Free Twain's Feast by Andrew Beahrs

still only some thirty in the whole Virginia colony, which wouldn’t adopt truly large-scale slavery for decades. That’s an awfully small window—if the “young Child” wasn’t the first person of African descent to be born in what would become the United States, he or she was certainly among the first. Flowerdew Hundred, on the bank of the James, might be the best place in America to raise a monument to a small, unnamed child.
    Anyway, Jim hated Berkeley and, I believe, California in general. So when he was back in the Tidewater, he wanted to eat Southern, reveling in properly cured slab bacon, blue crabs, and stone-ground hominy grits. And up at the local store, there was a big chest freezer filled, Jim discovered, with skinned and gutted muskrats; and there, atop the freezer, was a hand-lettered sign affirming that eight of said muskrats could be had for the price of seven. So he came back with a sack of the things and wanged one down on a picnic table like a shovel, right in the middle of a particularly heated game of Spoons. The muskrats had their heads on, and their teeth were really long, their noses wrinkled up as though in disgust. We wrinkled our own noses in completely genuine disgust; some of us, I recall, swore. “Dinner, you ass-holes,” said Jim.
    The cook at Flowerdew that year was frankly astonishing. Archaeology food usually slants toward cold cereal, peanut butter and jelly, and mushy spaghetti with jarred sauce—hot dogs, if you’re lucky. But Eric put together unbelievable spreads, breakfasts that included biscuits, real-deal home fries, country ham, Virginia bacon, pork chops, fresh fruit, blintzes, and omelets cooked to order; one night we had homemade dim sum. He did all this in an open pavilion overlooking some thousand acres of corn and peanut fields and a cypress swamp where bald eagles nested. The story was that Eric had worked for a time at Chez Panisse, but I never knew if that was true—the path from the Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto to a Prince George County peanut field seemed a strange one, but Flowerdew did have a way of collecting wanderers. Whatever the truth was, Eric seemed like a fine person to trust with a platter of whole, semiaquatic rodents. He butchered the muskrats, soaked them in a salt-and-vinegar solution overnight, and fried the pieces up like chicken.
    It didn’t work. Perhaps Eric simply approached it wrong; maybe muskrat is a delicate and subtle thing, to be approached with the fine hand of a sushi artist touching his knife to fugu. Whatever: what we ended with, that day, was a platter of chicken-fried meat so dark as to be almost purple, which tasted like a cross between beef liver and sea mussels. Beef liver with sea mussels, let it be known, does not rank with truffled eggs among the world’s great natural taste combinations. I don’t think of myself as a tentative eater; as I write this, a whole pig’s head is simmering on my stove. I’ll fry the slivered ears with joy and strip the snout and tongue for brawn. But I’ve never again sought out muskrat.
    Raccoon has a much better reputation. So does possum. You come across recipes for either more frequently than with muskrat, up to and including Joy of Cooking; the encyclopedic L.L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook says that raccoon meat is “just as tasty as squirrel, and better than rabbit.” People like raccoon, it seems, and anyway, I wouldn’t be cooking the ones from our backyard, which clambered from Berkeley’s antique, redwood storm drains after foraging for unspeakable things. The ones I’d eat would be clean raccoons, woodland raccoons, sanitary raccoons, the kind that spend hours scrubbing acorns in fresh mountain streams.
    Eli says, “No.”
    Reluctantly, I agree. And when I have time to think about it, I realize that the most important thing Twain wrote about raccoon wasn’t even about the taste. It was about how he got the meat in the first place, hunting it in the woods beyond his uncle’s