Twain's Feast (31 page)

It’s true that turkeys can be daunting. They’re big birds; trying to roast one that doesn’t end up either raw or dried out is the biggest challenge many home cooks face in a year. There’s a reason there are holiday turkey hotlines.

But you only have to brine a turkey once to realize that the days of devising intricate Thanksgiving Day roasting strategies, of planning your day around flipping and basting, are done. The debate is over; the code has been cracked. You submerge the bird overnight in a salt-and-sugar solution, with whole garlic cloves and plenty of fresh thyme. In the morning you dry it and smear the breast with butter. You roast it in a hot oven until it’s as bronze as an ancient hoard. Salivating desperately, you force yourself to let it rest while the juices distribute. At last you cut through the skin and find that brining has turned the turkey into a loving bird, a forgiving bird—moist, flavorful, and full of compassion for cooks with aunts and uncles who should really have stayed in Boca Raton or Pismo Beach or Scottsdale but instead are
walking up the front steps right now.
On Thanksgiving brining is a cook’s best friend.

Historically, that distinction has probably gone more often to cranberry sauce. My grandmother spent decades trying to roast a good, moist bird. Still, her turkeys were dry enough that after carving one you had to dust the mantel; cranberry sauce was less a condiment than a survival tactic. In using the sauce to dress birds that sometimes seemed made of pasteboard, Gran stood athwart a venerable American tradition—as far back as 1821, a visiting Frenchman complained about using the “most villainous sauce” to cover the sins of “half boiled meat, clammy puddings, and ill-concocted hash.” This, he believed, left Americans “insensible to the advantages of . . . various rich [French] sauces” and doomed forever to bathe meat in crimson sugar.

But then again, a man who complains about New England boiled dinner and red flannel hash is only worth taking so seriously. And though cranberry sauce can be stultifyingly sweet, cranberries themselves are bitter; several of their Native American names, like the Wampanoag
sasemineash,
simply mean “bitter (or ‘sour’) berry.” That’s probably one reason that cranberries with roast turkey are tied to Thanksgiving on a nearly genetic level; a balanced, bright, acidic cranberry sauce is the perfect foil for a rich bird with buttery stuffing and potatoes.

Cranberries are a truly traditional American food, gathered by Native Americans as far west as Minnesota, and one of the few North American berries ever cultivated commercially (the others are blueberries and Concord grapes). The story of that cultivation is unusually specific: they were first grown by Henry Hall, in 1816, near Kiah Pond in the Cape Cod town of Dennis. Compared with crops like potatoes, which were first grown somewhere in the Andean highlands sometime around 5,000 B.C., that’s truly pinpoint accuracy; and because the history is so recent, we know that the cranberries we eat today are often virtually identical to those first pulled from wild bogs and cultivated nearly two centuries ago.

Hall’s major innovation was sanding. A schooner captain, he started a saltworks on the Cape, heaping up sand alongside adjacent bogs as he went. When sand blew over the bogs’ cranberry vines, Hall expected it to smother them. Instead they thrived, their roots and uprights growing notably stronger. Sanding, whether done on winter ice or rails or even using barges, is still one of the most important techniques in the cranberry grower’s arsenal; it protects against frost and disease while also helping bog leaf litter to decompose and release nitrogen. Hall’s simple observation changed cranberries from something foraged into something farmed.

For decades, growing cranberries blurred the line between cultivation and wild harvest. Growers transplanted vines, sanded the bogs, and weeded out the competition, but their cranberries were often a single generation removed from those that had grown alongside cinnamon fern, white water lilies, and carnivorous pitcher plants. Even today, when the UMass Cranberry Station research center in Amherst has developed ultra-high-yielding hybrids, some of the most common varieties remain those carefully dug from wild bogs over a century ago. The Howes found in 1843, Early Blacks in 1852, and McFarlins in 1874 are still three of the most important cranberries and were probably the kinds eaten by Twain’s family.

As Thanksgiving changed from a largely religious occasion to a national feast, cranberries would change as well—one of the most recently wild food crops would become one of the most frequently processed, almost always encountered as canned sauce or as an ingredient in a blend of sweetened juices. But in Twain’s day, widespread processing was still a half century away; cranberries were still less a flavor than a fruit.

In November 1868, Twain had written a letter to his dear friend Mary Fairbanks on “
Thanksgiving
Day.” “It is
MY
Thanksgiving Day,” he’d said, “above all other days that ever shone on earth.” Livy had agreed to marry him, and he was ecstatic; he swore off drink and resolved to become a Christian. He thought they might live in Cleveland. But now, in 1885, after nearly twenty years of marriage, he was in his house on Hartford’s Nook Farm, and here he was well and truly home.

Though he often regretted that his free days of wandering had passed, the seventeen years that Twain lived in the house on Farmington Avenue were among the happiest of his life. He raised his daughters there (a third, Jean, had been born in 1880); it became a gathering place for friends as well as family, with neighbors and guests coming for lavish banquets or simply Friday-night billiards and beer. From the Viennese music box that played during dinner to the library where he’d read to the children, to the bed with its headboard of carved cherubs, the entire house gave Twain a palpable, “all-pervading spirit of peace & serenity & deep contentment.” For him it was “the loveliest home that ever was.”

The Victorian era idealized domestic life; one of a household’s major showcases was the dinner table, where elegant hospitality and efficient household management melded into a (hopefully) seamless whole. Sideboards, the grandest and most representative furnishings of the era, were often designed to suggest Gothic cathedrals. When serving dinner to guests—many Nook Farm neighbors were also writers and artists—Livy displayed her skills as a mother and a wife; Twain’s status as an upper-middle-class Victorian gentleman was at stake.

So dinners were often self-consciously lavish. Katy Leary, the family’s maid for some thirty years, later recalled that most were built around canvasback ducks or a fillet of beef:

Afterward the men stayed at the table with champagne while the ladies went to the drawing room for coffee.

From the roast to the champagne to the molded ice cream, it was all an extravagant, luscious display. Even the enormous quantities of butter reflected the host’s ability to pay for a considerable amount of refrigeration, while also (in my view at least) reflecting a reassuringly right-thinking attitude toward cooking. The table itself was strikingly beautiful; Louisiana author Grace King recalled a gorgeous display of cut glass, twisted silver candlesticks, and an “exquisite cut glass bowl . . . filled with daisies, ferns and grasses,” while every setting included a bunch of white roses. The night of King’s visit, they ate fresh salmon with white-wine sauce, sweetbreads in cream, broiled chicken, green peas, and new potatoes, followed by strawberries and powdered sugar along with the charlotte russe. “Never in [New Orleans],” she wrote, “have I seen such beautiful dishes, or such exquisite flavoring,” a compliment that would have gone straight to Twain’s heart.

But such banquets were exceptions. Leary certainly remembered them as special occasions, often prompted by Twain’s suggesting, “Well, I think it would be nice maybe if we give a dinner party” (these are Leary’s words; it’s a bit hard imagining her employer being so tentative). More usually, Twain and Livy would sit to a simple lunch of boiled chicken or potatoes hashed with cream. Such a lunch might be the first meal of their day, eaten soon after they made their way downstairs at around eleven-thirty (the girls ate several hours earlier).

Then there were holidays. “Thanksgiving,” Leary remembered, “was most as wonderful as Christmas.” That was saying something—Christmases on Nook Farm were epic, with Livy beginning to prepare weeks or even months in advance. She’d assemble fifty baskets in the billiards room, filling each with “a big turkey and cans of peas and tomatoes and vegetables,” along with nuts, raisins, a bottle of wine, and a box of candy. If there was snow on Christmas morning, Twain would put on a white-collared fur coat that made him “look just like Santa Claus,” and load the baskets into the family sleigh. Then he and the girls would ride around town giving their gifts before returning home for their own celebration.

On Nook Farm, Leary said, the family celebrated Thanksgiving with a “great dinner” for “people that wasn’t very well off, poor people—not [Livy’s] own friends specially.” Later the family gathered at the Twichell house for yet
another
great dinner, before returning for a massive game of charades (Livy always made sure the children could easily reach ten quickly emptied bowls of candy).

The Thanksgiving dinners themselves were probably much like what most Americans eat today: Twain’s 1879 menu lists “Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style,” cranberry sauce, and celery before moving on to roast wild turkey. Twain was right to list wild birds separately; they’d been mostly hunted out of New England’s forests by 1850. Still, Victorian families saw them as deeply rooted in the region’s colonial history, and they were becoming the holiday’s standard centerpiece—though now driven to the slaughterhouse in domesticated flocks or shot on Thanksgiving morning in organized “hunts” of farmed birds. Cranberries, meanwhile, had been paired with turkey for centuries (one of the very first mentions of them by name, in 1689, said that “an excellent sauce is made of them for venison, turkeys and other great fowl”) and, as a wild plant, could also be plausibly linked to early colonists. Celery didn’t have the same historical pedigree. Still, being best when left in the ground well into the cold winter, it enjoyed a central place as the season’s single fresh green vegetable, often kept crisp in ice water, then set out in special celery glasses. Twain’s Thanksgiving dinner was a meal that New Englanders could easily believe was rooted in their cherished history—with the addition of some elegant, if less storied, foods.

But the meal actually had little in common with the gathering usually called the first Thanksgiving. In fact, if you want your next Thanksgiving dinner to rigorously reflect what we
know,
for absolute certain, was served at the 1621 Plymouth harvest celebration, here’s your menu:

Missing from the list, of course, is everything we now associate with Thanksgiving, from cranberries and turkey to mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. And the first time the 1621 celebration was actually described as the first Thanksgiving seems to have been in 1841. In a
footnote.
The Thanksgiving holiday didn’t spring into being all at once. Thanksgiving—the story of its origins, the ways we celebrate it, and of course its menu—had to be invented.

Jannette Vanderhoop once walked around Martha’s Vineyard. It took her three September days, and she didn’t do it for fun; she could feel the coming autumn—could feel even the distant winter leaning in—and she suddenly wanted to walk. The Vineyard’s shore is sliding sand and cobblestone, left behind during the island’s glacial genesis. Both make for uncertain footing. “I don’t think people are meant to walk for twelve hours a day,” Jannette says now. “Especially with one foot lower than the other the whole time. I love the island, but it can get constraining.” At night she camped on the beaches; as she walked, she watched the sea, as though she were pacing a pen.