Twain's Feast (39 page)

By 1909 he was living near Redding, Connecticut, in the house he named Stormfield after the captain who’d brought him from San Francisco in the far-off days of 1866. In “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” Twain imagined the old mariner racing comets through space and finding Halley’s too slow to test him; the captain glimpsed it only as “a flash and a vanish” as he hurtled onward, away from the world.

Twain had been born during Halley’s comet’s last visit. Now, he said, “it will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”

He waited; the comet would return in a year.

Steam puffs gently from the wings on the sugarhouse cupola, wafting across the spread Bill and Amy and their kids share with their horses, beehives, and pack of dogs. On cold mornings the steam can billow a hundred feet into the air; neighbors have been known to come jolting down the dirt road in pickups to see if the place is on fire. Today is too warm for such a false alarm; it’s the beginning of what will probably be a good run—even a banner run, Bill hopes, with temperatures for the next few days looking ideal.

The boiling room is dominated by the evaporator, a divided pan ten feet long and four across (it’s been quite a while since Bill and Amy gave up their lasagna pan). Every compartment is full of furiously boiling sap; the rafters are fogged almost from sight, gray light shining in through the steam. The smell isn’t as rich as finished syrup—most of the steam, after all, is coming from something more like dense sap than what you’d find on a breakfast table. But it’s somehow all the more appealing for that, a sweetness I think I could breathe until nightfall and after without finding it cloying.

When Bill and Amy used a single pan, they were making syrup much as with boiling stones—adding sap continuously to a single vessel, with a last-minute transfer to a cooler pot for finishing. Now Bill pours sap into the evaporator’s main chamber; each addition pushes the already boiled, thicker sap further along, until it reaches the last and smallest compartment. When it does, this syrup will be medium amber. Sweet, first-run sap needs relatively little boiling, thus making lighter syrup; late in the season, lower-sugar sap will need more boiling, darkening and intensifying it.

“I need a special kind of wood. It’s called
free,
” Bill says with a grin. And he needs plenty of it—the broad rear entryway behind the evaporator opens onto wood stacked a neat eight feet high. Bill pulls on thick, nearly elbow-length work gloves; the firebox is blasting like a forge. He throws in four big logs, slams the door shut, and flips the fan back on, stoking the fire. When the syrup foams, threatening to spill from the pan, Bill drips in a precise five drops of a tasteless vegetable-oil emulsion, the modern version of salt pork or cream in the days of outdoor kettles. I’ve rarely seen any product work as well; it takes perhaps three seconds for the foam to vanish into the darkening sap.

A last innovation used by the Proulxs is a big reason old-timers sometimes call their product “technosyrup.” When Amy pulls up outside, the pickup riding low under the weight of the tank’s four hundred gallons of sap, Bill leads us down a steep staircase into the cellar. Over a gigantic steel tank, a fine-meshed bag is cinched around the end of a pipe; suddenly a waterfall of thin, clear sap pours through, filtered of any flecks of wood or bark or dirt as it splashes into the tank. But the really modern change is what’s between the tank and the evaporator—the reverse-osmosis system, which Amy and Bill call the RO. The RO pushes the sap against a semipermeable membrane that will allow only water to pass through, removing some 75 percent of the water before boiling even begins. This cuts the forty-to-one ratio down to about ten to one, a huge savings of time and firewood.

Finally, finally, it’s time to taste. Bill twists a spigot, pouring a smooth amber stream of syrup, filling paper cups. We blow and sip, and it’s exactly as good as you’d expect hot syrup to be when you’ve seen the trees it came from, when you’ve learned a little about the slow roll of seasons coming around brightly. It’s sweet and rich; it’s vanilla and toasted marshmallows and caramel. Chemically, the sugar from maple and cane and beets is nearly identical, but the extra compounds in cane and beets taste awful and have to be refined out. With maple they’re the whole point—they’re what make it
maple.
Erik drinks cup after cup; it’s going to be hard to convince him that we should ever drink anything else.

In his 1886
Signs and Seasons,
the naturalist John Burroughs said that well-made maple syrup has “a wild delicacy that no other sweet can match.” In the Old World, he reflected, “in simple and more imaginative times, how such an occupation as this would have got into literature, and how many legends and associations would have clustered around it!” In fact, Virgil did fantasize about something like maple syrup, dreaming of a golden age when grapes would grow from briars and “stubborn oaks sweat honey-dew.” It really is miraculous, and entirely natural; though Bill and Amy don’t bother to certify their syrup as organic, no cattle graze in the forest, no pesticides or fertilizers are added to the land. It’s forever a thing of place, a food of brief hours and long years.

Old-timers may call what the Proulxs make technosyrup, but it’s the innovations that let Bill and Amy do the work they love—that let them make it a life. And every innovation has its old analogue: drills instead of augers, plastic buckets instead of galvanized pails, reverse osmosis instead of freezing, an evaporator pan instead of kettles or a hollowed-out log. Even the filter in the cellar reminds me of Wilder’s grandfather, out in the woods with his kettle and ladle, constantly skimming. . . .

Then it hits me. Burroughs thought that maple sugar was too often “made in large quantities and indifferently,” thus ending dark and coarse, unlike sugar made from “properly treated” early sap. Boiling outside meant dirty snowmelt from branches overhead; it meant twigs, dead leaves, cinders, all ending up in the kettle. I grin—I almost laugh. I should have known better than to doubt Twain. Maybe he didn’t want it
clear
as in
light;
maybe he wanted it
clear
as in, simply,
clean.
As in
pure.
There were no inspectors back then, nobody checking whether sugar makers were filtering sap through mats of hemlock and spruce bark, no one ensuring that there was more sugar than cinder. Maybe Twain did like his syrup dark. Dark and clear.

Of course, I’ll never know for sure. But I like thinking that that’s the case, that Twain loved the flavor of dark syrup as he did the Mississippi’s dangerous currents or a deckhand’s artful curse. I throw a mental apology back a century. And standing in the sugarhouse, the firebox roaring, Erik gathering wood, Bill preparing to pour off another batch of syrup, I include a short, heartfelt thanks.

Livy, Twain remembered, “always worked herself down with her Christmas preparations.” On his last Christmas Eve, his daughter Jean did the same; she decorated the house, readied a tree, and littered the parlor with so many presents that Twain was reminded of the nursery when his children were young. But that night Twain was awoken by a servant’s cry for help: Jean was dead, drowned in her bath after an epileptic seizure. He’d outlived his wife and three of his four children. “Seventy-four years old yesterday,” he wrote. “Who can estimate my age today?”

Twain was already failing; he died at Stormfield, in April. Overhead, Halley’s comet burned as it had the night of his birth, half a continent away, in what was then a very different country. Now, as the comet sailed silently through the darkness, it shared a sky with the sugar moon.

A
BIG BOWL OF HOMEMADE FRIED CHICKEN, waiting in the middle of a table, is one of life’s great satisfactions. It’s also among the best meals to share with family and friends; you sit around talking, and drinking lemonade or beer, as the bowl gradually empties and the afternoon goes slowly dim and mellow. Besides, as long as you leave yourself enough time, frying chicken is easy, while still seeming complicated enough to impress.

Twain, of course, would have said that I’m being grossly superstitious when I claim that I, a Connecticut Yankee in California, can fry chicken; I may as well season the bird with salt tossed over my shoulder or use a horseshoe to hook each piece from the pan.

Well, I can’t make myself Southern. But I can brine the chicken for twelve hours. I can soak it in buttermilk and hot sauce overnight. To make the frying fat, I can clarify butter, and melt the butter into lard, and season the butter and lard with a heavy slice of good country ham (not faux-smoked Safeway hock, but a real, salty-enough-to-roll-your-eyes-back, Gwaltney country shoulder, simmered until the fat tastes softly smoky). I can start cooking at nine in the morning, giving myself enough time to pan-fry the chicken in small batches. And I can invite right-thinking friends, who will get why all this has to be done.

The chicken may still end up a mockery, but it won’t be for lack of care.

For Twain, life without variety, life without change, was literally not worth living. He once wrote that he’d happily die to escape the torture of a monotonous song (the singer, appropriately, later disappeared into the “white oblivion” of a snowstorm). He believed that “no land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful” and that “
change
is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.” He spent much of his life searching out the “certain something” that made things worth tasting, and returning to, and remembering.

He was a lucky man: his own life was full of change, of exploration and discovery. As a child he woke early on a cold prairie morning and heard, even through the cabin walls, that the prairie chickens were booming; he knew that spring had come. He hunted raccoon and turkey and possum in forests full of sumac and hickory and oak; he climbed from the deserts of Washoe and, with alkali dust still on his boots, fished for trout longer than his arm. He navigated the shoals of a river full of catfish and black bass, tasted the terrapin championed by three different cities, and ate the oysters beloved in a hundred more.

All of it seemed so natural, so rooted, that most Americans imagined it couldn’t ever be lost. The prairies were as vast and daunting as oceans—oceans of big bluestem and purple coneflower, where herds of bison took the place of pods of whales. The Mississippi seemed untamable, its muddy currents building the birthplace of a carnival of seafood. The water nearest Washington had reefs of oysters that could stop ships. Passenger pigeons could turn afternoon to midnight; at the Quarles farm, the birds were so numerous that they were hunted only with clubs, their millions enough to “cover the trees and by their weight break down the branches.” Few people had the foresight of the terrapin trader who feared the loss of ducks, and game, and so many of “the other things that are worth living for.” Few thought that the pigeons could vanish from the sky, that the oyster reefs could be mined out, that the teeming crabs and salmon runs could fail.

In Twain’s day wild things were at the heart of American cooking; they took pride of place alongside garden tomatoes, apple cider, and fresh corn. But that would be true only until people turned their faces from the things they loved—until they let them slip.