Twain's Feast (24 page)

Terrapin stew retained its local reputation even after long-distance shipment became common (the ideal Maryland winter dinner, the
Post
said in 1880, included turtle, roasted canvasback ducks, oysters, and crab salad, along with potatoes, vegetables, fried hominy cakes, and celery). At its best, terrapin could be a revelation to a newcomer, a symbol of the region’s delights. Corson’s New York cooking class ended with a midwestern student eating turtle for the first time: “After his second spoonful instantaneous measures were mooted by him either for the introduction of the chelonian to Illinois or his migration, with his wife and family, to this, the land of the terrapin.”

Four months after the Whittier dinner, Twain was as far from the Land of the Terrapin as he could reasonably get, his whole family—Livy, Susy, and Clara—in tow. Boarding the steamer, Twain had been full of anticipation, eager to return to the continent he’d loved exploring with his friends on the
Quaker City
a decade before. “One feels so cowed, at home, so unindependent, so deferential to all sorts of clerks & little officials,” he wrote just before departure, “that it is good to go & breathe the free air of Europe & lay in a stock of self-respect & independence.”

But as he traveled through Europe, his excitement faded. European manners, he came to believe, were often a mere cover—a polished disguise for aristocratic decadence. “It will not do for me to find merit in American manners,” he began, with deadpan affect, “for are they not the standing butt for the jests of critical and polished Europe? Still I must venture to claim one little matter of superiority in our manners”—namely, that ladies could walk wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted; in London, Twain claimed, they would swiftly be approached and insulted by so-called gentlemen. In America, he said, a woman might “encounter less polish than she would in the old world, but [would] run across enough humanity to make up for it.” Even artists were wildly overrated, especially the revered old masters. “There are artists in Arkansas to-day,” he declared, “who would not have had to paint signs for a living if they had had the luck to live in the time of the old masters.”

All of which says something about his mood when he sat down in an Italian hotel room, toward the end of his travels, and wrote his menu. European
home
food, Twain readily confessed, was often excellent—he called dinner with a Venetian family “a luxury which very seldom fell to our lot on the continent.” But food in European
hotels,
where he ate most meals, was “a sorrowful business. A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe,” he judged; “but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.”

Again and again the food in hotels and way stations left him frustrated. After breakfast one morning, he reported that he had “made a rare & valuable addition to my bric-a-brac collection. . . . It was an egg. There was a something about it which satisfied me that it was an antique.” He decided that the best way to tell Rhine wine from vinegar was to consult the label. Even German beer could play false: “We bought a bottle or so of beer,” he wrote; “at any rate they called it beer, but I knew by the price that it was dissolved jewelry, and I perceived by the taste that dissolved jewelry is not good stuff to drink.”

He remained, of course, a man open to pleasure where he found it; he didn’t close his eyes or mind to what was good. He loved Emmentaler cheese, and
Faschiertes
beefsteak with yellow of egg (minced or ground beef; probably it was bound together with egg yolk before cooking). He called green, egg-size plums the “pleasantest fruit in Germany,” thinking them “better than oranges”; that, he mused, “is why the plum, which is with us a worthless fruit, holds such a place in [German] literature.” When he could get good ones, away from the hotel’s decayed specimens, he liked German pears, cherries, raspberries, apples, peaches, and strawberries, as well as broiled salmon, Wolfsbrunnen trout, and duck.

Sometimes food and life joined with a savor as intense as on the shores of Tahoe, or in the San Franciscan night. In Switzerland, Twain recalled,

Another time, during a rafting trip, he stepped ashore at noon and bought bottles of beer and roasted chicken, immediately setting out again with the cold drinks and hot food. “There is no pleasanter place for such a meal,” he said, “than a raft that is gliding down the winding Neckar past green meadows and wooded hills, and slumbering villages, and craggy heights graced with crumbling towers and battlements.”

But these were the exceptions, the times when he broke out of his role as a visitor—a stranger—and ate the best of local produce. More typical were the first-class hotels that seemed “to use poor cheap 2d hand meats and veg[etables] because [they were] cheap,” that bought “strawberries when they [had] been 2 full months in market,” and then only the oldest and worst. He was sarcastically grateful for new potatoes, offered once and once only; Europe was not his home. “Short visits to Europe are better for us than long ones,” he reflected. “The former preserve us from becoming Europeanized; they keep our pride of country intact, and at the same time they intensify our affection for our country and our people.”

He scorned blind, political patriotism; but he did feel affection—love—for his home. Now he wanted the genuine, the honest, the real. “Ah for a hot biscuit,” he longed in his journal, and “coffee,
real
coffee, with
real
cream.—&
real
potatoes. Fried chicken, corn bread,
real
butter,
real
beefsteak,
good
roast beef with
taste
to it.” The menu began as a tribute to all his favorite foods, wherever in the world he’d eaten them; the first draft, in his journal, included chickens and hard-boiled eggs from Palestine, raisins and figs from Smyrna, Egyptian dates and pomegranates, South Island flying fish, and turtle steak (probably eaten in Hawaii, then called the Sandwich Islands), as well as complimentary nods to Roquefort cheese, German trout, English turtle soup, whitebait sole, and mutton. But as he went on—as he went deeper—the memory of American foods drew him back, and back, and back.

Maybe the Boston humiliation helped Twain to see American food in a different way; maybe his menu was, in some small, unconscious way, an act of defiance. It was at least the product of a defiant mood. Had the elite rejected his plain humor and language? Here, then, was his celebration of simple, honest, genuine American flavors. Here were things he loved without reservation or apology. He knew the country that produced them; it was, he thought, plainspoken, vibrant, straightforward, generous, and young . . . and perhaps too brash for the sophisticates who had wounded him to appreciate.

The Whittier dinner had gloried in consommé printanier royal, capon à l’anglaise, smelts panne, squabs en compote à la francaise. . . .

Game on.

“Radishes,” he wrote. “Baked apples, with cream. Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs. . . .”

It’s been over two hundred years since John Adams ate terrapin during the Continental Congresses. It’s been ninety-one since sherry, the essential ingredient, temporarily disappeared during Prohibition (a lull that probably saved the terrapin from extinction). And it’s been more than eighty since terrapin soup, by then rare enough to be eaten only by the wealthy, formed the first course of the first Academy Awards dinner. Now Marguerite Whilden roots three gentle fingers into a backyard patch of sand in Neavitt, Maryland, searching for a clutch of diamondback eggs.

The ideal terrapin habitat combines soft sand for nesting, thick marsh grasses where hatchlings can hide, and estuaries filled with oysters, snails, and clams. Even more than prairie chickens in their mosaic of grass and corn, or raccoons in their marshes and woods and lawns, terrapins need the border places—the margins, where the energies of different places wrestle and merge. The intertidal zone is among the greatest of such places, where swelling water carries nutrients to grasses and shellfish twice every day. That’s where terrapins often feed; that’s where they thrive.

But the terrapin nest Marguerite is digging up is in anything but a natural, sandy shoreline. Marguerite, sometimes known as “the Turtle Lady” since budget cuts at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources prompted an early retirement and full-time dedication to terrapin restoration, has dumped ten tons of sand into a three-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long, ten-foot-wide oval in the center of an acre of Eastern Shore lawn. A quarter of Marguerite’s “beach” is fenced, a safe place for terrapins to nest. The remainder is planted with native marsh plants: spartina, bayberry, cordgrass.

This time my whole family (Eli, Erik, and our newborn daughter, Mio) has come with me. Eli grew up in Virginia—we met in archaeology grad school in Charlottesville—and of all the things we miss living in California, the greatest is the vibrant sense of a landscape
alive:
of puddles that harbor huddling frogs, vines overtaking gas stations, cicada screams and fireflies muddling humid summer air. When we walk down to the dock, within moments we’ll see tiny garfish, a pair of water snakes, crab moltings, jellyfish, gulls, and a bald eagle. Birdsong here is insistent and omnipresent. It’s a very different feeling from that of the drier, statelier lands out west, where lack of water means life has to spread and space itself. Near the Chesapeake a thousand things want to live; here oysters once piled so high as to become navigational threats, a Swiss visitor writing in 1701 that “there are whole banks of them so that the ships must avoid them. . . . [A sloop] struck an oyster bed, where we had to wait about two hours for the tide.” The shellfish grew so big, he recalled, that he had to cut them in two. This is a place that cries out to be crammed.

Near the house, flanked by containers where Marguerite grows tomatoes and basil, are three big plastic tanks of diamondbacks: ten-inch females, six-inch males, tiny hatchlings. The turtles are an odd combination of stoic and social, crawling slowly up to and over one another, bumping gently against the sides with a sound like the start of rain. When held they regard us calmly. Many have distinct “diamond” points along the midline of their upper carapace. Each scute plate is whorled, like the central few lines of a fingerprint, or the stretched view of the mission staircase in
Vertigo.

When we boarded the plane, two small kids in tow, people eyed us as though we were guiding wolverines. But Mio is, at this stage of her life, basically a purse. And we were able to keep Erik happy by alternating chants of “We’re gonna see turtles, right, man? Turtles! Yeah, turtles!” with the funktastic colors and sounds of an
Electric Company
DVD. Now we’ve made it, and Erik is on all fours, completely absorbed by finding eggs buried in the fenced laying area. He peers so closely into the hole that I have to crane to see the eggs emerge from the sand. One, two, three . . . each egg is half the size of a Ping-Pong ball, each dented and somewhat squished (they’re hard as hens’ eggs now, but when first laid the shells were soft as leather). This clutch has ten in all, several fewer than average; amazingly, though laid all at once by a single female, it might have more than one father—a female can store sperm for up to four years. Carefully, keeping them upright, Marguerite places each egg into a bucket full of sand.

Though she started out leasing a small portion of a wildlife refuge along the South River in Annapolis, where she worked to protect terrapins from litter, campfires, and boats, Marguerite chose Neavitt deliberately. This part of the Eastern Shore, she says, has a strong conservation ethic, and there are still some large farms left amid houses on land that once grew pink tomatoes and sweet corn. “There’s a reason we don’t do heart transplants in ninety-year-olds,” she says. “You have to focus on the good bets, the things you can save for the long term.”

Terrapins used to be vulnerable to upper-class appetites. Today, with their commercial catch and sale banned, they’re more vulnerable to upper-class summer homes—the developments that eat up modest old houses and farms, replace meadows with lawns, and block routes to nesting grounds with banks of broken-stone riprap meant to slow the shore’s erosion. But Neavitt, which was at the heart of the old terrapin fishery, is still intimately connected to the water. The public pier is filled with working boats, barnacled and beaten and sturdy-looking. There’s a crab-shedding operation around the corner, holding blue crabs until they molt and become softshells; Marguerite’s cottage was once a modest lodge for canvasback-duck hunters. Her immediate neighbor, Joe Jones, worked as a waterman for thirty years—hauling crab pots at 4:00 A.M., switching to oysters at 10:00 (Joe says he starts feeling homesick as soon as he passes Bozman, six miles up the road). A high spring tide will flood the sharp, salt-loving spartina grass, and then twenty feet of Joe’s mowed lawn; the water wants this land.