The Physiology of Taste (47 page)

This sensual extravagance had also its aberrations and its perversions. Such were the feasts where the fishes and birds which were served were counted in the thousands, and the dishes which had no other merit than their exorbitant cost, like one which was made of the brains of five hundred ostriches, and another where were used the tongues of five thousand birds which had first been trained to speak.

From all this it seems to me that it is easy to understand the enormous sums Lucullus must have spent on his table and the expenses of the banquets which he gave in his Room of Apollo, where it was the rule to exhaust all known methods to flatter the sensuality of his guests.

129: These glorious days could well come again in our own time, and to see them once more it is only necessary to produce a Lucullus for them. Let us suppose, for example, that a man known to be powerfully rich would like to celebrate a great political or financial event, and give in its honor a memorable banquet, without bothering himself in any way with what it would cost;
¹⁰

Let us suppose that he calls on all the arts to decorate every corner of the place chosen for the festival, and that he orders his stewards to use every artifice in the feast itself and whatever is best in his cellars to refresh his guests;
¹¹

That he have two plays presented by the greatest actors during this luxurious occasion;

That, during the repast, music be heard, executed by the most renowned artists not only of the voice but of instruments;

That he has planned, between the dinner and the coffee, a ballet performed by everything that is lightest and loveliest among the Opera’s dancers;

That the evening end with a ball attended by two hundred of the most beautiful ladies, and four hundred of the most elegant gentlemen in existence;

That the buffet be constantly replenished with whatever is known to be peerless among hot, cool, and iced drinks;

That, toward the middle of the night, an artful supper be served to give everyone new enthusiasm;

That the servants be handsome and finely uniformed, and the lighting perfect; and, to forget nothing, that the host see to it that each guest be fetched and carried in a way proper to his social importance.

Given this feast, thus well conceived and planned, thus well prepared and well executed, anyone who knows Parisian life will agree with me that the next day’s reckonings would make even the cashier of Lucullus tremble.

In my exposition of what we would have to do today to imitate one of this magnificent Roman’s feasts, I have given enough hints to my reader of what was necessary for the obligatory accessories of such a celebration, where there must always be actors, singers, mimes, clowns, and everything that could add to the pleasure of people who had been invited together for the sole purpose of being amused.

What was first done by the Athenians, then by the Romans, still later in our own land during the Middle Ages, and finally by us today, springs equally from the basic nature of man, who awaits with impatience the end of his life work, and from a kind of inquietude which tortures him, so long as the sum total of the life that is remaining to him is not filled to the brimming point with conscious enjoyment.

130: Romans, like the Athenians, ate lying down, but they did not come to do so without following a somewhat devious route.

First of all they used couches for the sacred meals which they offered to their gods; the foremost magistrates and the most powerful citizens took up the custom, and in a short time it became general and was followed until almost the beginning of the fourth century in the Christian era.

These couches, which were at the beginning no more than a kind of bench softened with straw and covered over with skins, soon became a vital part of the luxury which crept into everything having to do with banqueting. They were constructed of
the most precious woods, inlaid with ivory and gold and even gems; they were formed of cushions of incredible softness, and the covers thrown over them were encrusted with magnificent embroideries.

Guests lay upon their left sides, leaning upon that elbow; and usually one couch held three people.

This way of lying at table, which the Romans called
lectisternium
: was it more convenient, was it more comfortable than the one we have adopted, or rather resumed? I do not think so.

From a physical point of view, leaning upon one elbow demands a certain apportioning of strength in order to stay balanced, and it is not without discomfort that the weight of one part of the entire body rests upon a single joint in the arm.

There is also something to be said from a physiological viewpoint: food is put into the mouth in an unnatural way, and flows with some difficulty toward the stomach, where it collects less evenly.

The absorption of liquids, or rather the act of swallowing them, is even more difficult: it must have demanded a very special skill not to spill the wine held in those great goblets which gleamed upon the tables of the wealthy Romans, and it is doubtless during the reign of the
lectisternium
that was born the proverb which says that
there’s many a slip’twixt the cup and the lip
.

It could not have been any easier to eat decently when lying down, especially when one remembers that many of the guests wore long beards and that they all ate with their fingers, or at best a knife to carry the morsels to the mouth, since the use of forks is modern; not one was found in the ruins of Herculaneum, although many spoons were uncovered there.

It must also be assumed that there were, here and there and now and then, some assaults on common modesty, in celebrations which frequently depassed the limits of moderation, on couches where both sexes lay together and where it was not rare to see a group of slumbering guests.

And thus it is man’s moral sense which first protested.

As soon as the Christian faith, released from the persecutions which bloodied its cradle, had gained some power, its ministers raised their voices against the sin of intemperance. They cried out against the length of banquets, where all their precepts were violated while all the fleshly pleasures were enjoyed. Themselves pledged to an austere regimen, they placed gourmandism among the capital sins, sourly criticized the promiscuity of the sexes, and above all attacked the custom of dining upon couches, one which seemed to them the result of a shameful softness and the principal cause of all the habits they deplored.

Their doomful cry was heard; couches ceased to ornament the banquet halls, and people went back to the old way of eating in a seated position; and by a happy accident this stricture based upon morality did nothing to hinder man’s enjoyment.

131: In the Roman period which we are discussing, convivial poetry underwent a change and took on, in the mouths of Horace, Tibullus, and other fairly contemporary writers, a languorous soft character which the Greek muses never knew.

132: The five or six hundred years which we have run through in the past few pages were happy times for cookery, as well as for
those who nurtured and enjoyed it, but the arrival or rather the invasion of the Northerners changed everything, upset everything: those days of glory were followed by a long and terrible darkness.

The art of eating disappeared, at the first sight of these foreigners, with all the other arts of which it is the companion and solace. Most of the great cooks were murdered in their masters’ palaces; others fled rather than prepare feasts for the oppressors of their country; the small number who remained to offer their services had the humiliation of finding them refused. Those snarling mouths, those leathery gullets, were insensible to the subtleties of refined cookery. Enormous quarters of beef and venison, quantities beyond measure of the strongest drink, were enough to charm them; and since the invaders were always armed, most of their banquets degenerated into orgies, and their dining halls often ran with blood.

However, it is in the nature of things that what is excessive does not last long. The conquerors finally grew bored with their own cruelty: they mingled with the conquered, took on a tinge of civilization, and began to know the pleasures of a social existence.

Meals showed the influence of this alleviation. Guests were invited to them less to be stuffed than to be delighted, and some even began to understand that a certain attempt was being made to please them; a more amiable pleasure affected everyone, and the duties of hospitality had something gentler about them than before.

These betterments, which emerged toward the fifth century of our era, became even stronger under Charlemagne, and we can read in his Capitularies that this great king gave his own attention to making his lands furnish their best for the fine fare of his table.

Under him and his successors, the banquet halls took on an air at once gallant and chivalrous; ladies were present to add their beauty and to distribute the prizes won in tourney, and there could be seen the pheasant with gilded claws and the spread-tailed peacock, carried to the princes’ tables by page boys gaudy with gold and by lovely virgins whose innocence did not always preclude their desire to please.

It should be noticed here that this makes the third time that women, sequestered by the Greeks, the Romans, and then the Franks, were brought in again to add their beauty to the banquet hall. The Turks alone have resisted this seduction. But dreadful storms menace that unsociable race, and before another thirty years have passed the powerful voice of the cannon will have proclaimed the emancipation of their odalisks.
¹³

Once this movement was inaugurated it has lasted until our own times, growing stronger with every generation.

Women, even the highest-born, busied themselves in their homes with the preparation of foods, and considered it a part of the duties of hospitality, especially as understood and practiced in France toward the end of the seventeenth century.

Under their pretty fingers some dishes suffered amazing changes; an eel grew the tongue of a serpent, a hare was served wearing cat’s ears, and like whimsicalities. They made great use of the spices which the Venetians were beginning to bring from the Orient, as well as the perfumes which came from Arabia, so that now and then a fish appeared cooked in rose water.
¹⁴
Luxury at table consisted mainly in the quantity of the dishes served, and things went so far that our kings felt obliged to put a brake on them by imposing sumptuary laws. These, needless to say, met the same fate as the ones written by the Greek and Roman legislators: they were laughed at, evaded, and forgotten, and survived in books only as historical monuments.

People continued, of course, to dine as well as they could, especially in the abbeys and convents and other religious retreats, for the wealth attached to these houses was less exposed to the hazards and dangers of the civil wars which for so long have ravaged France.

Since it is very plain that Frenchwomen have always taken more or less of a hand in whatever went on in their kitchens, it must be concluded that it is due to them that our cookery has reigned supreme in Europe, mainly because it contains an immense quantity of dishes so subtle and light and tempting that only the ladies could have invented them.

I have said that our ancestors continued to dine
as well as they could
. Often they could not. The suppers of our very kings were
sometimes a matter of luck, and we know that they were far from certain during the civil wars: Henry IV would have had a thin meal of it once, if he had not had the good sense to invite to his table the humble but happy owner of the only turkey in a town where the king must spend the night.

Nevertheless the science of cookery advanced little by little: the Crusaders enriched it with the shallot, plucked from the plains of Ascalon; parsley was brought from Italy; and, long before the time of Louis IX, our butchers and sausagemakers had based on their artfulness with pork the hope of making their fortunes, of which to this very day we can see memorable examples.

Pastry cooks were no less successful, and the products of their industry were an honorable part of every feast. Since before the reign of Charles IX they have been an important guild, and that ruler gave them a charter into which was written the right to make all bread used in Holy Communion.

Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, the Dutch imported coffee into Europe.
*
Soliman Aga, the Turkish diplomat who so flustered the hearts of our great-great-grandmothers, served them their first cups of the beverage in 1660; an American hawked it openly at the Saint-Germain Fair in 1670; and the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts had the first café decorated with mirrors and marble-topped tables, much as is the fashion today.

Sugar began to appear about then, too;
†
and Scarron,
¹⁵
when he complained that his stingy sister had made the holes of her sugar sieve smaller, at least let us know that this utensil was in use in his day.

It is also in the seventeenth century that brandy began to be
more commonly known. Distiling, whose basic principles had been brought back by the Crusaders, had remained a mystery known to only a few adepts. Toward the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV, stills became better understood, but it was not until Louis XV’s time that brandy was really popular, and it is only a few years ago that we succeeded, after countless minute experiments, in making alcohol in a single operation.