The Physiology of Taste (24 page)

Since chocolate has come into common usage in France, everyone has been taught how to make it; but few people have really mastered the art, which is far from an easy one.

First of all it is necessary to be able to tell good cacao from bad, and to be
determined
to use it in its purest form, for there are inferior samples in even the best boxes of it, and a careless merchant often lets bruised kernels slip by, which his conscience should make him reject. Then the roasting of the cacao is still another delicate operation; it demands a certain feeling for it which must border on inspiration. There are roasters who are born with this instinct, and are infallible.

Then a special talent is needed for the proper regulation of the amount of sugar which must enter into the mixture; it cannot be fixed in routine and inflexible proportions, but varies according to the intensity of flavor of each lot of cacao beans and the point at which the roasting is stopped.

Pounding and mixing both demand special care, as well, since upon them depends the digestibility of the chocolate.

Other considerations must govern the choice and amount of flavoring, which cannot be the same for chocolates meant to be used as food and those meant to be eaten as delicacies. This flavoring must also be adjusted to whether or not vanilla has been added to the mixture. The net result is that, in order to make a truly exquisite chocolate, countless subtle equations must be solved, from which we benefit without even having been conscious of them.

For some time now machines have been used for the making of chocolate; we do not feel that this method adds anything to
the quality of the product, but certainly it lessens the handwork, and those manufacturers who have adopted it should be able to sell their product at much lower prices. Nevertheless they manage to dispose of it at even higher ones, a fact which makes it only too clear that the true commercial spirit has not yet appeared in France; for, rightly applied, the facility of production realized by machinery ought to prove profitable to both merchant and buyer.

As a lover of chocolate I have fairly well run the gamut of local purveyors, and have finally chosen M. Debauve, Rue des Saints-Pères, 26, chocolatemaker to the king, thanking heaven meanwhile that such regal favor has fallen so rightly.

It is not too astonishing: M. Debauve, a highly distinguished pharmacist, brings to the manufacture of his chocolates the skills which he acquired through long study in a much wider sphere.

People who have not worked at a certain subject, no matter what it may be, have no conception of the difficulties which must be overcome to attain perfection in it, nor how much attention, instinct, and experience are necessary to produce, for instance, a chocolate which is sweet without being insipid, strong but not bitter, aromatic but not unwholesome, and thick but not grainy.

Such are the chocolates of M. Debauve: they owe their supremacy to a good choice of materials, to a stern vow that nothing inferior ever come from his factory, and to the master’s eye which sees to every detail in production.

M. Debauve, moreover, as an enlightened pharmacist, has succeeded in offering to his numerous clients some pleasant remedies for certain sickly tendencies.

Thus, to those who are too thin he suggests the use of a restorative chocolate with salep;
²⁶
to highly nervous people, antispasmodic chocolate flavored with orange-flower water; to irritable souls, chocolate with milk of almond; to which list he will undoubtedly add my
chocolate of the unhappy
, well prepared with amber
secundum artem
.

But his main merit is to offer to us, at a moderate price, an excellent average-priced chocolate, from which we can make a good breakfast; which will delight us, at dinner, in custards; and which will still please us, at the end of the evening, in the ices
and little cakes and other delicacies of the drawing room, without even mentioning the amusing distraction of pastilles and crackers, with or without mottoes.

We know M. Debauve only by his products; we have never seen him; but we do know that he helps mightily to free France from the tribute which she used to pay to Spain, in that he provides both Paris and the provinces with a chocolate whose reputation does not cease to grow. We also know that every day he receives more orders from beyond our borders; it is therefore because of this fact, and as a charter member of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, that we make here this mention and this recommendation of him, of which it will soon be seen that we are not too generous.

Americans make their chocolate without sugar. When they wish to drink it, they have boiling water brought to them; then each person grates into his cup the amount of cacao he wishes, pours the hot water over it, and adds sugar and flavoring according to his own tastes.

This method appeals neither to our manners nor to our preferences, and here in France we like to have chocolate served to us all prepared.

Transcendental chemistry has taught us that it should neither be grated with a scraper nor ground with a pestle, since the dry friction which results in either case turns part of the sugar into starch, and makes the beverage less flavorsome.

Therefore, to make chocolate, that is to say to make it ready for immediate use, about an ounce and a half should be taken for each cup, and then dissolved slowly in water as it heats, stirring the whole meanwhile with a wooden spatula; it should boil then for fifteen minutes, so that the solution takes on a certain thickness, and then be served very hot.

“Monsieur,” Madame d’Arestel, Superior of the convent of the Visitation at Belley, once said to me more than fifty years ago, “whenever you want to have a really good cup of chocolate, make it the day before, in a porcelain coffeepot, and let it set.
The night’s rest will concentrate it and give it a velvety quality which will make it better. Our good God cannot possibly take offense at this little refinement, since he himself is everything that is most perfect.”
²⁷

1.
In the text the Professor spells this word with two
t
s. Perhaps this footnote was added after his death? Certainly it is one of the rare inconsistencies in his precise and finicky style.

2.
In an old tale, Fortunatus had in his pocket an inexhaustible purse, and on his head a magic cap that could transport him anywhere at all. (In the end he was undone …)

3.
For a man who interested himself as passionately as did the Professor in the subject of turkeys, he was both vague and illogical. It is true that turkey cocks were called
coqs d’Inde
in France in his time, but they had been called turkeys and recognized as natives of Africa since 1555 in England, albeit they were really guinea fowl. But at about the same time our presently known turkeys were found by Europeans in Mexico. As for Brillat-Savarin’s next sentence, about “the shape,” it is a strangely unlegal sentence for a cautious old lawyer: does the shape of a thing prove it to be of this land or that?

4.
These secret-diary references are a plague, at least to anyone who is as curious as I have come to be about the Professor. It is astonishing that any man living in his period could leave so little behind him. He and most of his friends were at one time or another political refugees, salving themselves with the unguent of continual letter writing, journal keeping. But not only is there no mention of any titillating and tight-locked memoirs of Brillat-Savarin: there is almost no mention of the man himself, although he moved discreetly through a dozen concentric social circles touching the Chaussée d’Antin. I think that his occasional waggish references to his secret diary are waggish, and no more: he was plainly a desirable companion, which meant that the ladies liked him, and in a man of the years he bore when he polished this book for the printer, sly humorous references would
be much more
de rigueur
than any more direct approach to their feminine attributes. I have known professors past their virile prime who made themselves welcome indeed for the things they managed not to say, rather than the things they were unable to do. There was always a note, a hint, of possibility, past or even present, which Brillat-Savarin sounded often with his preeminently ungossipy hints of gossip.

5.
The Professor uses the pretty word
volatile
here. It was still heard as an adjective in English in the nineteenth century, when “volatile insects” flitted through novels and text books alike, and directions for carving, as in Soyer’s
GASTRONOMIC REGENERATOR
, referred ponderously to feathered game as “the volatile species.” But as a noun few writers since Brillat-Savarin have used it.
“J’empoignai le superbe volatile,”
he said, and the picture of him standing proud and alone in the virgin American forest with his wild catch in his fist is as good as any for an honest Latinism’s obit.

6.
It is too bad, indeed it is a pity, that the Professor suppressed the details of his solemn labor. How was his “superb volatile” prepared? It was roasted, and it was good, and that is all we know. Did he baste it often? Half sweet butter and half olive oil, kept mixed and hot, are good for that. Did he stuff the bird?

The only living human being I have known who could speak casually of hunting, cleaning, and then roasting a wild turkey, and all that in the state of Arkansas, told me that in general the birds are stuffed lightly with cold cornbread and plenty of butter. In general, this woman said to me, histing blue denim pants over her flat hip-bones and looking Chinese-like over her straight lower lids, in general wild turkeys isn’t thought highly of and people who cook them at all slice off the two breast-meat pieces and fry them in good hog fat
(Filets de coq d’Inde sauvage
, I thought), and they sure enough taste damn near as good as steak, she said. But if they are roasted they take a lot of basting to keep from being dry, and yes they should be stuffed.

I thought, as she spoke, of all the stuffings in the world, especially of the one in which fresh shelled oysters and then melted butter and then fresh oysters are poured into the dark hollow until it can hold no more and must be stiched shut. I thought of
what Morton Thompson once wrote at the end of a recipe on How To Cook A Turkey: “No pen, unless it were filled with Thompson’s gravy, can describe Thompson’s dressing and there is not paper enough in the world to contain the thoughts and adjectives it would set down, and not marble enough to serve for its monuments.”

7.
This brutishly refined recipe has made me search through every book I own, without success, and at the end I must admit that the puzzling part of it is what Canon Charcot did with the feathers. Did he pull them from the little live bird? This seems likely, from what the Professor writes in “Meditation 27”. Or did he dip it still peeping into a pot of boiling water? Or did he choke down the whole musty mouthful without a single refinement?

I prefer to think that the tiny fat carcass was plucked with finicky care by a lay brother, and then rubbed artfully with a bit of sweet butter so that the powdering of salt would stick, when hunger finally pushed the Canon to devour it. I can see him tuck the wee thing into his ample mouth, snip off the two curled claws with his strong teeth, and flick them over his shoulder as he champs and chews and holds back with his sensitive lips the juice that leaps forth from his tongue and his gums and his “inner cheeks.” I hear the mighty ecclesiastical crunching. It is good.

8.
Not all gastronomers agree with this didactic statement, as the recipe for Quails Richelieu with its poaching in veal stock can prove, but it is true that any man who has once eaten the little birds roasted in the ashes of a sleeping log fire will never again much care for other methods.