The Physiology of Taste (16 page)

22: Such is, at first glance, the kingdom of gastronomy, a domain fertile in every kind of results, which can only grow mightier by the discoveries and the labors of the wise men who till it; for it is inconceivable that gastronomy, before too many years, will not have its own academicians, its professors, its yearly courses and its contests for scholarships.

First of all a rich and zealous enthusiast must organize in his own home a series of periodical gatherings, where the best-trained theoreticians will meet with the finest practitioners, to discuss and penetrate the different branches of alimentary science.

Then (and this is the story of all such schools) the government will step in, to regulate, protect, subsidize, and finally to seize one more chance to give back to the people some compensation for all the orphans its cannons have made, and all the women who have wept because of them.

How happy will be the man of might who gives his name to this essential institution! It will be repeated from century to century with those of Noah, of Bacchus, of Triptolemus
⁴
and of other benefactors of the human race; he will be among ministers what Henry IV is among the kings, and his eulogy will be on every
tongue,
⁵
without any law to force putting it there.

1.
In
MAN
,
BREAD
,
AND
DESTINY
, J. C. Furnas wrote cynically, “Books which suggest simplicity in the kitchen never sell well.” His, which did suggest just that, has gone into many editions since it first appeared in 1937.

2.
In an unsigned article in
ST
.
JAMES’S
MAGAZINE
, published in London in 1868, a reviewer of the Professor’s book said with what might almost be called enthusiasm, “Speaking of Brillat-Savarin, it is no exaggeration to declare, that every statesman, as well as every physician, ought to make a pocket companion of his
PHYSIOLOGIE
DU
GOUT
.”

3.
The Professor’s enthusiasm for his subject sometimes overpowered his innate sense of detachment, and he permitted himself a fine extravagance like this, as if to prove himself reassuringly human. It is said that more than once, during the twenty-five or thirty years he worked on
THE
PHYSIOLOGY
OF
TASTE
, he could not bear to leave the manuscript at home and tucked it into his hip pocket to carry to the law courts so that he might make a few revisions as the spirit moved him. At least once it was lost. Fortunately it turned up: it is hard to imagine either French or English letters without it.

4.
Triptolemus, one of the principal figures in Greek religion, is said to be the inventor of the plow and of agriculture, and therefore the real father of what we call civilization.

5.
This pardonable play on words must have pleased Brillat-Savarin, in a quiet but thorough way. In spite of his surface flippancy, he felt strongly about the social importance of gastronomy, and the chance to imply that full mouths would be praiseful mouths was one that he could not let slip by him.

23:
MOVEMENT
AND
LIFE
cause a steady loss of substance in any living being; and the human body, that highly complicated machine, would soon be useless if Providence had not placed in it a sentinel which sounds warning the moment its resources are no longer in perfect balance with its needs.

This guardian is appetite, by which is meant the first warning of the need to eat.

Appetite declares itself by a vague languor in one’s stomach and a slight feeling of fatigue.

At the same time one’s soul concerns itself with things connected with its own needs; memory recalls dishes that have pleased the taste; imagination pretends to see them; there is something dreamlike about the whole process. This state is not without its charms, and a thousand times we have heard its devotees exclaim with a full heart: “How wonderful to have a good appetite, when we are sure of enjoying an excellent dinner before long!”

However, one’s whole digestive machine soon takes part in the action: the stomach becomes sensitive to the touch; gastric juices flow freely; interior gases move about noisily; one’s mouth waters, and every part of the machine stands at attention, like soldiers waiting only for the order to attack. A few minutes more, and spasmodic movements will begin: one will yawn, feel uncomfortable, and in short be hungry.

It is easy to watch all the nuances of these various states in any drawing room when dinner has been delayed.

They are as much a part of instinct that the most exquisite politeness cannot hide their symptoms, from which fact I have
coined the following aphorism: Of all the qualities of a good cook, punctuality is the most indispensable.

24: I shall illustrate this important maxim by the details of what I once observed at a gathering I attended,

    Quorum pars magna fui,

where my enjoyment in watching saved me from miserable discomfort.

I was invited, this day, to the home of an important official.
¹
The card read five thirty, and at that precise hour all the guests had arrived, because it was common knowledge that the host loved punctuality and sometimes scolded his lazier friends.

I was struck, on my arrival, by an air of alarm which I saw everywhere: the guests whispered among themselves, or peeked through the windowpanes into the courtyard, and some of their faces showed plain stupefaction. Obviously something extraordinary had occurred.

I went up to the one of the guests I felt would be best able to satisfy my curiosity, and asked him what had happened. “Alas!” he answered in a voice of the deepest suffering, “his lordship has been summoned to a conference of state. He just this moment left for it, and who knows when he will be back again?”

“Is that all?” I replied, in an insouciant way which was far from genuine. “It’s a question of a quarter-hour at the most; some information they needed; everyone knows that an official banquet is taking place here today; there is absolutely no reason to make us fast at it.” I continued to talk this way; but in the bottom of my heart I was not without anxiety, and I should have loved to be safely out of the whole business.

The first hour passed well enough, with the guests seated next to their preferred friends; conversational banalities were soon exhausted, and we amused ourselves by guessing the reasons why our good host had been thus summoned to the Tuileries.

During the second hour a few signs of impatience began to show themselves: the guests looked at each other worriedly, and
the first ones who complained aloud were three or four of the company who, not having found places to sit down and wait, were especially uncomfortable.

By the third hour, discontent was general, and everyone complained. “When will he be back?” one of them asked. “What can he be thinking of?” another said. “This is murderous!” said a third, and everywhere it was demanded, with never a satisfactory reply, “Should we go? Should we not go?”

By the fourth hour all the symptoms had grown worse: the guests stretched themselves, at the risk of knocking into their neighbors; the room was filled with the singsong of helpless yawns; every face was flushed with concentration; and not a soul listened to me when I risked remarking that our host was without doubt the most miserable of any of us.

At one point our attention was riveted by a ghostly sight. One of the guests, more familiar to the house than some of us, roamed as far as the kitchens; he came back completely out of breath; his face looking as if the end of the world were upon us, and he burst out in an almost unintelligible voice, in that heavy tone which betrays both a fear of being heard and a wish to be listened to: “His lordship left without giving any orders, and no matter how long he is gone, nothing will be served until he comes back!” He had spoken: the horror which his announcement roused could not possibly be outdone by the trumpet of the last judgment.

Among all these martyrs, the unhappiest was the good d’Aigrefeuille, well-known to all of Paris in those days; his body was the personification of misery, and the agony of a Laocoön showed in his face. Pale, distracted, sightless, he hunched himself into a chair, crossed his little hands over his generous belly, and closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to wait for his own death.

It was not Death, however, who came. About ten o’clock there was the sound of carriage-wheels in the courtyard. Everyone jumped to his feet. Gaiety took the place of sadness, and five minutes later we were seated at the table.

But the time of appetite had passed. There was a feeling of astonishment at beginning a dinner at this unfamiliar hour; our jaws could not attain that synchronized chewing which is a
guarantee of perfect digestion, and I learned later that several of the guests were inconvenienced by it.
²

The procedure indicated in such a situation is not to eat immediately after the enforced fast has ended, but to drink a glass of sugared water, or a cup of broth, to comfort the stomach; and then to wait another twelve or fifteen minutes, since otherwise the abused organ will find too oppressive the weight of the foods with which it has been overstuffed.

25: When we read, in earlier writings, of the preparations which were made to entertain two or three people, as well as the enormous portions which were served to a single man, it is hard not to believe that our ancestors who lived nearer than we to the beginnings of the world must have been endowed with a much greater appetite than ours.

This appetite was held to increase in direct ratio to the importance of the person; and that man to whom was served no less than the whole back of a five-year-old bull was served his drink in a cup almost too enormous to lift.

There are still a few living witnesses of what happened in the old days, and written memoirs are full of examples of an almost incredible voracity, one which covered every kind of edible thing, down to the most unclean.

I shall spare my readers these somewhat disgusting details, and I prefer to tell them of two special feats which I myself witnessed, and which will not demand blind faith in order to be believed.

Some forty years ago I paid a flying visit to the vicar of Bregnier, a man of great stature, whose appetite was renowned throughout the district.

Although it was hardly noon, I found him already eating. The soup and boiled beef had been served, and after these two traditional dishes came a leg of mutton
à la royale,
³
a handsome capon, and a generous salad.

As soon as he saw me arriving, he ordered a place set for me, which I very wisely refused; for, alone and without help from me, he easily got rid of the whole course, which is to say, the mutton
down to its bone, the capon down to its several bones, and the salad down to the bottom of the bowl.

Next came a good-sized white cheese, from which he cut a wedge-shaped piece of precisely ninety degrees; and he washed down the whole with a bottle of wine and a carafe of water, after which he rested.

What delighted me about it was that, during this entire operation which lasted about three quarters of an hour, the good priest seemed completely at his ease. The generous-sized chunks he tossed into his great mouth did not keep him from either talking or laughing; and he polished off everything that was served to him with no more fuss than if he were nibbling at three little larks.

In the same way General Bisson, who drank eight bottles of wine every day with his breakfast, had an air of not even touching them; he used a larger glass than his guests’, and emptied it oftener; but you would have said that he did it without paying any attention to it, and while he thus absorbed some sixteen pints of wine he was no more kept from joking and giving his daily orders than if he had drunk only a tumblerful.

This feat reminds me of the brave General P. Sibuet, from my own part of the country, who was for a long time first aide-decamp to General Masséna,
⁴
and who died on the field of honor at the passage of the Bober in 1813.

Prosper, when he was eighteen years old, and had that happy appetite which is Nature’s way of saying that she is busy finishing off the creation of a fine sturdy man, went one evening into the kitchen of Genin’s inn, where the old men of Belley were used to meet together to eat chestnuts and drink the newly fermented white wine which is called
bourru
in that district.

Genin had just taken off the spit a magnificent turkey, a fine well-shaped bird, golden brown, cooked to perfection, whose aroma would have tempted a saint.

The old men, who were no longer hungry, paid little attention to it; but the digestive powers of young Prosper were violently aroused by it; his mouth began to water, and he exclaimed, “I just got up from the dinner table, but I’ll still bet that I can eat this big turkey singlehanded.”
“Sez vosu mezé, z’u payo,”
replied
Bouvier du Bouchet, a fat farmer who was there, “
è sez vos caca en rotaz, i-zet vo ket pairé et may ket mezerai la restaz.”
^*

The contest started immediately. The young athlete took off a wing very nicely, and swallowed it in two mouthfuls, after which he cleared his teeth by munching the neck of the bird, and drank a glass of wine by way of interlude.

Then he attacked the leg, ate it with the same poise, and dispatched a second glass of wine, to prepare a passageway for what was still to come.

Soon the second wing followed the same path: it disappeared, and the contestant, more and more active, seized upon the last of the four members, when the unhappy farmer cried out mournfully:
“Hai! ze vaie
PRAOU
qu’i-zet fotu; m’ez, monche Chibouet, poez kaet zu daive paiet, lessé m’en a m’en mesiet on mocho.”
^†