Twain's Feast (3 page)
Authors: Andrew Beahrs
In journals, novels, and travelogues, Twain’s love for a dish was inseparable from his love of life. “Open air sleeping, open air exercise, bathing, and a large ingredient of hunger” make freshwater fish incomparably delicious, he declared in
Tom Sawyer.
And he reflected after stagecoaching through the Rockies that “nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. . . . Ham and eggs and scenery, a ‘down grade,’ a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.” When I read his travelogues, it seemed that he never had a bad meal when happy or a good one when miserable. Maybe he really didn’t; it was very much like him either to love a moment utterly or to despise its every detail.
Tom Sawyer.
And he reflected after stagecoaching through the Rockies that “nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. . . . Ham and eggs and scenery, a ‘down grade,’ a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.” When I read his travelogues, it seemed that he never had a bad meal when happy or a good one when miserable. Maybe he really didn’t; it was very much like him either to love a moment utterly or to despise its every detail.
So of course he loved foods recalled from great times in his own life. He’d passed through Saratoga, New York, only a few days after the invention of Saratoga potatoes, now better known as potato chips. Doubtless he’d eaten turtle soup during his brief stint as a printer’s assistant in Philadelphia. The menu included many of the foods from his uncle’s farm. On, and on, and on, so that when I returned to the menu, I now saw a memoir, and a map. It was filled with memories, of all the things Sam Clemens had eaten in boyhood and during his wild travels from the New Orleans docks to the backstreets of San Francisco. No wonder that when Twain thought of food, he thought of the best of America, an America imagined as generous, full-hearted, and young.
James Fenimore Cooper on American food: “As a nation, their food is heavy, coarse, ill prepared and indigestible, while it is taken in the least [artful] forms that cookery will allow.”
Twain on Cooper: “Cooper’s eye was splendidly inaccurate.”
Fresh. Local. Lovingly prepared. Intimately tied to the life of a place. These were Twain’s standards, as they are for many food lovers today. I was amazed by the currency of the menu, at its relevance; Twain might have been writing a love letter to today’s growers of native New Mexico peppers, makers of Creole cream cheese, and raisers of American Bronze turkeys: people dedicated to preserving the unique species and ingredients and recipes that have made American food special. He seemed to speak to all those who search for, and relish eating from, tables anchored on the land—and to share their longing.
Because the truth is that not even Twain’s angel from a better land could assemble the entire feast today. To be sure, some are still with us. Whole books have been written about Southern-fried chicken, clam chowder, and many of Twain’s pies; heritage gardeners raise Weeping Charley tomatoes, Long Scarlet radishes, and Cherokee White Eagle corn, varieties long since vanished from land given over to industrial-scale farming. Some of the specific preparations are still with us—American broiled chicken, Southern-style corn pone with chitlins, northern-style oysters roasted in the shell—though sometimes in renditions that would have Twain shouting,
Counterfeit!
Counterfeit!
Many more are entirely gone. And with a pang I realized that many of those were the most purely local, rooted foods on Twain’s menu, those that reminded him not only of his country but of a lake, a river, or a mountain. It was when Twain thought of wild things that he knew, precisely and without hesitation, both what he wanted and where it could best be had.
Sierra Nevada
brook trout.
San Francisco
mussels. Prairie hens
from Illinois.
These were the foods that defined American places in the days before cheap railroad transport blurred the culinary lines between New York City and Twain’s boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri. They spoke to Twain of special times, places, and people.
Sierra Nevada
brook trout.
San Francisco
mussels. Prairie hens
from Illinois.
These were the foods that defined American places in the days before cheap railroad transport blurred the culinary lines between New York City and Twain’s boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri. They spoke to Twain of special times, places, and people.
To me they spoke of prairies and marshes, of rivers and bays, of forests and mountains, of landscapes that once literally gave American life flavor. Now I read Twain’s menu more carefully, and this time I was choosing—choosing foods rooted in the lands and waters he knew. I wanted to find out what had become of the prairie chickens near his uncle’s farm, the mussels and oysters he feasted on in San Francisco, the trout he ate near Tahoe before accidentally setting the forest ablaze in a roaring conflagration. I wanted to know about the maple syrup and cranberries harvested near his Connecticut home—the former still a wild food, the latter only recently coaxed into cultivation. I’d find out what these foods meant to a single man during a life well and fully lived, a life that had taken him from the Mississippi’s shoals and murky currents to Nevada’s crazed shanties. I’d find out how each food once helped to make a place a place.
Once more I read through the menu. Croakers, from New Orleans. Philadelphia terrapin soup. Canvasback duck, from Baltimore.
I wanted to know what we still have. I wanted to know what we were losing, and what we might be getting back. I wanted to know what was gone.
One
IT MAKES ME CRY TO THINK OF THEM
Prairie-Hens, from Illinois
M
Y WIFE, ELI, looks a bit wary when I bring up Twain. She’s happy enough about some of my ideas, such as visiting Tahoe; when I start in with San Francisco mussels, at least it’ll be close to home. But she fears that my first plan—to sit, at dawn, in a frozen Illinois cornfield and watch prairie chickens—could be the first step down the road toward serious Berkeley eccentricity. “I just don’t want you to be ‘that freaky Twain guy,’” she says. “There’s enough of that here. One day you’re reading about food, the next you’re walking around campus shouting at the sun and random undergrads.”
Y WIFE, ELI, looks a bit wary when I bring up Twain. She’s happy enough about some of my ideas, such as visiting Tahoe; when I start in with San Francisco mussels, at least it’ll be close to home. But she fears that my first plan—to sit, at dawn, in a frozen Illinois cornfield and watch prairie chickens—could be the first step down the road toward serious Berkeley eccentricity. “I just don’t want you to be ‘that freaky Twain guy,’” she says. “There’s enough of that here. One day you’re reading about food, the next you’re walking around campus shouting at the sun and random undergrads.”
I laugh a little; she snorts a bit.
“I’m serious,” she says. “You do know this is kind of weird, right?”
In fact, I do. And I’m grateful that Eli (rhymes with “Kelly”) is just joking around, because right now I do want to go to Illinois and sit in a cold, bare field—in fact, I need to. So much of Twain’s life was spent looking back at his own youth; exploring those memories inspired his best work. The weekend after his wedding at the age of thirty-four, he found himself in a kind of trance, seeing old faces, hearing old voices. “The fountains of the deep have broken up,” he wrote to his longtime friend Will Bowen, who would later appear as Tom Sawyer’s companion Joe Harper. For a day and more, Twain watched and listened. It was as though settling into married life had primed a fuse that a letter from Bowen then lit, returning him to a childhood he was thrilled to rediscover. And the earliest of his many memories, the first with real heft, color, and presence, were of the wonderful feasts on his Uncle John Quarles’s prairie farm.
Every year the boy Sammy Clemens had spent several months on the farm, just four miles north of the hundred-person village of Florida, Missouri. Though Florida was a forest town, the farm abutted the prairie, “a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks.” The farm’s five hundred acres were in a lucky country of grass, wood, and water, and all lent their bounty to the heavily laden table that Twain later remembered.
Ducks and geese, wild turkeys, venison, squirrel, rabbits, pheasants and partridge—when these wild things were served alongside garden-fresh corn, watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, butter beans, and peas, and with the corn bread, fried chicken, and hot biscuits that Twain would later claim could never be properly cooked anywhere outside the South, the result was
rooted
food that would live forever in his memory. He’d remember its flavors, of course—but he’d remember, just as vividly, the way his uncle gathered and hunted and tended the foods, the way in which the meals sprang from a place he loved so dearly:
rooted
food that would live forever in his memory. He’d remember its flavors, of course—but he’d remember, just as vividly, the way his uncle gathered and hunted and tended the foods, the way in which the meals sprang from a place he loved so dearly:
I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end feathers. . . . I can see the blue clusters of wild grapes hanging among the foliage of the saplings, and I remember the taste of them and the smell. I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted, and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts, and the persimmons; and I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawn to scramble for them with the pigs. . . . I know the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it. . . . I know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkin vines and “simblins.” . . . I know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and I know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person. I know how ripe ones look when they are piled in pyramids under the trees, and how pretty they are and how vivid the colors. . . . I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on a hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream.
I remember. I can remember. I know. I know. I know.
Twain remembers; Twain chants. His memories bound together land and table, as surely as they joined Mark Twain with Sammy Clemens, the boy he once was.
Twain remembers; Twain chants. His memories bound together land and table, as surely as they joined Mark Twain with Sammy Clemens, the boy he once was.
Of all the incredible bounty of the Quarles table, roasted prairie chicken was perhaps the most rooted, the most fundamentally local. Where tallgrass prairie thrives, with its prairie pinks and “fragrant and fine” wild strawberries, prairie chickens thrive also; and when the grasses vanish, so do the birds. When Twain was a boy, there was still more than enough tallgrass to shelter the prairie chickens, and he remembered well the mornings spent hunting them and other grassland creatures: “I remember . . . how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go.” Once in the woods, the party “drifted silently after [the dogs] in the melancholy gloom. But presently the gray dawn stole over the world, the birds piped up, then the sun rose and poured light and comfort all around, everything was fresh and dewy and fragrant, and life was a boon again. After three hours of tramping we arrived back wholesomely tired, overladen with game, very hungry, and just in time for breakfast.”
But when Twain wanted prairie hens in later years, he thought first of those from Illinois—Illinois, where there was little
but
prairie, where thousands of years of grass growing and burning and dying, then growing again, had left a bounty of soil among the deepest and blackest ever found, at any time, anywhere in the world. In 1861, when Twain left the Mississippi River for Nevada at the age of twenty-five, fleeing before either North or South could force him into service as a steamboat pilot, he knew that he was leaving behind the howl of the steam whistle, the splash of the paddlewheels, and the long journeys to New Orleans from Cairo, Illinois. He couldn’t have known that there would never be more Illinois prairie chickens than there were at the moment he went west. The young pilot left behind a countryside that would soon be leached of some of its abundance; many would feel the loss, but few as powerfully as did the aging, elegiac, haunted Twain.
but
prairie, where thousands of years of grass growing and burning and dying, then growing again, had left a bounty of soil among the deepest and blackest ever found, at any time, anywhere in the world. In 1861, when Twain left the Mississippi River for Nevada at the age of twenty-five, fleeing before either North or South could force him into service as a steamboat pilot, he knew that he was leaving behind the howl of the steam whistle, the splash of the paddlewheels, and the long journeys to New Orleans from Cairo, Illinois. He couldn’t have known that there would never be more Illinois prairie chickens than there were at the moment he went west. The young pilot left behind a countryside that would soon be leached of some of its abundance; many would feel the loss, but few as powerfully as did the aging, elegiac, haunted Twain.
That, more or less, is what I tell Eli. She kisses me; she gets it. I kiss her back, and I’m off for Illinois.
PRAIRIE CHICKENS
Cut out all shot, wash thoroughly but quickly, using some soda in the water, rinse and dry, fill with dressing, sew up with cotton thread, and tie down the legs and wings; place in a steamer over hot water till done, remove to a dripping-pan, cover with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, place in the oven and baste with the melted butter until a nice brown; serve with either apple-sauce, cranberries, or currant jelly.
—Mrs. Godard.
—ESTELLE WOODS WILCOX,
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping,
1877
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping,
1877
Newton, Illinois, has three thousand people and two power plants. It has a motel with weekly rates for men who ignore the No Smoking signs in their rooms, having driven from Carbondale and Vandalia and Terre Haute to work in the plants for five days at a time. It has a bowling alley, the Parklane, that serves the only breakfast in town, eggs and potatoes and biscuits and bacon. But the Parklane doesn’t open until 5:00 A.M., which is still a half hour away when I drive off from the motel and out into the country darkness.
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