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Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens
by Andrew Beahrs
- Used
- as new
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- As New/As New
- ISBN 10
- 1594202591
- ISBN 13
- 9781594202599
- Seller
-
Rock Island, Illinois, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
First Edition. First Printing. Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens. Andrew Beahrs. Penguin Press (2010). Fine, as new, unread hardcover with fine, as new jacket in new removable Brodart sleeve. NOT a remainder. Boxed for safe shipping. 15-b
Synopsis
One young food writer's search for America's lost wild foods, from New Orleans croakers to Illinois Prairie hen, with Mark Twain as his guide. In the winter of 1879, Mark Twain paused during a tour of Europe to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. He was desperately sick of European hotel cooking, and his menu, made up of some eighty regional specialties, was a true love letter to American food: Lake Trout, from Tahoe. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Canvasback-duck, from Baltimore. Black-bass, from the Mississippi. 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 Hannibal, Missouri, and San Francisco. These dishes were all local, all wild, and all, Beahrs feared, had been lost in the shift to industrialized food. In Twain's Feast , Beahrs sets out to discover whether eight of these forgotten regional specialties can still be found on American tables, tracing Twain's footsteps as he goes. Twain's menu, it turns out, was also a memoir and a map. The dishes he yearned for were all connected to cherished moments in his life-from the New Orleans croakers he loved as a young man on the Mississippi to the maple syrup he savored in Connecticut, with his family, during his final, lonely years. Tracking Twain's foods leads Beahrs from the dwindling prairie of rural Illinois to a six-hundred-pound coon supper in Arkansas to the biggest native oyster reef in San Francisco Bay. 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. In Twain's Feast , 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. Weaving together passages from Twain's famous works and Beahrs's own adventures, Twain's Feast takes us on a journey into America's past, to a time when foods taken fresh from grasslands, woods, and waters were at the heart of American cooking.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Widdershin's Books
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 484
- Title
- Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens
- Author
- Andrew Beahrs
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- New
- Jacket Condition
- As New
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- First Edition. First Printing
- ISBN 10
- 1594202591
- ISBN 13
- 9781594202599
- Publisher
- Penguin Press
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2010
- Bookseller catalogs
- American History; Cookbooks;
Terms of Sale
Widdershin's Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged in transit.
About the Seller
Widdershin's Books
Biblio member since 2019
Rock Island, Illinois
About Widdershin's Books
Trading since 1970, Widdershin's Books offers fantastic voyages, transformative myth, regional lore, and frank speculation.
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- Brodart
- Generally used to refer to a clear plastic cover that is sometimes added to the dustjacket or outside covering of a book. The...
- Remainder
- Book(s) which are sold at a very deep discount to alleviate publisher overstock. Often, though not always, they have a remainder...
- New
- A new book is a book previously not circulated to a buyer. Although a new book is typically free of any faults or defects, "new"...
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
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