Samuel Clemens wrote one really great book. Other than that, most of his artistry was betrayed by a cynicism so deep and all pervading that Poe could have used him in a character sketch. Read " Letters From Earth " for perspective. Likewise, his food selections seem interesting but unpalatable.
@andy b:
A cynic, yes, but only in his later writings, due in large part to several personal tragedies.
As for his taste in food, meh. We all have different tastes. "Unpalatable" is highly subjective.
Personally, I find the overall topic more interesting than the details.
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I don't think I'd eat squirrel. I'm an adventurous eater, but there are health hazards that I wouldn't want to deal with. Perhaps that's only one part of the animal, but it's so small I wouldn't trust that the dangerous parts are butchered out.
I loved the sheepshead that my college landlord in New Orleans would drop on my steps many a Sunday night. His wife would not allow him to clean fish in their home, so I was the recipient of the bounty of his fishing trips. They do have ugly faces, but I was happy to look at them for the free fish.
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This has already been done. Ron Silver, chef and owner of Bubby's TriBca and Bubby's Highline in NYC put on this dinner at his now closed site in DUMBO, in NYC a few years ago. The food was spectacular.
@ Angelo Sgro Philadelphia
Might "the twainian" menu have been the cause of the restaurant closure?
I love Mark Twain, but I refuse to eat a raccoon.
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The first time I ever left my home town in St. Louis was when I was about ten, and took a train by myself to Hannibal for a tour of Mark Twain's house and Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn's cave. I traveled alone with a peanut butter lunch my mom had prepared.
Twain's language in his books wasn't "racist", in that he intended it as a racial slur. It's what everyone called people back then, especially in the Civil War era in which he was born. I'm almost seventy, and the N-word was an accepted part of language while growing up in Missouri, unfortunately. The truly tragic note is not that Twain used the common colloquialism of his era, but it seems to be making a big resurgency back in that region. One reason I moved to California over forty years ago.
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Mark Twain was an amazing author. He would definitely be a guest at my dinner with the best people in history.
If heading to the Mark Twain house in Hartford(an amazing place) stop at the Mark Twain library in West Redding, CT, as well.
Just doing my bit for historical locations in CT.
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And very close to his where his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had a home which you can also visit. Not far from Noah Webster’s home and places where Wallace Stevens lived and worked. Hartford, a surprisingly literary town.
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Worth a mention is Nick's wood shop:
https://offermanwoodshop.com/news/
Here's an article on sheepshead in SA from 2013:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/the-sheepshead-fish-has-human-teeth-but-its-okay-because-it-wont-give-you-a-psychedelic-crisis/
I knew them as drum fish and caught more than a few at the Jersey Shore in the 60s and 70s. Good eatin' fish, IMHO.
And they left opossum off of the menu (America's mystical marsupial.
When a phrase such as "they can vanish very, very quickly" appends a story on traditional Americana, then you know that the problems of climate change, and human population growth, and global resource depletion, have entered the main stream consciousness.
So I don't read a phrase such as "they can vanish very, very quickly" with trepidation but with optimism.
A wonderful description of what must have been a wonderful meal.
I am reminded of a really bad joke, however: "How many Alabamans (or you may substitute the denizens of any other State) does it take to prepare a raccoon for dinner? Three - one to scrape it off the road and two to watch out for traffic."
(Sorry about that.)
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If I could have dinner with Sam Clemens I wouldn't care what was on the menu.
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There is a new restaurant in chicago called Twain. Is this the hot new thing??
Is that Jeff Tweedy. of Wilco at the table?
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Yes!
@Rich Grotton Yes it is!
@Rich Grotton yes!
Prairie Chicken (chef couldn't find them), raccoon, and an ugly fish with human-like front teeth? Slim pickings for an article about food.
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@CVW
Americans ate less in 1879.
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The shores of many popular fishing spots along the rivers here, particularly the Fox and Wolf, in my experience, are littered with the dried or rotting carcasses of Sheepshead. When you’re fishing for northern or walleye or anything else, you will catch Sheepshead. (They are sometimes jokingly called “Silver Bass” to make your relative fishing failure sound better.) Yes they’re ugly... but I had no idea anyone actually ate them.
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Nick Offerman: actor, musician, craftsman, singer and crazy about his wife. What's not to like about him?
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Nice article...Please let chef Anderson know he can send the Sheepshead my way any day...Along the Gulf Coast it is prized for its sweetness due to its main diet of crab and shrimp
(those funky teeth help it crack crab and shrimp shells)...
We love it down here and if yu venture into New orleans restaurants it is a common sight.
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Try the freshwater version and let me know.
Interesting that Twain would like sheepshead, a fish which when caught in local waters here in the Mid-Atlantic we often call "drum fish." These fish used to be prolific in the waters of Long Island and New Jersey, hence the name "Sheepshead Bay." New York. They're a popular fish down south, and surf casters along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, especially Cape Hatteras have always landed some big sheepshead, considered a trophy eating fish on par with striped bass or even big migrating bluefish. Delaware Bay is another body of water where there's still a popular recreational fishery for sheepshead. On calm nights in summer on the Bay fishermen have said they can hear large schools feeding in the shallows by the incessant noise they make which is likened to a "drum beat," hence the nickname drum fish. I've never eaten sheepshead nor caught one but last year while fishing off the tip of Sandy Hook i watched a guy catch a pretty hefty sized one while fishing for bass. It was a beautiful fish, silvery with dark bands running down from its dorsal to the belly and a mouth full of pronounced buck teeth. The angler though he caught a world record porgy but when we told him it was a drum or sheepshead, he said he wouldn't eat any fish he didn't know so he released it back into the surf. I love broiled thick Virginia bacon too!
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"Twain's Feast," the book, is a great read.
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There are still healthy populations of prairie chickens in several great plains states that have carefully managed hunting seasons. Where the proper habitat exists they are locally abundant. They are also delicious and to substitute a turkey for a prairie chicken is to have no idea what you are attempting to do except that you know both are birds.
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With all due respect to Mr.Twain, I'd rather dig into his literary works than his culinary favorites. Racoon? Not so fast.
Then again, if Mr. Twain participated in this meal, conjured up by Nick Offerman, I'm sure he'd be rather pleased. Not only by the honor bestowed, but the guests as well. He'd be in good company. Wanda Sykes, Mr. Offerman and 'JT' would offer a steady stream of heavy hitting intelligent entertainment (so, I imagine). Christina Greer and Andrew Beahrs rounding it off immensely. Wonder whether Mr. Offerman has an audio recording? A fine conclusion to the audio series it'd make.
3
A subject I would find interesting is not only WHAT did Mark Twain eat--
--but HOW MUCH.
May I expound on that a little--
--and adduce an intriguing magazine article I read once (summer of '74) by the celebrated Oscar of the Waldorf. A reprint of a much earlier article.
Oscar's point was: American eating habits underwent a seismic shift around the time of World War I. To illustrate this, he reproduced a menu of dishes he'd prepared in the 1890's.
My! Did these guys know what it was to be full?
But photos from that time only prove the point. It was the thing for American males to be massive--plump--overweight. A sign of prosperity. As who should say, "I've done WELL in life. I propose to do MYSELF well."
And they did. Dear Lord, they sure did. Look at photos of William Howard Taft sometime. Corpulent isn't the WORD.
But Oscar's menu from 1915--half the food. No lie. HALF the food from twenty five some years earlier. Moderation had come in. Restraint.
Twain (I have read) was much in demand as an after-dinner speaker. So much so that (eventually)--
--he skipped the feast entirely. Showing up only when people were finishing up dessert, sipping coffee and brandies.
BUT--
--even at home, he always took a glass of wine with dinner.
But the stuff (apparently) he liked to EAT!
Boy--have tastes changed!
I'd prefer a Whopper or a Big Mac--
--any day of the week.
You can KEEP your prairie chicken!
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Save the Texas Prairie Chicken. - Mike Nesmith, The Monkees.
See also this, from The Talk of the Town in The New Yorker for June 25, 1990, labeled "Comment, Pt. II", unattributed in print but revealed as the work of the magazine's fifty-year medical-mystery profiler, Berton Roueché:
"They [pre-1900 Americans] ate fresh fish (fried) and shellfish when the weather permitted, and at other times they ate salt cod and smoked eel. They drank whole milk and used plenty of heavy cream and butter and eggs and cheese. They ate the local fruits and vegetables in their natural season. They shot and ate migrating ducks and grouse in fall and spring. They ate pancakes and johnnycake and samp and doughnuts and plenty of rye bread (made of stone-ground flour) and biscuits and pies and cakes and cookies, all baked with lard. Oranges and lemons were luxuries, and grapefruit was still in the future. Oats were something they fed to their horses. They drank well water. It was plain fare, simple fare, and probably a bit monotonous. It was also a diet that the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, and the American Cancer Society would consider not much short of toxic. So what was different? One thing came immediately to mind. These were for the most part men and women who worked with their hands; their work was physical labor. Even the shopkeepers cut firewood, dug gardens. And they all walked.
https://www.aleksandreia.com/2009/05/11/meat-and-veg-and-no-vegging/
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@Scott Lahti
Oh please. And a lot of them lollygagged around. especially the ones that could afford the diet you describe. No one was getting "heavy cream" which is a modern day dairy product, they just had milk with the cream on top and maybe a lot of cream resulted in something once in a while. But without refrigeration dairy was not a reliable thing. Lots died young, for other reasons, maybe, but whatever: life is fatal, there is no "good" death, just different ways of dying. We live longer now. And we have - for the most part - better palliative care: better opiates. The good old bad old days, indeed. They would trade it for our misery any day.
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@Scott Lahti Home canned fruits and vegetables were a staple as were herring and nut flours so some diets were quite healthy. Checking the old family cookbooks the biggest difference was the high amount of eggs in home cooked sweets. The ones that begin with 18 eggs, oh my.
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@Matthew Also, apparently our early ancestors from weaning age onward went about their days half plastered, because the only potable beverage before sanitary water systems was weird forms of beer and other fermented types, so they didn't die of bad water.
3
A lovely story. Mark Train's craving for simple Usan ( = American) foods is a proof of how much food is an acquired character.
I would love to see in this Section an article on the connections, if there be any, between the individuals' food preferences and their political orientation. There must be more than the clichés of Trump's henchmen guzzling moonshine and devouring hamburgers with their hands, or of the Democrats adhering to the vegan diet and cannabis-smoking.
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