"Twain's Feast" by Andrew Beahrs

John James Audubon's painting of the Greater Prairie Chicken.
Author Beahrs watched the mating dance of the once-plentiful birds in one of their
last nesting places in Illinois, and described the factors that have nearly extinguished them.

A homesick Mark Twain, bored with a European cuisine he found tasteless, once wrote a wish list of the American foods he longed for.

Food writer Andrew Beahrs used Twain's list as the jumping-off place, a combination of research on historic recipes, on 19th century agriculture and transportation, on the natural history of the game birds and animals Twain enjoyed eating, on the role of some of the foods in Twain's literary works, on menus from banquets Twain attended, and even on the way ice was used in 19th century America. Beahrs described a number of his own experiences seeking to eat the foods or to see the now-rare species in the wild. I loved this well-written book for its variety!

Beahrs' description of his visit to the rare nesting site of a few surviving prairie chickens fascinated me, as I love to see wild birds; he explains how the taming of the prairies and the conversion of grassland to farmland gradually destroyed the vast habitat of the bird. Once killed by the hundreds and shipped in barrels to American cities, the prairie chicken is now mostly protected from any hunting at all -- so of course he never tasted any.

Other now-rarely-eaten game included raccoon, possum, and terrapin, all enjoyed by Twain. Beahrs did manage to taste raccoon, but doesn't recommend it, while the traditional way to boil a live terrapin made Beahrs decide not to follow Twain's example. Oysters on the East coast, the West coast, and the Gulf coast were all popular in Twain's day, and Beahrs documents their history and how few of them remain as they were then. On an early trip west, Twain loved the now probably extinct species of trout from Lake Tahoe, whose natural history appears in the book.

In contrast to the fraught history of fish and game in early American life, maple syrup and cranberries, which Twain loved, are still quite available and not at all obscure. Two fabulous flavors, in my opinion! Beahrs presented both the history and the current methods for preparing these two favorites.

Beahrs researched the methods that Native Americans used to gather maple sap, with its 2% sugar, and concentrate it into a much more intense sweetener. Lacking iron kettles, they hollowed-out felled tree trunks, poured sap into them, and then dropped hot rocks into the sap to bring it to a nearly-explosive boil and turn it to syrup. An interesting bit of historical background: abolitionist Benjamin Rush, at the time of the American Revolution, encouraged the substitution of maple sugar for cane sugar -- because it would help defeat the slave-intensive production of refined cane sugar.

I was delighted and fascinated by the wide variety of past and present food information that's assembled in this book. I loved the way he tried to find both the similarities and the differences between how things probably tasted to Mark Twain and how they taste now.