If Mark Twain invited you over for dinner, you’d better come hungry.
Or to put it more accurately: Samuel Clemens and his wife entertained guests almost nightly at their Connecticut home and dropped around $100 a week on groceries (around $2,668 today)—so you’d best be prepared for an utter culinary assault.
Take, for example, this menu from one summer night in the latter half of the 19th century, as documented by author Steve Courtney in his book “The Loveliest Home That Ever Was”:
• Olives, salted almonds, and bonbons in “curious dishes”
• Soup of unknown provenance
• Sherry
• Fresh salmon in white wine sauce
• Naturally sparkling mineral water from a spring in Germany
• Sweetbreads in cream
• Broiled chicken with green peas and new potatoes
• Tomato salad with mayonnaise dressing
• Charlotte Russe cake and wine jelly with candied cherries and whipped cream
• And, finally, a plate of strawberries “the size of walnuts.”
Next came the entertainment: Clemens himself. Before the massive oak mantlepiece he had acquired from a castle in Scotland for his library, Clemens read excerpts from his new
