Shares insights into Mark Twain's menu-style tribute to American cuisine and how it included wild regional specialties that have been lost to industrial food production, tracing the author's efforts to track down eight specific dishes.
In 1879, Mark Twain paused during a tour of Europe to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. He was sick of European hotel cooking, and his menu, made up of some eighty regional specialties, was a true love letter to American food. When food writer Andrew Beahrs first read Twain's menu in the classic work A Tramp Abroad, he noticed the dishes were regional in the truest sense of the word--drawn fresh from grasslands, woods, and waters in a time before railroads had dissolved the culinary lines between regions. These dishes were all local, all wild, and all, Beahrs feared, lost in the shift to industrialized food. In Twain's Feast, Beahrs sets out to discover whether eight of these forgotten specialties can still be found on American tables, tracing Twain's footsteps as he goes. He finds pockets of the country where Twain's favorite foods still exist or where intrepid farmers, fishermen, and conservationists are trying to bring them back. He reminds us what we've lost as these wild foods have disappeared from our tables, and what we stand to gain from their return.--From publisher description.
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