Mark Twain’s Feast

(wweek) For most of America’s early history, when all food was local, the best of our emergent cuisine came from the wild. But almost as soon as some of our foundational foods were born from the rich stew of immigrant techniques and American raw ingredients, they had flickered into oblivion. In Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens (The Penguin Press, 323 pages, $25.95), California food writer Andrew Beahrs tells the story of eight of Twain’s favorite American foods, among them “possum,” “coon” and “Philadelphia Terrapin Soup.” Continued