Twain's Feast (2 page)

But though the coffee was important, the cream was probably closer to Twain’s heart. Throughout his trip he railed against European cream, calling it pale, sickly, and counterfeit. He suggested that the hotels made it by diluting single cans of condensed milk in the fifty-eight-thousand-gallon Great Tun of Heidelberg. And he viewed European cows with suspicion. Germans “work the cows in wagons—maybe they
can’t
give good milk,” he reflected in his journal. “I’d like to put one in a hydraulic press and
squeeze
her.”

Today raw milk or cream is illegal in nearly half of the states, and European raw cheeses are legally required to be aged for more than sixty days before being imported. The overwhelming majority of American milk has been pasteurized at a temperature as high as 171 degrees Fahrenheit, a process that extends shelf life but also produces hydrogen sulfide gas, giving the milk a distinctive, slightly burned flavor. When raw milk can be found at all, its price reflects the difficulty of delivery and its short shelf life—I paid an insane fourteen dollars for half a pint, blowing my family’s milk budget for the next two weeks. But the moment I opened the bottle, I remembered how Twain the young newspaperman had loved the cream served at San Francisco’s Ocean House, “so rich and thick that you could hardly have strained it through a wire fence.”

I coaxed the raw, almost clotted cream from the bottle with gentle taps, spreading it thickly on the bottoms of two cups with the back of a spoon. Then I let dark streams of coffee ripple under the cream’s edge, raising it like a hot-air balloon’s yellow silk. The steak sputtered; the biscuits and buckwheat cake steamed. Breakfast was ready.

Among the German phrases Twain resolved to master:

No wonder that his perfect breakfast revolved around fresh, honest, genuine flavors. My breakfast table, loaded down with ripping-hot steak and biscuits and coffee, with warm syrup and cool cream, gave humbling testimony to the depth and power of Twain’s genius. Never again would I speak ill of
Tom Sawyer Abroad,
or of the last eleven chapters of
Huckleberry Finn.

The steak was the color of well-oiled oak, and I knew from my first bite that it was the best piece of meat I’d ever had (much more a comment on the skills of the rancher and butcher, I stress, than on my cooking—in the hands of a professional, the steak might have killed me with joy). It tasted denser, more packed, than wet-aged steaks, which by comparison seem almost insubstantial. Though the aging gave the porterhouse a slightly gamy, almost smoky taste, the grass was distinctly present, giving even the painstakingly aged meat a contrasting suggestion of freshness. The biscuits were tall and hot, the butter clean as springwater.

Honesty compels me to record that the buckwheat cake sucked. Henceforth, “Do not doubt Mark Twain” would be my motto. When Twain called for buckwheat cakes
,
I would by God make buckwheat
cakes,
with batter properly salted and cooked to perfection in a bit of good butter, and no more of this Confederate buckwheat-cake claptrap. I contented myself with a sip of pure dark syrup.

The coffee was commandingly rich, the cream a revelation. Though the butter was vastly fresher and sweeter than what I was used to, it was still recognizably butter—a familiar taste, much improved. The cream was something altogether new to me, with a raw, immediate flavor that homogenized cream doesn’t even aspire to. I understood Twain’s anger at the thought of another cup of hotel coffee, topped with watery cream.
Insipid!
I imagined him spitting.
Counterfeit! Baptized!
Then I imagined his happiness at being handed the cup I held; I breathed in, and out. I sipped.

I tend to cook too much food, and I’d cooked too much that morning. But my wife and son and I tore in with appetites that would have done credit to Twain—cranky, ravenous, homesick Twain. Soon there was nothing left but plates of crumbs and a platter divided by a lonely border fence of bone.

I’d learned a lot while getting ready to cook, and more while cooking. I knew more about dry-aged meat than I had, and a little about what pasteurization does to the flavor of milk (consult your thesaurus: see “decimates”)
.
I’d learned something about the grades of maple syrup, and when the Worcestershire I used in the butter-and-meat-juice gravy was invented (around 1840, reputedly when a keg of unpalatable sauce was discovered to have mellowed during its several years forgotten in a cellar; it is not known whether the first taster was drunk). Though it’s impossible to exactly replicate the flavors of a meal dreamed up nearly 150 years ago, learning something about the history of the foods on the table—the difference between beaten and baking-powder biscuits, the way that feeding cattle on grass results in healthier fats—had been part of the pleasure of the breakfast. Knowing a little about the menu rooted it, and gave me a sense of real connection to Twain. It made the meal a conversation.

But Twain didn’t stop with breakfast. He went on to list some eighty American foods, which he said he wanted served at a “modest, private affair,” all to himself, the moment he stepped off his steamer:

“Fresh American fruits of all sorts,” he went on, “including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way.” And “ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.”

Now,
that
is a meal. Twain’s wide-ranging enthusiasm extends even to properly fresh, cold ice water. At times he jumps around at random; at others he riffs for five or six lines on vegetables, game birds, or pie. When he lists corn pone, hoecake, egg bread, and light bread, all served Southern style, he’s almost audibly excited. And his enthusiasm is not just due to hunger. If it were, surely he’d never have opened the menu with radishes. Radishes! I thought of a bowl of them, fresh and crisp, dipped in butter, sprinkled with salt. Peppery, refreshing radishes: wonderful, yes, but probably not the first thing most hungry men think of.

It was different reading the menu after I’d cooked breakfast. I understood better what Twain had meant when he used the words “earnest” and “generous,” “genuine” and “real”; I understood better what he thought of when he thought of American food. Reading it again, with the dense, strong, fresh flavors of breakfast still lingering, the menu spoke to me.

I’ve always hated it when people say that America doesn’t have a real cuisine, as though fast food were the only thing we can truly call our own. Granted, the growing national trend toward fresh, high-quality, local food is greatly inspired by the incredible depth of French and Italian cookery. But food is our most basic connection to the world, our fundamental means of sustaining ourselves on earth; it’s always seemed intuitively wrong to me to say that America lacks rooted culinary traditions. Surely we have them, even if many have been buried beneath a sodden heap of McNuggets.

As I looked deeper, returning to Twain’s other writings for more insight into his menu, I saw that when he thought of American food, he thought of anything but tired, clumsy, monotonous junk. Instead he thought of freshness and abundance. He thought of careful preparations. Most important, I realized, he thought of his own life.

The foods of the feast were necessarily fresh, the menu filled with local, seasonal flavors. Asparagus, butter beans, sliced tomatoes—none could have been eaten very long after harvest, at least without Twain’s judging them “insipid” or “decayed,” as he did European string beans and cherries. And in the 1840s America of Twain’s childhood, it would have been simply impossible to eat a fish like “sheep-head, from New Orleans” very far from the Gulf of Mexico. Such things were purely local; he’d later write that though many fine dishes could be had at Buckingham Palace, such dishes as pompano, crayfish, “shrimps of choice quality,” and “small soft-shell crabs of a most superior breed” could be had in “perfection only in New Orleans”—a testament both to the city’s legendary cooking and to its thriving lake, bayou, Gulf, and Mississippi River fisheries.

The menu shouts of a joyous abundance. It testifies to a deep bond in Twain’s mind between eating and tasting and celebrating, an association that went back to childhood. Twain remembered to the end of his life the cheapness and plenty of many of the foods in Florida, Missouri, the tiny village where he’d been born: apples and peaches, sweet and Irish potatoes, corn and chickens and butter, coffee and sugar and whiskey. “It makes me cry to think of them,” he wrote of the meals his Uncle John Quarles served at his farm not far outside of Florida, meals that included biscuits, corn on the ear, fried chicken, succotash, tomatoes, buttermilk, apple dumplings, and many more foods he’d later yearn for in Europe. And there were more beloved dishes from Boston to San Francisco, from the highest Sierras to the deepest lakes. . . .

Of course, such good things demanded respectful attention. Twain took as firm a stand on questions of regional cookery as he did when he declared European-style butter a “sham” because it lacked salt or when he moaned that to carve a chicken in the German fashion one must “use a club, and avoid the joints.” Concerning the meals on his uncle’s farm, he declared that “the way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor—particularly a certain few of the dishes. For instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread and the fried chicken. These things have never been properly cooked in the North—in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread but this is gross superstition.”