This meal symbolized, rather than replicated, the first Plymouth celebration. Where Plymouth had feared starvation, Hale assumed easy abundance, replacing hunted and foraged foods with those from the nation’s bountiful farms. She insisted upon pumpkin pie and many other dishes unknown to the first celebrants, who rejoiced over what they’d been able to grow, rather than what they had chosen to eat.

Hale’s was the new domestic ideal. Still, Twain’s menu suggests that wild foods continued to give American cuisine its unmistakable character. On Thanksgiving, Twain wanted a domestic turkey, with cranberry sauce and stuffing. But every Christmas, he delighted in the gift of a brace of prairie hens a dear friend sent him by rail from the Illinois tall grass.

Even some farmed foods had recent wild roots, such as the cranberries first cultivated a mere half-century earlier. Though the majority of foods in Twain’s day were domestic, the wild ones were distinct and wonderful, rooting meals in the natural world as cultivated things never could.

His menu celebrated the amazingly varied landscapes of an entire nation. Shad from Connecticut, mussels from San Francisco, brook trout from the Sierras and partridges from Missouri all found their place alongside apple dumplings, Southern-style egg bread, “American toast,” and strawberries, which were “not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way.”

In a sense, Twain’s menu was a biographical sketch, for during a lifetime of travel he had eaten each and every one of the wild foods near its source. But it was also a portrait of what American food could be at its best: a cuisine with a deep sense of place, reflecting a splendid jumble of national landscapes and the people who lived in and off them.

The Pilgrims appreciated wild foods for their contribution to survival; Twain, for their taste and their hold on his memory. All saw the foods as fundamental to the America they knew. None would have imagined that many would one day be seen as curiosities.