Twain's Feast (4 page)

On this April morning, it’s twenty degrees in Newton. Outside town a steady, freezing wind pulls across winter-naked soybean fields and fields stubbled with ranks of cornstalks—stalks cut down to their last spare inches, looking elastic after a winter under snow.

Scattered among the hundreds of thousands of farmed acres are perhaps twelve hundred of broken-up prairie—a few acres here, twenty there, a hundred more here, acquired piecemeal whenever money and opportunity presented themselves. The plots of prairie are marked on my map: small, irregular blocks covered in cross-hatching like braille. But even to my untrained eye, even by the light of a two-thirds moon, the grasses are obvious as I drive toward Prairie Ridge State Natural Area. What seems a flat, featureless landscape will rise suddenly high and ragged against the pale road, swelling beside my headlights like surging water. It’s vaguely discomfiting to see wild grasses carved into such clean plots, as though a flock of flying starlings had formed into perfectly even ranks.

Newton is a strange place to come in search of Twain’s feast; as far as I know, Twain never heard of the place, let alone set foot in it. But there are only about three hundred prairie chickens left in all of Illinois, and all of them are here. So: the cornfields outside Newton.

Besides, I’ve already begun to understand that when it came to the foods of the feast, the simple fact is that Twain knew what he was talking about. What, for instance, is so special about canvasback ducks from Baltimore or, by extension, from Maryland? Why is it so certain that the birds living near that particular place were what Twain loved, rather than a single Baltimore restaurant’s recipe? Here’s why: the vast waters feeding into the Chesapeake Bay are replete with wild celery, an aquatic grass (unrelated to table celery) that canvasback ducks gorge on. Such is the greed of the ducks for the grass that they’re named after it (wild celery is
Vallisneria americana;
canvasbacks are
Aythya valisineria
). When able to feed with abandon, as they are in the waters near Baltimore, the result is birds so fat that a contemporary of Twain described them as filled with their own gravy.

I learned my lesson with the buckwheat cakes: I will not doubt Twain.

That’s why I’m soon trudging behind a Prairie Ridge guide named Bob across an icy field, flashlight in hand, toward a distant plywood blind. The freeze is recent, so in spite of the cold only a half inch of ice covers the wide, wintry puddles. This, I realize, explains why the one thing the taciturn Bob has said to me is, “Got rubber boots?” and why, when I said I didn’t, Bob was much amused. To avoid breaking through and soaking my feet, I have to stay on top of the clumps of frozen grass, jumping clumsily as though I’m crossing mossy stepping-stones.

The wind blows over the bare fields and straight through the five-inch-high viewing slot that runs the length of the blind’s front wall. I shiver on a long bench with a few dedicated birders, my arms tightly crossed, eyes squinted against the cold. The bench is long enough to hold six people, and it’s cold enough that I wish we did have that last body squeezed in here. The mating ground—or “booming ground,” or “lek”—is immediately in front of the blind, perhaps forty yards wide, a bit less than that deep. It was disked last fall, and the grass on it is as short as though mowed. But that’s all I can make out; except for the moon, the only light comes from a pair of radio towers blinking steadily across the fields.

Twenty degrees is
cold.
When I called to reserve the blind, Bob told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to leave it until the birds were done booming, which might be several hours. He insisted, Bob did, that I not drink coffee. At home I drink a lot of coffee. At home, right now, it is three in the morning. I’ve come a long way to hear the birds that even now, I remind myself, are stirring, figuratively clearing their throats, picking silently toward the dark lek. But the truth is that at this moment I would happily garrote a prairie chicken for an espresso. The wind through the viewing slot is picking up, icing my ears and nose. I have obeyed orders, I have drunk nothing, and yet I greatly desire to pee. I begin to suspect that coming to Illinois was actually sort of dumb—even dumber, maybe, than some of my friends thought, which was pretty dumb.

Then from behind the plywood blind comes a mournful, hollow cry, as though someone were blowing across the lip of a jug. At once it’s answered from across the lek—it’s a pair of male prairie chickens beginning to boom.

The booming ground is thirty or forty yards wide; the movement of the birds on the far side is just visible in the gray of the coming dawn. It’s like trying to make out crabs scrabbling under murky water. I guess that there are about four cocks there, though it’s difficult to tell; their calls blend into one long, low, lonely note. They boom steadily, each holding a sustained tone that sometimes rises a step for a moment or two. The intermittent rises give the whole a slowly throbbing quality, like the sound of UFOs descending in 1950s science-fiction movies.

The booms don’t merely echo across the emptiness, they infuse it; what was bare and dismal is now pulsing, beating, full.

But still lonely. Later I’ll try and fail to approximate the sound on a cello, guided by an 1893
Science
article that suggested beginning with a low G. But strings have too much presence, too much vibrancy; when stringed instruments sound lonely, it’s because of what they’re playing. The prairie chickens can’t sound any other way. “Some morning in the month of April,” author T. A. Bereman exhorted in
Science
magazine, “when the sun rises clear and the air is crisp and frosty, go out upon the suburbs of a prairie town, away from the usual noises of the village, and listen.”

Even the streaking shadow of a great horned owl can’t stop the cocks for long; they press themselves flat on the lek or flee into taller grass, but rise or return almost as soon as the predator is past. Now at least six of the large, black-and-white grouse scratch and stamp and turn. Raised pinnae feathers jut from their brows like horns. Spotted tail feathers fan and flare as they stamp their feet in rapid staccato, their stout, black-striped bodies level with the ground. Though their bodies are rounded and soft-looking, their tail feathers are stiff and straight. Every wing is locked tightly back.

People who have handled prairie chickens describe them as among the wildest of animals—wilder than badgers, than bald or golden eagles. Some of that explosive force is on display here. Though one cock stands entirely still except for an orange timpani sac ballooning at his throat, most rush fiercely at their counterparts, stamping as they square off. Sometimes they burst into the air, nearly chest to chest. One flips backward, landing awkwardly on the dust and short grass.

The booming rises, rises. Now, in their excitement, the cocks entirely ignore the northern harriers and short-eared owls hunting in the tall grass beyond the lek. At last the booms are answered by the high, sharp caw of an approaching hen. As one of the ornithology students whispers, it doesn’t sound like an American thing; it makes me think of a jungle more than a patch of low grass beside an Illinois cornfield.

It also makes me really hungry. A confession: watching almost any animal for long enough makes me wonder how it tastes. Eli is like this, too. We’ll wander the Monterey Bay Aquarium, watching awestruck as sleek tuna, graceful sea turtles, and sevengill sharks cruise through shimmering blue water and forests of kelp. Then we’ll go for sushi. This is a large part of what drew me to Twain’s feast in the first place; it’s when we use all our senses that we’re most powerfully alive, most engaged with the world that feeds and sustains us. Primed by Twain’s description of early-morning hunts, I naturally start thinking about making a meal of these rare, beautiful birds.

Of course that isn’t about to happen; I’ll almost certainly never taste prairie chicken. To do so I’d have to move to Minnesota, one of the few places with a healthy population, and enter a lottery to win one of the something like two hundred licenses that would allow me to shoot a brace of birds. Still, a number of historical descriptions let me imagine how it would have been to sit down to a plate of prairie chicken on John Quarles’s farm.

First off, the meat is dark. Just about everyone, from William Clark of Lewis and Clark fame to the author of a guide to America’s urban markets, calls it dark; the one chef who doesn’t, Charles Ranhofer of New York’s legendary Victorian restaurant Delmonico’s, calls it “black.” Prairie chicken is a species of large grouse, and so other grouse, like sage hens, probably offer the most analogous flavor (though Clark clearly preferred prairie chicken, finding sage hen by comparison “only tolerable in point of flavor,” probably due to the latter’s winter diet of pungent sagebrush). Ranhofer’s recipes use grouse and prairie chicken interchangeably and describe partridge as relatively light.

How best to cook this dark, rich meat? The short answer is “add fat.”
¹
Naturalist Frances Hamerstrom, who studied the birds in Wisconsin for decades, always resented having to stuff their skins for use as specimens rather than using them to enrich the meat while roasting. Ranhofer dipped his in butter or oil before broiling, or he served the roasted birds with gravy, fried bread crumbs, and applesauce, or he prepared them “a la Tzarina,” which meant including a forcemeat of game and cream. On occasion he indulged in baroque, Gilded Age productions involving molding prairie-chicken breasts with jelly before garnishing with truffles, cock’s combs, mushrooms, and poached chicken kidneys.

Twain, I like to think, would have wanted his simply roasted in a hot oven, quickly enough that the meat wouldn’t go dry. True, in later years the dinners served at his Hartford home owed a great deal to the rich, elevated food served at Delmonico’s—considered the finest restaurant in America from the time of its founding in 1827 through the end of the nineteenth century—and other dining palaces. It is, regretfully, necessary to report that one 1887 dinner at Twain’s house involved creamed asparagus, creamed sweetbreads, and creamed shad sauce over shad-roe balls, and that the tomatoes were molded into jelly, with mayonnaise on the side (afterward came ice cream sculpted into flowers). But Twain was a man of many contradictions, and the fact is that when he thought of his favorite things, he thought first of ingredients instead of preparations, tastes instead of recipes. His most impassioned food writing is about basic things, roasted meats and fried chicken and freshly picked vegetables. The prairie chickens he remembered and wanted again, I believe, were those he’d helped to hunt and ate simply roasted.

With the rising sun, the booming ground in front of me has come fully alive. The cocks pace and charge and fly; the two hens stroll, seeming to ignore the mock combats. One cock hangs at the lek’s eastern edge, strutting as enthusiastically as any but never approaching the other birds. Eventually the larger group works its way toward him. The lone cock waits for his chance; suddenly he strides forward, swiftly cuts a hen away from the others, and hurriedly escorts her into a patch of tall grass. Everyone in my blind wants to adopt him. When he returns to the lek, we give soft group cheers. Vivid yellow meadowlarks sing a few feet in front of the blind; owls and northern harriers stalk the tall grass behind the lek. But behind all that, behind the grasses, the corn ground is quiet and gray. The lek is a jungle island in an acid sea.

It’s literally awesome to think of the scale of the old prairies. Lewis and Clark started crossing them in May, at the very beginning of their transcontinental journey; they came to the far edge of the grasslands in June
of the following year.
Imagine the labor it took to cross that vast distance and it’s easy to understand why the first European explorers—men who knew what crossing the Atlantic meant—used words like “ocean” and “sea” when they spoke of the grass.

It’s humbling to imagine those thousands of miles, and what filled them. Nowadays people think of prairies as empty and monotonous. But what they’re really thinking of is the cornfields that replaced the tallgrass. Corn ground is acre upon acre upon acre of row after row after row, all planted in one variety, of one thing, all at the same time. Corn ground is more a growing medium than it is soil, having been drenched in enough pesticide and herbicide to kill all the microbes that let the soil live. In
The Omnivore’s Dilemma,
Michael Pollan calls such land “food deserts”—producers of a volume of calories that must be processed by industry or used to feed livestock prior to human consumption. Anything growing on corn ground—except for corn—is a mistake.

Prairie is this: Twelve-foot-high big bluestem. Blazing stars. Sky blue aster. Purple coneflower, also called echinacea. Poppy mallow and downy gentian. It’s 230 species crowded onto a tiny, remnant “postage stamp” prairie. A prairie is marshes, filled with crayfish and ornate box turtles. It’s a silent sky, exploding with a flight of grouse. It’s dust tossed in billows by wallowing bison. It’s prairie fire sending smoke to redden, then blacken, the summer sun; it’s snow in drifts that can bind and kill entire herds of elk. Though the early explorers described what they saw as an ocean, their word “prairie” came from the French or Belgian name for a park or a grassy orchard.
That’s
a prairie—a place that invokes both ocean and garden, both the wildest place and the tamest. And that’s what Twain remembered—a lonely place, but also one replete and bounteous, a place whose sounds and smells and tastes remained with him all through his life.

Today prairie is also, very often—too often—much like what’s in front of me at the moment: a display, nearly a zoo. This tiny patch of grassland, acquired and maintained for the express purpose of preserving the prairie chickens, needs constant human care and attention. Without periodic burns and occasional grazing by hired local cattle to replicate prairie fires and bison, short invasive grasses could, and would, overwhelm Prairie Ridge. Keeping this place “natural” is damned hard work.