Twain's Feast (50 page)

Not bad general cooking advice, when you think about it. Drizzle roasted vegetables with olive oil; sauté almost anything in butter; fry pastries. Figure out what kind of fat to add, and how much, and how to do it: this will bring you joy.

I do have a life, I swear to God.

For fellow Yankees: pot liquor (or “likker”) is the delicious, smoky, salty, bitter brew you get from simmering greens with a hock of good ham.

It’s an enduring mystery why Twain’s Confederate service never annoyed his Northern readers, while his deserting the Confederate army never alienated the South. In part it’s probably because the man could charm a statue: on one occasion he blamed his desertion on the weather, and in his
Autobiography
he explained that he’d become “incapacitated by fatigue” after two weeks of persistent retreating.

The original name had been given in honor of former California governor (and Confederate sympathizer) John Bigler; after the Civil War broke out, Union-friendly Washoe adopted the name Tahoe (weirdly, no one got around to changing the name officially for the better part of a century; the lake known on maps as Tahoe was officially Lake Bigler until 1945). We can be grateful at least that Twain didn’t argue for the other early alternative, Lake Bonpland.

By the time Twain wrote this, he’d have known what lava streams looked like, having seen volcanoes in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1866.

Once he was up against a newspaper deadline, with two empty columns to fill, when he got word of a murder; Twain later wrote that he’d told the killer, “Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day which I can never forget. If whole years of gratitude can be to you any slight compensation, they shall be yours. I was in trouble and you have relieved me nobly and at a time when all seemed dark and drear. Count me your friend from this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor.”

Let us pause here to praise Clemens’s choice of alias.
Mark Twain—
short, sharp, sounds like a name. It works. Compare it with his friends’ pseudonyms:
Old Blow, Yellow Bird, Amigo
,
Dan De Quille.
Tough to imagine Hemingway saying, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Amigo,” as he did about Twain and
Huck Finn.

Speaking of bathing houses: it can’t be confirmed, but a recurrent rumor has it that Mark Twain met, in a Turkish bath on the Montgomery Block, where the Transamerica Pyramid now stands, a San Francisco firefighter named Tom Sawyer. Submitted without comment.

One of the town’s first Italian restaurants began in a ship owned by a man named Giuseppe Bazzurro, who may well have brought cioppino to San Francisco. He’d emigrated from Genoa, home of a fish stew known in the Genoan dialect as
cioppin
(possibly after the Chiappa fish market). If he
was
the primary importer, Giuseppe Bazzurro was a great man; there should be statues of him everywhere.

He’d only recently returned from a trip to Hawaii, where he surfed; it is for such things as this that I love him.

And it’s actually from Rhode Island; “Manhattan” is an insult, originally levied by right-thinking citizens of chowder-loving Massachusetts.

At the time it was still legal to catch and sell terrapin; Asian markets remain the most common destination for poached animals.

When he measured a safe depth of two fathoms, a leadsman would call out “mark twain.”

Not all bog plants are valuable as either food or medicine, of course—poison ivy, another woody vine, openly competes with cranberry, helping to cement its reputation as the Plant from Hell.

It became the fourth Thursday of the month in 1941, a change made to lengthen the Christmas-shopping season.

The whaling story is a great one but may be apocryphal; Sandra Oliver, author of
Saltwater Foodways,
says she’s never seen cranberries included as a substantial part of a ship’s lading. And at least one frequently quoted bit of evidence linking berries and whaling, a supposed passage from
Moby-Dick
about how Ahab refused to carry them against the scurvy, is definitely made up (Ahab was many things, but he wasn’t an incompetent).

It’s also called the “frog run,” because the screaming of the peeper frogs used to signal the season’s end.