Twain's Feast by Andrew Beahrs

Author:Andrew Beahrs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-fiction, Travel, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781101434819
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 2010-06-01T10:00:00+00:00

ANOTHER WAY WITH TURTLE SOUP

Receive one can Bookbinder’s Snapper Soup from the Turtle Lady. Open can and heat in saucepan, with addition of several tablespoons sherry. While heating, note that on the list of ingredients, “snapper turtle” falls behind water, tomato puree, cooked egg white, and sherry wine, which isn’t overly discouraging, but also behind margarine and cornstarch, which is. Eat soup, attempting to find and taste turtle. Fail.

Twain dropped some terrific things between writing the list of favorite foods in his journal and the final menu he published in A Tramp Abroad. A lot of them were inexplicable—a man who forgets to include “lobsters boiled & deviled” on a list of great American foods can maybe be forgiven, but a man who lists them, then edits them out, is a man who has made a serious mistake. Fried onions, for some reason, failed to make the cut. So did hot eggs, pot liquor, cabbage boiled with pork, scalloped oysters, shrimps, pine nuts, catfish, hard crabs, potato salad, celery salad, lima beans, smelts and sturgeon from San Francisco, and rib of beef. I regret each and every one of these exclusions, except the celery salad, raw celery being one food I’ve never been able to champion.

Still, Twain was on a roll. In his Autobiography he’d rant that including too many details in a story made it into a “tangled, inextricable confusion,” leaving it “intolerably wearisome to the listener.” So on his menu, he pared dishes to their simplest essence. He listed ingredients rather than recipes; he wanted good things, simply prepared. Yes, he was strutting a bit—Twain was in an ostentatiously American mood, like Ben Franklin as he strolled through Paris in a coonskin cap. Still, the menu was a real cache, a trove of what the great writer saw as the best of his country’s food; even the porterhouse steak he wanted for breakfast was an American cut, never produced by European butchers.

True, at home things were changing. Railroads and cans had already transformed the food of Twain’s youth, increasing choice and availability but also disconnecting the food that made Americans Americans from the land that made America America. Michael Pollan makes the wise observation that a culture that treats foods as medicines can’t be said to have a real cuisine at all; now dietary reformers like John Harvey Kellogg, Eliza Leslie, and Mary Mann were arguing that the health of one’s bowels was more important than flavor, that inner purity should take precedence over taste. For Kellogg, Leslie, Mann, and more, proper food was a sign of physical and even moral virtue.

But though the idea that food should be something other than food was beginning to be a problem in Twain’s day, it was never a problem for Twain. He scoffed at the whey-and-grape diets he saw offered to invalids; he demanded fried chicken, fresh butter, and hot rolls; he reflected that “it is a pity that the world should throw away so many good things merely because they are unwholesome.

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