Food, History, Fire, Words
Twain’s Feast
“What a gift this is! Inspired by the foods most loved by Mark Twain, Beahrs has given us a warm and nostalgic history of wild foods in the United States.” - Marion Nestle
In the winter of 1879, Mark Twain paused during a European tour to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. A true love letter to American food, the menu included some eighty specialties, from Mississippi black bass to canvas-back ducks from Baltimore. In Twain’s Feast, Andrew Beahrs chooses eight of these forgotten regional specialties, retracing Twain’s footsteps as he sets out to discover whether the great author’s favorite foods can still be found on American tables. Weaving together passages from Twain’s famous works and Beahrs’s own adventures, this travelogue-cum-culinary history takes us back to a bygone era when wild foods were at the heart of American cooking.
Order Twain’s Feast from a local independent bookstore, or buy it on Amazon.
“Part offbeat literary study, part Blue Highways travelogue, part slow-food manifesto…lots of fun.” - New York Times Book Review
“Beahrs, a wonderfully lucid, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic writer, uses Twain’s gustatory passions as a map with which to explore the nation.” – Chicago Tribune
