Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens - Rilegato

"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. His search for once abundant native foods reveals how much we have lost. This book should encourage food lovers to get busy and rescue the wild foods that remain."
-Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat

"Twain's Feast is a celebration of the way America used to eat. Andrew Beahrs shares with the reader the delightful appetites of Samuel Clemens, a bevy of old-timey recipes, and his own journey to discover whatever happened to our culinary traditions. Beahrs's attention to detail had my mouth watering for a Tahoe trout cooked over a campfire, freshly shucked oysters on the half-shell, and I'm sad to admit, the now endangered prairie chicken, roasted."
-Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City

"Twain's Feast takes us on an engaging, quixotic search for the lost regional specialties Mark Twain loved-and reminds us of how food always shapes our sense of where we come from and who we are. Whether gorging on barbecued raccoon, mourning the endangered terrapin, or whipping up a chess pie with his young son, Andrew Beahrs pays attention to the details that make meals memorable. Anyone who likes Twain, or cooking, or the bittersweet history of our changing landscape will savor this feast."
-Jane Smith, author of The Garden of Invention

"Long before the Slow Food movement, Mark Twain championed regional American cooking. In this beautifully written ode to Twain and local delicacies like possum, oysters and Philadelphia terrapin, Andrew Beahrs has given us an instant classic in the literature of the table."
-Andrew Todhunter, author of A Meal Observed

"I had no idea that a menu written down by Mark Twain over a century ago could teach us so much about American food, but in the skillful hands of Andrew Beahrs, it does that and more. Twain's Feast is a brilliant book: elegant, insightful, and funny, part history and part hungry-making. It's not only an illuminating and relevant read, but a fun one."
-Molly Wizenberg, author of A Homemade Life

Andrew Beahrs is the author of two novels, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Ocean Magazine, Food History News, and Living Bird. He received his M.A. in anthropology- archaeology from the University of Virginia and his M.F.A. in fiction from Spalding University.