream. Philadelphians added a lot of cream, while Baltimoreans favored a butter-infused broth like that served at the Whittier dinner. The difference prompted long-running, passionate disputes, like the one over whether Manhattan clam chowder, lacking cream, is potentially good clam chowder, or even chowder at all (it’s not).
¹²

Given Twain’s affectionate relationship with cream, it’s no surprise that he sided with the Philadelphians. Colonel John Forney, once a member of Lincoln’s cabinet, would have agreed, arguing that “terrapin is essentially a Philadelphia dish. Baltimore delights in it, Washington eats it, New York knows it; but in Philadelphia it approaches a crime not to be passionately fond of it.” However, in 1893 two clubs met before an impartial jury to decide once and for all which soup deserved primacy. Twain was not on the jury; Baltimore won.

The stew wasn’t always named after a city. There was also Southern style, sometimes attributed to Savannah or Charleston, which the
New Yorker
’s Joseph Mitchell gorged on in 1939 and which “contained the meat, hearts and livers of two diamondbacks killed early that day, eight yolks of hard-boiled eggs that had been pounded up and passed through a sieve, a half pound of yellow country butter, two pints of thick cream, a little flour, a pinch of salt, a dash of nutmeg, and a glass and a half of amontillado.” This recipe, like most others, included nutmeg; others added mace, or cayenne.

Many recipes called for liver, a holdout from a more all-inclusive era; Amelia Simmons had begun her 1796 recipe with detailed instructions on handling the entrails, lungs, blood, and liver, all added to the back and belly meat (each dish was then infused with Madeira and sweet herbs, covered with beaten eggs and parsley, and baked). But by the time of the 1887
White House Cook Book,
entrails were “no longer used in cooking terrapins for the best tables.” Boiled turtle eggs, on the other hand, were common—and usually taken from the female terrapin being cooked. Baltimore’s Hotel Rennert (which kept hundreds of live terrapins penned in the cellar) also included the blood along with the liver, cream, and whole turtle eggs.

The normal accompaniment for terrapin soup was roasted canvasback ducks from the Chesapeake; canvasbacks headed up the game course as far away as the Whittier dinner in Boston, which probably made Twain happy. He once wrote a letter to Livy describing a “marvel” of a dinner he’d eaten in New York, beginning with individual quarts of champagne in a silver cooler. After a first course of “very small raw oysters—just that moment opened, and swimming in their own sea water,” had come terrapin stew “in dainty little covered pots, with curious little gold-&-silver terrapin spoons from Tiffany’s. Sublime,” he wrote. “There never was such terrapin before. It was unspeakable.” Finally, “before
each
man was set an entire canvass-back duck, red hot from the oven, & on his plate was laid a carving knife and fork.—he must do his own carving. These ducks were just simply divine. So ended the dinner. . . . Five skeletons represented the ducks; 6 empty bottles represented the champagne.”

The best canvasbacks, as Twain noted on his menu, were from Baltimore, or at least the Chesapeake—by fall these had grown so fat on wild celery that they were said to include their own gravy. “There is no need to prepare a gravy,” went typical instructions. “Immediately they are cut they will fill the dish with the richest gravy that ever was tasted.” This regional quality is why they were so often paired with terrapin; McAllister said that “terrapin is with us as national a dish as canvasback,” while in 1839 Frederick Marryat ate them together so frequently that he thought it natural to compare them directly, writing that “the great delicacies in America are the terrapin, and the canvas-back ducks. To like the former I consider rather an acquired taste, but the canvas-back duck is certainly well worthy of its reputation.” He was unusual in strongly preferring one over the other; both delicacies, the
New York Times
said in 1888, were “necessary to a very swell dinner.”

However it was prepared, whatever the accompaniments, terrapin meat was usually described as elevated
,
even delicate. Joseph Mitchell compared it to baby mushrooms. A recent
Baltimore Sun
article dissented considerably, saying that the word most often applied lately is “gamy”
—
and that it was even a bit like muskrat. This, I’d suggest, was written by someone who has never eaten muskrat—or else descriptions of tasty turtle soup were monstrous put-ons, massive acts of collective self-delusion. Besides, in Twain’s day cooks agreed that the best analogue to terrapin was calf’s head; recipes for mock turtle soup almost always began with simmering a head until the cheeks and tongue fall apart.

A lot of terrapin recipes sound delicious. Still, I can’t get as enthusiastic about terrapin soup as about Twain’s other foods, for the simple reason that before any cooking could begin, the terrapin had to be dead. Obviously that’s true for the raccoons, trout, prairie chickens, and so on. The difference is that, like lobster today, terrapins were almost always sold live; you killed them in the kitchen.

After my semitough talk about killing lobsters resolutely and without regret, the descriptions of killing turtles remind me why I should never talk tough. Terrapins are cute. I wish terrapins well. And though, in an era of truly abundant terrapin, I can imagine killing one with a single swift stroke of the cleaver, nearly every recipe begins with something along the lines of “plunge the live turtle into boiling water.” That I don’t think I could do, or ask to have done on my behalf. And it strikes me that the necessity of killing and cleaning a turtle on the spot was probably a big part of its elite appeal; cooking terrapin was messy and difficult, but not so much if you had a full-time kitchen staff. (Suddenly the upper classes acknowledging the African-American origins of terrapin makes a bit more sense—they often referred to blacks
cooking
terrapin, rather than
inventing
the recipe. When it comes to maintaining race and class boundaries, that makes all the difference in the world; instead of crediting African Americans with creative cooking, the well-heeled were bragging about their servants’ skills.)

Even in Twain’s day, the death of the turtle could prompt serious angst among unpracticed cooks. An observer at the Corson cooking class admitted to hating the thought of the turtle’s “martyrdom” and rationalized that “if there was a better way of taking away her life, humanity would have dictated that method,” before finally giving way to practicality: “to decapitate a turtle by saying ‘Dilly! Dilly!’ to him or her does not always succeed in getting them to show their heads.” Meanwhile, a souvenir cookbook from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition argued that boiling or roasting them alive was preferable in any case and warned home cooks to “be careful not to cut off their heads before boiling, since it will make them watery.” Putting aside the question of exactly how careful you have to be to avoid cutting off a turtle’s head, even if it left the meat as watery as water I think I’d chant
Dilly! Dilly!
all day before I’d drop a
live goddamn turtle
into a boiling kettle.

Of course, my attitude here marks me as a person who can afford to make that kind of decision. If I don’t eat turtle tonight, then tonight will be like every other night of my life; I can always call Lanesplitter Pizza and order a large Garbage Special. A few centuries ago, the Delaware wouldn’t have had the luxury of turning down an available protein source, especially one that could be pried from marsh mud in winter; many enslaved Africans certainly did not. What’s more, Native American earthenwares couldn’t sustain a hot and furious boil. If the easiest way of cooking an animal that could retract into its shell was to put the whole, live animal into the coals, then that’s what most people were going to do. Having a direct relationship with wild foods can mean respecting them, treating their sources with care. But it also means that they’re
foods,
things needed and sought for a person’s immediate sustenance.

After killing a turtle came preparing it for the stewpot; since gall or sand would spoil the meat, the big challenge was cutting out the gallbladder and sand bag whole. If the killing had been a matter for some angst, cutting it up inspired grandiose wariness, as though approaching the bladder were like stalking a grizzly. “Even a pinprick of gall will spoil the whole thing,” quailed the
Post.
The
Times
reporter failed to man up: “Here was your terrapin, almost ready to give a foretaste of bliss, and only a puncture of the gall bladder between what was supremely excellent and what was horribly nasty! The class was serious at once, and looked on, breathless” (the successful extraction of the bladder led to “mutual hand-shaking” all around). Statesman and gourmet Sam Ward struck a Hemingwayesque, sentimental-tough-guy stance: “A little gall does not impair the flavor, . . . but the sand bag requires the skillful touch of a surgeon, the heart of a lion, the eye of an eagle, and the hand of a lady.”