Twain's Feast Read Online Free

single man during a life well and fully lived, a life that had taken him from the Mississippi’s shoals and murky currents to Nevada’s crazed shanties. I’d find out how each food once helped to make a place a place.
    Once more I read through the menu. Croakers, from New Orleans. Philadelphia terrapin soup. Canvasback duck, from Baltimore.
    I wanted to know what we still have. I wanted to know what we were losing, and what we might be getting back. I wanted to know what was gone.

One
    IT MAKES ME CRY TO THINK OF THEM
    Prairie-Hens, from Illinois
     
     
     
     
     
    M Y WIFE, ELI, looks a bit wary when I bring up Twain. She’s happy enough about some of my ideas, such as visiting Tahoe; when I start in with San Francisco mussels, at least it’ll be close to home. But she fears that my first plan—to sit, at dawn, in a frozen Illinois cornfield and watch prairie chickens—could be the first step down the road toward serious Berkeley eccentricity. “I just don’t want you to be ‘that freaky Twain guy,’” she says. “There’s enough of that here. One day you’re reading about food, the next you’re walking around campus shouting at the sun and random undergrads.”
    I laugh a little; she snorts a bit.
    “I’m serious,” she says. “You do know this is kind of weird, right?”
    In fact, I do. And I’m grateful that Eli (rhymes with “Kelly”) is just joking around, because right now I do want to go to Illinois and sit in a cold, bare field—in fact, I need to. So much of Twain’s life was spent looking back at his own youth; exploring those memories inspired his best work. The weekend after his wedding at the age of thirty-four, he found himself in a kind of trance, seeing old faces, hearing old voices. “The fountains of the deep have broken up,” he wrote to his longtime friend Will Bowen, who would later appear as Tom Sawyer’s companion Joe Harper. For a day and more, Twain watched and listened. It was as though settling into married life had primed a fuse that a letter from Bowen then lit, returning him to a childhood he was thrilled to rediscover. And the earliest of his many memories, the first with real heft, color, and presence, were of the wonderful feasts on his Uncle John Quarles’s prairie farm.
    Every year the boy Sammy Clemens had spent several months on the farm, just four miles north of the hundred-person village of Florida, Missouri. Though Florida was a forest town, the farm abutted the prairie, “a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks.” The farm’s five hundred acres were in a lucky country of grass, wood, and water, and all lent their bounty to the heavily laden table that Twain later remembered.
    Ducks and geese, wild turkeys, venison, squirrel, rabbits, pheasants and partridge—when these wild things were served alongside garden-fresh corn, watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, butter beans, and peas, and with the corn bread, fried chicken, and hot biscuits that Twain would later claim could never be properly cooked anywhere outside the South, the result was rooted food that would live forever in his memory. He’d remember its flavors, of course—but he’d remember, just as vividly, the way his uncle gathered and hunted and tended the foods, the way in which the meals sprang from a place he loved so dearly:
    I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end feathers. . . . I can see the blue clusters of wild grapes hanging among the foliage of the saplings, and I remember the taste of them and the smell. I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted, and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts, and the persimmons; and I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawn to scramble for them