Twain's Feast

Table of Contents

 

 

 

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First published in 2010 by The Penguin Press a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Andrew Beahrs, 2010

All rights reserved

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Beahrs, Andrew, 1973-

Twain’s feast: searching for America’s lost foods in the footsteps of Samuel Clemens / Andrew Beahrs.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-43481-9

1. Gastronomy. 2. Cookery, American. 3. Food habits—United States.
4. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. I. Title.
TX633.B393 2010

394.1’20973—dc22

2009053444

 

 

 

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IF I HAVE A TALENT IT IS FOR CONTRIBUTING VALUABLE MATTER TO WORKS UPON COOKERY.

F
OR MY THIRTY-THIRD BIRTHDAY, I wanted breakfast with Mark Twain. I’d been preparing for more than a week—reading Twain’s novels, digging through old cookbooks, shopping in a half dozen markets. Now a two-inch-thick, dry-aged porterhouse rested on my kitchen counter in a nest of brown butcher paper. Buckwheat batter and a tray of biscuits waited for the oven; dark maple syrup warmed in a small saucepan. In the living room, my wife had our three-year-old son pinned down (literally, I hoped). Beside me a deep, seasoned-to-black cast-iron fryer heated over the highest possible flame.

I owed my planned menu to Twain’s painful homesickness. In the winter of 1879, he was more than a year into the European tour chronicled in
A Tramp Abroad.
Along the way he’d mocked the pretensions of Alpine expeditions, the absurdity of French duels, the awful German language—and the food, most of all the food. He
detested
the food. From watery coffee to decayed strawberries to chicken “as tasteless as paper,” Twain thought European food monotonous, a hollow sham, a base counterfeit. “There is here and there an American who will say he can remember rising from a European table d’hôte perfectly satisfied,” he wrote. “But we must not overlook the fact that there is also here and there an American who will lie.”

So Twain dreamed of American dishes, from peach cobbler and simply dressed tomatoes to oyster soup and roast beef. But he dreamed first of breakfast. He imagined an angel, “suddenly sweeping down out of a better land,” and setting before an American exile “a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and genuineness; . . . a great cup of American home-made coffee, with the cream a-froth on top, . . . some smoking hot biscuits, [and] a plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup.” He concluded wistfully: “Could words describe the gratitude of this exile?”

I’d known at once that I’d make the breakfast; for me, cooking and reading blend like a chicken-fat roux. When Ishmael writes of savory clam and cod chowders, or of frying ships’ biscuits in the try-pots, I linger; I return to “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (Sherlock Holmes finds a gem hidden in a roasting goose) and “Breakfast” (Steinbeck eats breakfast) more often than the stories deserve. After roasting a pig, I’ll gnaw the tail and think of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autumn butchering. I’ve cooked snails from my backyard with butter, garlic, and prosciutto, raising the first from the broth to salute those that sent Italo Calvino’s young Baron Cosimo into the trees (my wife threatened to follow his example). I’ve cooked prawns from Hemingway, steaks from Joseph Mitchell, and gumbo from Least Heat-Moon.

So it seemed inevitable, after reading
A Tramp Abroad,
that I’d cook Twain’s breakfast. I’d make the first meal he thought of, when he thought of home.

Twain described his ideal steak as though he were mapping his own home country—he wrote of a county of beefsteak, of townships of fat, of districts separated by bone. When I looked at the meat on my counter, I could see why. This was no uniform, sterile cut; it had heft, authority, presence. The mottling of meat and fat declared that no two bites would be alike.

Wanting a steak as much as possible like those Twain enjoyed, I ordered a grass-fed, dry-aged porterhouse from a small local butcher. Raising cattle on grass makes both biological and environmental sense, requiring vastly less oil and water than is needed to grow enough grain for a large ruminant. More important for my purposes, Twain’s steaks were invariably from cattle raised on pasture. Until cattle were forcibly moved to a diet of corn, the sometimes rich, sometimes gamy taste of beef fed exclusively on grass was simply what beef tasted like.

Similarly, it’s likely that every steak Twain ever ate was dry-aged, hung in a cool, dry spot for the three to five weeks necessary for the proteins to begin to break down and the flavor to ripen. Wet aging—a cheaper, faster process that begins with packing meat in plastic—leaves the steak with more of its original weight; dry aging can give it an aroma as smooth as old wine.

I had an urge to brag. I imagined myself calling up relatives or knocking on neighbors’ doors. Instead I rubbed the meat with a fistful of kosher salt. Soon it was sizzling in the pan; I’d finish it in a hot oven.

“Some smoking hot biscuits,” Twain wrote. “Some real butter, firm and yellow and fresh.” I was using a biscuit recipe given to me by an archaeology graduate student on the Virginia corn-and-peanut plantation where I excavated during college summers. The recipe always reminds me of a thunderstorm that turned the air purple and sent lightning crashing along the James River as we feasted, after a long week of digging out colonial bottles and pipe stems, on angel biscuits, blue crabs, and beer. I’d considered making beaten biscuits—slamming the dough with a rolling pin until it blistered and needed no leavening. But using the Virginia recipe instead was a sympathetic nod to Twain’s nostalgia, which, by the time he wrote his fantasy menu, was both intense and introspective. He’d published the semiautobiographical
Tom Sawyer
only a few years prior, and had begun to draft
Huckleberry Finn;
soon
Life on the Mississippi
would revisit his years of young manhood. Thinking of each well-loved place must have made him long for the foods he’d eaten there. I knew it did for me.

The butter was from a local farmers’ market, churned and shaped into an irregular log only the day before. I dipped in the tip of a knife, touched it to my tongue, and . . . well, you know what’s better than sweet, fresh butter? Not a whole lot. Fresh butter melting on a steak, maybe.

“A plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup.” This was a harder one. Making flapjacks would complicate the timing of the steak, biscuits, and coffee, which I planned to brew in a French press at the last minute. I found a solution in
The Confederate Housewife,
a compilation of recipes printed in Southern newspapers during the Civil War. Though the buckwheat-cake recipe was serenely confident, concluding with a simple, imperious “try it,” the truth is that the instructions seemed off, calling for neither leavening nor salt. Still, the cake had the advantage of being baked, instead of cooked on a griddle; I’d be able to finish the entire meal in the oven, making the timing immeasurably easier. Besides, I mostly wanted the cake to serve as a base for dark maple syrup.

Twain wanted his syrup “transparent,” probably the grade called light amber, or “fancy.” But I like maple syrup dark. One of my earliest memories—not just food memories but memories—is of boiling sap in a lean-to at my Connecticut-hippie nursery school. It’s an intensely sensory memory of melting snows, and cold spring air swirling into the smoky boiling house, and steam pouring from a slowly sweetening kettle of syrup. Most of all it’s a memory of maple—maple sipped from a wooden ladle, maple boiled until it seemed, to my four-year-old tongue, to be dark as night and sweet as the heart of the tree.

The hell with transparent syrup.

Steak, buckwheat cake, and biscuits went into the oven together. When the smells of baking breads and roasting meat began filling the kitchen, I turned to the coffee.

“A great cup of American home-made coffee, with the cream a-froth on top.” I didn’t go so far as to roast my own beans, which might have been what Twain meant by “home-made.” But I did take care with my French press, pouring in water a few degrees below boiling, relishing the blooming of the fresh, coarse grounds. The beauty of a French press is that every bit of coffee spends precisely the same amount of time steeping as all the rest; in a drip machine, some grounds are wet long enough to go bitter while others stay dry until the very end, which isn’t long enough for them to yield all their flavor. I stirred down the grounds and spent a happy ninety seconds inhaling the ever-richer steam. I wanted it strong, dark as earth, the antithesis of Twain’s Recipe for German Coffee: “Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil; rub a chicory berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former into the water. Continue the boiling and evaporation until the intensity of the flavor and aroma of the coffee and chicory has been diminished to a proper degree; then set aside to cool. . . . Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement.”