Twain's Feast (40 page)

As Twain said, “The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor.” I drop four wings into the hot fat; while frying in lard and clarified butter, chicken smells purely luxurious. Fifteen minutes later the first batch is cooling on a rack. Tasting the first wing is a cook’s prerogative, as unassailable as taking a giant spoonful of cake batter, and my first bite is impatient enough that I singe the tip of my tongue. But after a brief wince, I don’t regret the hurry. The skin and dredge have melded into a crunchy, subtly smoky shell; the chicken is savory with buttermilk, with just enough hot-sauce bite to give it authority.

Twain may have thought that only Southerners could cook fried chicken. And, granted, I’m using the technique laid out by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, Southerners both, in their
Gift of Southern Cooking.
Still, Twain can stuff it; I made this, and this is
good.

While the next batch of chicken cooks, I clean six pounds of greens. Eli steals a moment from watching Mio to chop garlic. Collards, chard, kale, turnip greens, mustard greens: I put each bunch into a giant bowl of water, waiting for the dirt to loosen and fall easily away. When it does, I chop the leaves coarsely, the resulting pile soon overflowing our biggest stockpot. Twain said
bacon
and greens. But we have more of the good country ham I used to flavor the fryer—and country ham, if less veined with fat than Virginia bacon, tastes as layered and smoky and rich as any.

Greens don’t need to be tough and bitter; good, young ones need only a quarter hour of simmering. But even greens that start tough can be terrific. Their toughness is even a virtue—growing hardy, robust greens, fit for cooking with pork, isn’t like raising baby lettuce. Chard will volunteer wherever it’s thrown down (our old yard sported an uninvited, and seemingly invincible, five-foot specimen); if you couldn’t eat kale, you’d call it a weed. The fact that many greens are as vigorous as they are nutritious has made them the salvation of generations of Americans with a spare spot in the yard, or who know what to look for in meadows and ditches: De Voe enjoyed shepherd sprouts, pigweed (“much used by country people”), dandelion, milkweed, and evening primrose gathered from roadsides and pastures.

Whatever their source, when cooked in real, homemade stock, greens bloom with flavor. One kind is good. But when you have four or five—collards forming a foundation, kale adding body, mustard lending its peppery sparkle—each green becomes the others’ best sauce. Even those that start bitter end as something layered and complex: different yet wonderfully familiar, always new and always the same.

For me the glory of Twain’s feast is in its inclusiveness, in how it honors forest and farm, prairie and orchard, wetland and dairy. All of Twain’s foods came from distinct American places; all were, in some way, the essence of their sources. When Twain ate roe from shad netted in the Connecticut River, a Missouri partridge, a possum fattened on persimmons from the orchard it was trapped in, or mussels gathered off rocks at low tide, his meal depended on a wholly American place. The same thing was true when he ate butter beans, peas, sweet potatoes, and radishes from the garden—or blackberries and wild grapes from the forest’s edge, or hickory nuts from well within the woods. It was true when he drank coffee with fresh cream on a cliff above the ocean, or spread butter on hot wheat bread on a cold morning, or cut himself a piece of peach cobbler made with backyard-orchard fruit.

Saying that food is the essence of place can seem like a sentimental throwback, or like something we’ve totally lost. But here’s the thing: it’s still always true. It’s true whether you’re eating a grilled sardine, or a tomato selected for perfectly voluptuous freshness, or a Whopper. Behind the sardine there’s a rock-rimmed bay, thick with drifting kelp; behind the tomato there’s a farm, and a farmer who chose the fruit for flavor instead of rubbery durability. And the Whopper—flat, gray, salty, and otherwise tasteless—represents wholly and without deviation the sprawling but cruelly confined pens that produce fast-food cattle. A McNugget has as much
terroir
as an oyster; it’s just not the
terroir
of a place you want to be.

Twain would have recognized the false abundance of fast food at once. “The number of dishes is sufficient,” he wrote in Europe. “But then it is such a monotonous variety of
unstriking
dishes. It is an inane dead level of ‘fair-to-middling.’ ” He wanted food that had body and heft—that he could call mighty, rich, and ample. He wanted sputtering, smoking, fragrant, frothy, even clotted food, food that had vibrancy and energy and life, food straightforward enough about what it was to be called genuine, honest, and real. When we insist on uniformity—on having plenty of
something
instead of a jumbled, various, magnificent plenitude—one inevitable result is food that Twain would describe as monotonous, tiresome, and feeble, as a base counterfeit and sham. Bad food, he’d have known, comes from hurt and shrunken places.

When Twain was born, the bond between food and place was more obvious; wild foods were knit tightly into the fabric even of city cooking. Baltimore perch and canvasback ducks, Philadelphia terrapins, San Francisco mussels, New Orleans croakers and sheepsheads, even Boston beans flavored with maple—every one relied on wild lands beyond the city lines. As Twain’s life passed, more and more foods disappeared from American tables; choosing mining over fisheries, pulp mills over oysters, even corn over prairie and cantaloupe over trout, changed American food—and the American landscape—forever. Twain was born in a country of woodcock and died in one of Coca-Cola.

Today, of course, how we treat the land and water still determines what foods we eat. But just as often, choices about what we eat help to determine which American landscapes survive and thrive. There are enormous economic and political pressures to define food as, ultimately, a calorie-production system, the end product of a basically mechanized and mechanical process. But our choices aren’t inevitable.

And our choices matter. We can choose to support Massachusetts cranberry growers as suburban development pushes up against their bogs, and we can buy from people raising oysters in the nation’s cleanest bays. We can help to keep shrimpers on the water after they lose their boats in a hurricane; we can work in community gardens and help with a local clambake, fish fry, or even a coon supper. We can eat seafood from low on the food chain, preserving the ocean life that’s the one remaining wild thing most Americans ever see on their tables. We can support local bakers, restaurants, farmers, grocers—all the people whose work with food helps to make communities better, richer, more entirely themselves. And, maybe most important of all, we can recognize the scandal of food deserts—urban neighborhoods with as much as a twenty-to-one ratio of liquor stores to greengrocers—and work to ensure that everyone has at least the opportunity to choose good, healthy food, that everyone can access the true, varied abundance that farmers can produce on the American land.

All this helps make food what it was to Twain, whose best-loved meals gained savor from the parts they played in his life: a human project.

Next up is chess pie. Chess pie is an old Southern dessert of uncertain origin; the only thing I’m sure of is that it’s impossible to bake a better pie. It’s made of eggs, buttermilk, butter, and sugar. Lemon chess pies have lemon; chocolate have chocolate. Of course there’s a crust. That’s about it—but a good chess pie is sweet and moist and custardy, like the platonic ideal of cookie dough.

The one Erik and I like to make is also one of the world’s great kid-friendly recipes—there’s no sifting dry parts, or mixing wet parts, or beating whites until they form soft peaks, or any of that foofaraw. You just add the ingredients, one at a time, and wait for the kid to do as he will with a whisk.

I put the eggs in a big bowl; Erik beats the holy hell out of them.

“You measure, I mix!” he says.

“Right,” I say, and pour in the sugar; he beats it until eggs and sugar are pale as cream. Butter, buttermilk, lemon juice, vanilla—after each addition Erik goes to town, whisking until it’s vanished, the filling always getting richer, sweeter, better. My only concern will be washing the walls; this pie’s gonna be smooth.

“I know the stain of blackberry hulls,” Twain wrote. “I know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkin vines.” He could still hear the cracking as a melon split below the carving knife, could still see “the rich red meat and the black seeds, and the heart standing up, a luxury fit for the elect.” He knew how to choose ripe apples, peaches, and pears; he knew how to roast apples and walnuts before washing them down with cider. He knew the taste of fresh corn, butter beans, asparagus, and squash—knew them well enough that he’d call out poor produce with all the scorn he had, which was a lot.

It takes work to know food. It always has: the first market guides appeared in America in the eighteenth century, though the culinary world they described was of course very different from ours. An 1805 edition of Hannah Glasse’s
The Art of Cookery
declared that April was the time for young geese, January for hen turkeys, and that smelts were good until after Christmas. Glasse knew how to choose lobsters by weight, herring by their full eyes and the “lively shining redness” of their gills, and how to test an egg by touching the bigger end to her tongue (“if it feels warm, be sure it is new”). Bull beef, she said, was “tough in pinching,” while with cow beef “the dent you make with your finger will rise again in a little time.” Such market guides could assume physical access to food, an ability to engage with it using all the senses. True, part of the reason that they insisted on that access was that some butchers and fishmongers and dairymen were cheats (a personal connection doesn’t guarantee an honest person). Still, the result was something worth holding on to: a complete sensory experience before cooking ever began, looking and smelling and touching and even tasting to find what was good.

Knowing food takes attention and deciding to know something about the things in our kitchens: When and where apples grow. How to choose fish. How to store mushrooms; how chopping and slicing and crushing change garlic. It takes repetition, making a soup again and again and again, each time honing the seasoning, adjusting the broth. It can mean growing a pot of thyme and rosemary, or eating all the kinds of briny or lemony or coppery oysters you can get your hands on. It means experiencing flavors with full attention.

It also means sharing them. Twain grumbled about hotels that “pass the sliced meat around on a dish . . . so you are perfectly calm about it, it does not stir you in the least.” But he had a suggestion: “perhaps if the roast of mutton or of beef,—a big generous one,—were brought on the table and carved in full view,” it might give “the right sense of earnestness and reality to the thing.” Even carving at the table could transform a meal, making the eaters participants, turning the experience into something communal and worth remembering. That, I think, is what he’d recently encountered in a private Venetian home; “if one could always [eat] with private families, when traveling,” he reflected, “Europe would have a charm which it now lacks.”