The Physiology of Taste (49 page)

1.
This word is so Latin, and so little used, that it sounds very much like a Professorial invention. But according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1942), it does actually mean just what it seems to: fruit-eating.

2.
Escoffier says sadly that these birds are not met with in American markets and it is therefore useless to give any recipes for them. The simplest French cook book I own says to put them plentifully upon a brochette, with a little piece of bacon between each one, and roast them over a very hot fire for eight or ten minutes. It says with gravity: “Figpeckers must never be emptied of their guts.”

3.
One of these may have been the Canon Charcot mentioned in “Meditation 6”, whose recipe for eating small birds continues to titillate the Professor’s readers. He himself manages to endow only other people with a true taste for uncooked meat, and reports its virtues by hearsay, although a rumor has it that he used to embarrass his legal colleagues by appearing all too often in court with a brace of wild birds tucked into his coat-tails, to hasten with his own heat their race toward that gamy disintegration known as “highness.” While it cannot be thought that he prepared all high birds with the Lucullan care he prescribed
for pheasant (“Varieties,” XII), it is probable from his cautious approach to the subject that he preferred to let other gastronomers enjoy game in the raw, and that he at least grilled the meat he carried with such odoriferous nonchalance in his pockets.

I myself have never yet been reduced by stark hunger to the ability to tear flesh from a carcass and devour it, but a peckish gourmandism has often enabled me to relish a plate of raw beef, finely chopped, served forth with toasted sourdough bread and some watercress. And rawboned fish, cut into thin strips and marinated for an hour or two in lime or lemon juice, is finicky enough for any self-styled gourmet.

4.
One of the most overquoted things in the English language is Charles Lamb’s nicely foolish story of the discovery of roast pig, and of how Bo-bo the idiot Chinese boy and his almost equally silly father kept burning down their buildings so that they might taste the poor little grilled porkers within. The Professorial word
osmazome
is never mentioned, of course, but Lamb writes: “There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted crackling, as it Lefevre Dacier is well called—the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance—” This plump little literary classic is as much fun to reread as some by Dickens, and is a sure proof of the connection between our sentiments and our salivary glands.

5.
Boudin
in France is a kind of sausage, a kind of custard really. It used to be part of any Parisian Christmas Eve feast, incongruous sometimes amongst the truffles, very forthright and vulgar. I would like to taste
Kokoretzi
in Greece, any time at all but especially at Easter, when the young lambs, when there
are
any young lambs, are broiled on long pine branches over open fires and beside them spit and sizzle all the entrails, chopped and highly seasoned and either tied together or stuffed into the gut-casings. It sounds good. It sounds a little less darkly disagreeably smooth than
boudin
.

6.
Anne-Lefévre Dacier (1654–1720) was an early French bluestocking, daughter of one famous classical scholar and wife of another. She translated
THE ILIAD
, among many other Greek
and Latin works. In
ANTIQUITATES CULINARIAE
, which was written and published in London in 1791 by Richard Warner, it says that Madame Dacier was mistaken, for in the Fifth Book of
THE ILIAD
there is a mention of boiling meat. Few readers can or will dispute this only faintly portentous point.

7.
In my 1870 edition of
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE
there is a footnote here signed by the Marquis de Cussy, who had a rather poor opinion of the Professor’s gourmandism. It is probably taken from
L’ART CULINAIRE:
“In spite of these successful attempts, Athens never knew
great cookery
, for the sole reason that she sacrificed too much to her love of sweet dishes and fruits and flowers; what is more, she never had the fine wheat bread of the Caesarian Romans, nor their Italian spices, nor their subtle sauces and their white Rhine wines.”

8.
This Apician recipe for stuffed and roasted dormice reminds me of a pleasantly drunken American called Big Boy, mentioned in
LAST MAN AROUND THE WORLD
by Stephen Longstreet (1941), who downed a great deal of hot wine once in China and then ate six newborn mice fried alive, thinking them some kind of crisp radish. His outlandish gourmandism was unconscious, but other men since the Romans have battened on the mouse family, as witness this quotation from the
IRISH QUARTERLY REVIEW
of the mid-nineteenth century: “We ourselves once betted five shillings, that a certain dear friend of ours would not eat a mouse-pie—and lost. In short,
chacun à son goût
. (He got through the task with great ease, and offered, when the pie was done, to eat a mouse roasted in the fur with butter, and oat crumb-cakes, for the same sum—but we declined indulging in any more such experiments.)”

9.
This lusty and “unfeminine” ruler, reputedly an habitual tippler of champagne, could have been no more eccentric than a certain Mrs. Jeffreys, “the sister of Wilkes,” as Dr. Doran tells of her in
TABLE TRAITS
(London, 1854). At Bath she slept the year ‘round with open windows, crazy enough! A dozen clocks chimed unevenly in her chilly bedroom. And “… she breakfasted frugally enough on chocolate and dry toast, but proceeded daily in a sedan chair, with a bottle of Madeira at her side, to a boarding-house to dine. She invariably sat between
two gentlemen, men having more sinew in mind and body than women, and with these she shared her London Particular … some mighty joint that was especially well-covered with fat … She was served with slices of this fat, which she swallowed alternately with pieces of chalk, procured for her especial enjoyment. Neutralizing the
subacid
of the fat with the alkaline principle of the chalk, she amalgamated, diluted, and assimilated the delicious compound with half-a-dozen glasses of her delicious wine. The diet agreed well with the old lady, and she maintained that such a test authorized use.”

10.
Once before the First World War, Isadora Duncan gaily spent more than 200 of her Lohengrin’s many thousands of dollars, to give a summer festival as she felt it should be given. It began at four in the afternoon, in the park at Versailles, where marquees filled with everything from caviar to tea cakes tempted her horde of real and self-styled friends, and where the whole Colonne orchestra, directed by Pierné, played Wagner. Then there was a magnificent banquet. It lasted until midnight, when lights sprang up everywhere in the park, and a Viennese orchestra made lively until dawn the worshippers of Siegfried and Lucullus. Duncan, gently sarcastic, wrote that if a rich man
must
spend money to entertain his friends, that was her idea of how it should be done!

11.
Some time after the First World War, a financier in Paris wanted to celebrate one or another of his portentous deals, and invited ten polyglot and gastronomical colleagues to dine with him at the Ritz. “Money doesn’t count,” he said, handing over some twelve thousand francs. “I only want the foods and wines to be perfect …” And the gentlemen ate some twelve courses of Lucullan fare, floated downward on the following incredible flood: Sherry Carta Oro Viejo, Meursault Goutte d’Or 1915, Magnum de Château Léonville Barton 1878, Jeroboam de Château Lafitte 1870, Pommery 1911, Grand Chambertin 1906, Romanée 1881, Giesler 1906, Château Yquem 1869, Cognac Hennessy (Reservée Privée). This is by no means the most princely wine list to hand. But it will do.

12.
There is no light Latin verse attributed to any Gallus, and I suspect this is one of the Professor’s little Gallic tricks.

13.
It took nearer a hundred than thirty years to emancipate the concubines in Turkey, to unveil them and let them hold public office, and forget the blunt title they had worn, made from the Turkish words
odah
, chamber, and
liq
, function.

14.
In spite of the Professor’s straight face in mentioning this culinary atrocity, it manages to sound almost as funny as some of the things suggested in “women’s magazines,” or even in the more solemn quarterlies devoted solely to
la gourmandise
. The former lard their recipes heavily with love stories, and the latter with truffled anecdotes of gastronomical tours through France, or The Old South, or even Alaska. They both have a weakness for spices and one form or another of rose water, figuratively speaking, for they comfort uncountable hungers of the soul as well as the body.

15.
Paul Scarron (1610–1660) was a writer of realistic novels and high-comedy burlesque plays. At one time he was married to the pretty woman who later became Madame de Maintenon, but perhaps a surer claim to immortality is the influence he had on Molière and Beaumarchais and many another French playwright.

16.
These gastronomical pipe dreams appeared in England long before they did in France, according to the Professor’s dates, and they were a necessary part of any great celebration at table. They were made, it is true, of pastry and spun sugar, but so many feathers and furbelows went into them that it was inconceivable that they be eaten … although it is not known what happened to them once they had been displayed at the banquet table. Many years later the Britons were more sensible, and saw to it that their great cooks made
edible
“removes,” as they were called by then. Here are a few of Soyer’s directions, in
THE GASTRONOMIC REGENERATOR
(London, 1847), for “A British Admiral’s Cake”: “Make a sponge-cake of twenty eggs as directed, have a tin mould in the shape of a vessel … (… 18 inches in length, 6 in breadth, and high in proportion); paper, butter, and lightly flour the interior, into which pour the mixture, which bake an hour and a half a day or two before using; mask the exterior with chocolate icing to imitate a ship, when quite dry partly empty the interior, leaving a piece across the centre, to fix
the mast upon, which you have made of pâté d’office, as also the ladders, riggings, and guns; mask the guns with chocolate icing, and form the muzzles with small rings of puff paste, place them judiciously at the sides, place the vessel upon a dish rather upon one side, lay rolls of gelée à la bacchante round, over which lay thin slices of the same to form waves, make the sails of wafer or rice-paper, fix them to the mast as if filled with wind, also have a flag made of the same and painted with a little water-colour which place at the stern; well soak the interior with wine or brandy, mixed with apricot marmalade, just before serving, and when ready fill with a delicate vanilla ice; you have previously formed some ropes of spun sugar, which affix to the rigging at the moment of serving. This dish has a pleasing effect …” and the directions go on and on, until finally Soyer ends by confessing: “The remains and trimmings are very good made into cabinet pudding!”

17.
The phrase
petit couvert
, which Brillat-Savarin uses here, applied only to the meals which French royalty enjoyed in complete intimacy, with a few trusted friends.

18.
In this amusing description the Professor uses one of his own words,
TRIPUDIER
, which has not yet shown itself in any French dictionary and is probably from the Latin
tripudiare, to
caper or dance.

19.
Here Brillat-Savarin used the word
karik
, which is to
curry
exactly what
bif-teck
is to
beef-steak
in international gastronomy. He meant the powder of bruised spices which gives even the worst curry dishes, and there are many of them, their distinctive flavor. There are almost as many recipes for the powder as there are Indians to blend it, of course. Its chief virtue, which is unknown to almost all Americans who must buy it bottled or tinned, lies in the fact that it should be ground freshly every day, but there may still be a few “peppery old colonels” in the British Empire’s outposts who can follow some such recipe as this, and make it up in 1½ pound lots:

20.
This is almost surely soy sauce, a blackish liquid either thick or thin, which every cook from the old Countess Morphy to young Mrs. John Doe will admit “reigns supreme in Japan—
shoyu
… made from the Soya bean seeds, wheat, and pure salt, with a pleasant and distinctive flavor, unlike that of any of our European bottled sauces.”

Once a cook has started to use soy, it becomes a kind of game to play, for there is perhaps no other condiment which can be added to so many things with so little potential damage, such small risk of gastronomical mayhem.

One of the best uses I have ever found for it, besides as a marinade for steaks being prepared for the barbecue, is as covering for fish which cannot be used at once and must be held over in a cold place for a day. It is patted generously onto every surface, to form an ominous dry dark skin. Then no fishy odors creep from it to other food, and when the ordinary preparation takes place there seems nothing but an added delicacy. It is mysterious.

21.
Negus is a mixture of hot water with wine, usually sherry or port, and sugar, lemon, spices. It is a pleasant tipple on a cold day, but can soon grow tiresome. I used to drink it on winter market days, in France in a small bar on the ground floor of a house named La Coupole and inevitably misnamed La Copule. If the delicate care that the barman gave to my drink was any indication of his feelings, my discreet and well-chaperoned mid-morning visits were a pleasant break in his sex-ridden routine, and the negus was a fine potion indeed.