Twain's Feast (29 page)

The solution, it increasingly seems, is to help the river go where it wants to go anyway. The proposed Third Delta Conveyance Channel would divert two hundred thousand cubic feet per second of muddy Mississippi River water into the Atchafalaya Basin. As it poured through the wetlands into the Gulf, it could begin halting, then reversing, the damage done by long, slow erosion. Admittedly, it’s unnerving to think of yet
another
cut through the wetlands, even one meant to heal. But the Atchafalaya River is the one major distributary that still carries mud and muck in something like a natural pattern; as a direct result, the Atchafalaya’s outlet is the one place that the land actually grows
,
by two thousand acres a year. When Mike Tidwell traveled the Atchafalaya, he became a true believer in the river’s restorative powers and the necessity for the channel; at the mouth “myriad small islands and sandbars dot the water, new ones popping up all the time, every few months, like mushrooms after a rainstorm.” All through the new land, he writes, there’s a “rich scent not found elsewhere in Louisiana, a smell like mud and musk and seaweed and salt water and hope all mixed together.”

The project could cost $2 billion, or much more. But the alternative is landscapes like the one at the Mississippi’s mouth. To get there you drive mile after mile along a highway tucked snugly between levees that extend like a copper pipe into the Gulf. The river is between the levees, too; it’s a river in the ocean, maintained only to protect the navigational channel, its banks clustered with helipads and industrial facilities. And at the end, the loss of the coastland is glaringly, horribly obvious: skeletal oaks stand dead a half mile offshore, set firmly in sunken land.

In August 2005, bored enough to read up on Eight Easy Fashion Tips that I never intended to use, I spent part of a flight home from Boston leafing through
Men’s Health.
One of the magazine’s features was a list of endangered American places to visit, among which was New Orleans—it had a huge termite problem, the author explained, and besides, much of the city was gradually sinking, and the system of levees was old and ill maintained. Hurricane Katrina landed less than two weeks later. And there was President Bush, saying, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees”—except (he neglected to add) for the crack team of hydraulic engineers employed by
Men’s Health.

We know what the problem is. We have at least a good idea of how to fix it and how much that might cost (it’s a lot; it’s also a lot less than the cost of doing nothing). And if the wetlands go, if New Orleans becomes a coastal city, if a hurricane then strikes dead-on, this time let’s at least not act surprised.

As he steamed toward New Orleans for the first time in more than twenty years, Twain overheard two “scoundrels” talking about their businesses: one was an oleomargarine manufacturer, the other a counterfeiter of olive oil. Slashing a knife into his “ostensible butter,” the oleomargarine maker declared that “you are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you can’t find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, outside of the biggest cities. . . . We can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has
got
to take it. Butter’s had its
day—
and from this [day] out, butter goes to the wall.”

One well-placed pistol shot would have made Twain a national culinary hero. Instead he listened to the man’s companion describe the process for removing the “one little wee speck . . . in a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that gives it a smell, or a flavor.” The oil could then be bottled, marked with an imported label, and sold as olive oil. “Maybe you’ll butter everybody’s bread pretty soon,” the man gloated, “but we’ll cotton-seed his salad for him from the Gulf to Canada, that’s a dead-certain thing.”

Twain was appalled. But, he found in the city, not every change was bad. There was ice in New Orleans—ice! There were even ice
factories:
the city that had once needed to ship ice from the distant Sierras now pumped it out in August. Twain visited one “to see what the polar regions might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics.” He didn’t understand the process, but he was impressed by the large ice blocks, meant as centerpieces to decorate and cool a room, that held bouquets and French dolls frozen as behind plate glass.

And in New Orleans he could eat the food he loved best. He rode with his friends to the hotels beside Lake Pontchartrain and had dinner on a veranda over the water. “The chief dish,” he said, “was the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.” Even better, perhaps, was the pompano at a city club, where the fish “was in his last possible perfection . . . and justified his fame.” Along with the pompano was “a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish—large ones; as large as one’s thumb; delicate, palatable, appetizing. Also deviled whitebait, also shrimps of choice quality, and a platter of soft-shell crabs of a most superior breed. The other dishes,” he mused, “were what one might get at Delmonico’s, or Buckingham Palace; those I have spoken of can be had in similar perfection in New Orleans only, I suppose.”

As the river changed, so did the life along it; and changes along the river changed the food of the South. Though Twain’s menu included Southern-style light bread, wheat bread, and egg bread, in his youth none of these were as common as his corn bread, corn pone, and hoecake. But as the plow moved west into the mixed prairies of Kansas and Nebraska, wheat had ceased to be a luxury in the South. The opening of the Midwest’s great flour mills meant that biscuits made with white flour would be far more common on Southern tables in the twentieth century than in Twain’s childhood; his offhand comment that many steamboat pilots had left the river “to grind at the mill” had some truth in it.

But the biggest change in New Orleans cooking was emancipation. Though some remained as employees, black Creoles were no longer inextricably bound to the kitchens of slave owners. Many white Creoles either had to hire new cooks or learn their own way around a kitchen. Some tried to preserve recipes and techniques they’d once taken for granted, a point that
Creole Cookery
made directly and offensively: “In this time, glorious with the general diffusion of learning, it is befitting that the occult science of the gumbo should cease to be the hereditary lore of our negro mammies, and should be allowed its proper place in the gastronomical world.”

Both
Creole Cookery
and
La Cuisine Creole
appeared in 1885; the first two Creole cookbooks, they give a picture of the city’s cooking just two years after Twain’s visit. The books have many surprises, such as a beef-based “gombo.” But there are also dozens of dishes that could easily be served today—fried eggplant, stewed okra, ten styles of oyster, fifteen ways to cook fish. Meanwhile, Hearn wrote, peddlers walked the streets selling chickens, lemons, apples, and strawberries; many poked their heads through open windows, crying their wares. Twain himself marveled at the sheepshead, red snapper, and Spanish mackerel sold in “a very choice market for fish.” Much on the river had changed, but these things at least were still there. Probably Twain thought they always would be.

I’m a ruthless wedding hors d’oeuvre grazer; before waving hello to the bride, I’ll scope out the best bottleneck to snatch tidbits from passing trays. Servers will eye me warily, smile stiffly as they spin out of reach, even head for the back entrance.

Cruising the tables of the Louisiana Foodservice EXPO feels like crashing the world’s largest wedding. Every vendor offers samples—it’s only right—and so there’s andouille and fresh Gulf shrimp and tasso and smoked, shredded Berkshire pork and a dozen cuts of beefsteak and lobster bisque and seafood gumbo, and there are crab cakes and smoked duck and
freaking foie gras,
which I never ever get to eat. I miss the last of the paddlefish caviar by seconds. There’s also a great number of fine-looking vegetables and a few fruits, but in this kind of context I’m a carnivore (with, admittedly, frequent exceptions for pastries and the free and plentiful beer). There are also a tremendous number of seafood poppers and fried things various and sundry: some look bad and many are, and a few I can’t even identify, but I taste all of them anyway because, hey, you never can tell.

This is after a few days of eating way, way too much. I’d been surprisingly on edge before coming—stomach literally clenched, having trouble sleeping, the whole deal. New Orleans is, far and away, my favorite American city, and I’d felt as if I were going back to see a relative I’d neglected for too long. Of course this is completely self-absorbed—I know that the city didn’t care one way or the other about my arrival. Still, that’s how I felt, and it wasn’t until I sat down to a couple dozen charbroiled oysters with my friends Dora and Paul and Reilly that I could start to relax. Drago’s is a New Orleans institution, even if it’s a couple miles out of town, and walking in there felt good. Seeing the bar crammed three deep on a Thursday night felt even better. And working through the oysters—the wood fire had melted the butter, garlic, and Parmesan and Romano cheeses on each into a perfectly smoky, crusty cap—while washing them down with a beer or three was nigh on to blissful.

I don’t want to overstate this, but the return—the survival—of places like the old-school hangout Drago’s means something. It means people going out with friends for things they’ve been eating for years; it means sitting at a familiar table, taking a bite and raising a drink. It means just knowing that the place is crammed midweek, that people are lining up at the bar, that the wood fire is roaring. It’s not everything; it’s something. “Everything was just so emotional when we started coming back,” Dora says. “This restaurant, that restaurant, the first Saints game. It was all loaded. Highs and lows.”

Which was all the permission I needed to treat eating in New Orleans as akin to a patriotic duty. The city’s restaurants needed my help; I would help them until I could not see.

So already this week I’ve had charbroiled oysters and shrimp with fried eggplant and something, God help me, called the “Shuckee Duckee” (blackened duck breast and oysters in cream sauce over fettuccine). I’ve had fried rabbit liver on pepper-jelly toast, hogshead cheese, hen-and-andouille gumbo, barbecue shrimp, and shrimp and grits. I’ve had Creole tomato salad, fried-potato omelet, and a Ferdi Special po’boy filled with roast beef, ham, gravy, and debris (the blackened yummy bits from the roasting pan). I’ve had spearmint sno-balls and nectar sno-balls, fried oysters and fried shrimp and fries. I haven’t had much green, but I’ve had pecan waffles with bacon, and I’ve inserted beignets and café au lait between meals with the regularity of an Old Testament prophet chanting “begat.”

After a while I’ve begun to honestly fear I might die.

Now I’m at the expo; and appearances notwithstanding, I’m not there to embarrass myself. I’m there because it hosts the Great American Seafood Cook-Off, which an announcer dramatizes as having begun with “a single eight-by-ten piece of white paper” on which Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal inscribed a challenge—in blood, we are left to assume—to the nation’s other sitting governors. But the truth is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration started the event six years ago to promote the nation’s sustainable seafood stocks. The cook-off is tucked along the back edge of what seems like a square country mile of vendors promoting their wares; it’s a promotional event within a promotional event. There’s nothing spontaneous about it—it’s a performance, not a festival—and when six masked, befeathered samba dancers arrive, drumming and marching to announce the event’s beginning, they serve less to attract revelers than to leave three small alligators in a glass tank looking moderately surprised.

But, spontaneous or not, it’s an event with a serious purpose; fish are the only wild foods that Americans still eat with regularity. We still know the difference between salmon and swordfish, just as people once distinguished between mallards and canvasbacks and wood ducks. But as Twain’s menu shows, such things can be lost fast; already, Louisiana’s beloved speckled trout and redfish are limited to a sports fishery, appearing in restaurants only when farmed or brought in from Alabama. We don’t
have
to eat sustainably, but if we don’t, the nonnegotiable fact is that our menus are going to get a lot less interesting. Today there are fifteen chefs here to promote their states’ fish (and, not to be naïve about it, themselves); each qualified by winning a state cook-off, or else by being tapped by their respective governor.