The Physiology of Taste (66 page)

Bruise first four ingredients in wine, and let stand for two weeks, stirring daily. Strain through fine cloth, add amber, bottle, and drink as required.

28.
There are almost too many Richelieus for the translator’s comfort, but I think this refers to Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, who was a rather hard-pressed politician before his death at the age of 56, in 1822, and who had served Russia as a soldier and governor during his years as an exile before his return to France in 1815. The note made by Nimmo and Bain about another Richelieu might as well apply to this one: “… he distinguished himself by his amorous and political intrigues …” And if my choice had not died at 56, he would qualify as well for Macaulay’s description of the Richelieu who seized Minorca from the English in sight of their own squadron:” … an old fop who passed his life from sixteen to sixty in seducing women for whom he cared not one straw.” Whichever of the sly family he was, he drew strength from his little amber lozenges!

29.
Here Brillat-Savarin uses the phrase
sellé et bridé
, to mean that no expense had been spared to make the luncheon elaborate, “from soup to nuts.” In this case it probably meant that oysters were served in a dozen or so ways, in the English style, or at least that many other dishes followed unlimited quantities of the live molluscs.

30.
As is so often the case in this masterpiece of discreet and classical obliquity, no more may lie here than meets the most innocent eye. On the other hand it may be the proper place for a note or two on the supposed importance of the oyster as an aphrodisiac.

This “breedy creature,” as it was sometimes called in England in the eighteenth century, was most highly thought of then (as now) as a divine combination of practicability and sensuous delight. It was nourishing. It was cheap. It was a fine thing for hunters on an empty stomach. It was good for nursing children, and for growing children, and indeed for almost any sad condition inherent to mankind between the first and second childhoods. Most of all it was thought of as “celestially designed for physical regeneration, health, and vigor.”

It is true that this mollusc contains a fair share of phosphorus,
which according to the Professor, and many other more scientific men than he, is heating to the blood. But only the basic fact that a fresh oyster is one of the most easily digested foods in the world has kept myriad seekers of renewed virility from dying in the search. Many a man, both young and old, has downed countless slippery Dublin Powldoodies or Florida Apalachicolas in the hope that he would rise to the occasion of an imminent rendezvous with unsuspected power. Many a man has then sagged alone to bed, dragged downward by his futile gluttony.

It is astonishing that the myth still flourishes, in a dozen languages and a hundred covertly marketed books published under one variation or another of the title
CUISINE D’AMOUR
, that oysters contribute to masculine potency and even to the willingness of the ladies. Recipes for preparing them are legion, and whether they are whispered to come from the kitchen of a famed bordello, rather like the one for the Dish of Eel, or from the chef’s manual of a Venetian nobleman, they usually lean heavily upon those two tried irritants, paprika and crayfish tails.

The truth of the whole hoary legend, I suspect, lies in what one nineteenth-century essayist wrote in London: “The oyster, when eaten moderately … produces a peculiar charm and an inexplicable pleasure. After having eaten oysters we feel joyous, light, and agreeable—yes, one might say, fabulously well.” In other words, they are supremely digestible! And any human being whose digestion is happy will, as the Professor has often remarked of certain gastronomical reactions, see miracles happen.

31.
Medlars were called loquats, from the Japanese, when I was a child in southern California, and they were the only thing I ever stole. They always seemed to grow outside the tight-lipped houses of very cross old women who would peek at us marauders and shrill at us. There are very few of the tall dark green trees left, and most people have never tasted the beautiful voluptuous bruised fruits, nor seen the satin brown seeds, so fine to hold. The last time I saw loquats was in 1947, in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, many of them almost dead ripe on a long branch which was part of a decoration in the flower shop there. My early experience as a thieving gourmande warned me that they would be at their peak of decay in about six hours. That
made it midnight. I asked the flower girl if the shop would be open then, and she said yes and I was there at midnight, but the fruit was gone. It smelled, she said. Of course, I cried sadly to myself, and I left with the ever-remembered perfume in my spiritual nostrils, envying her, thinking with Shakespeare, “You’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that’s the right virtue of the medlar …”

32.
In Colorado Springs, around 1885, there were gentlemen of every nationality who for one reason or another had plenty of money as long as they stayed there instead of in their homelands. They formed
safaris
, in their own sporting way, and in the autumns went higher than most white men had ever gone, into the great Rockies. Mounting, they killed bears, and the guides hoisted the fat furry carcasses into the tops of the tallest trees, to wait for Springtime, when the meat which had been frozen solid for months would have thawed slowly in the thin high air. Steaks from those bears are said to be the finest meat that any living man can remember … “high” in more ways than one, and “far gone” in a sense unknown to most game lovers.

33.
This was the name of a fashionable milliner. I know nothing about her except that she made hats and turbans high off the faces of her high-hat clients, so that their fashionably ragged “Titus” hairdos would show, and their aigrettes and bows and such.

34.
Escoffier says that there is no proper roebuck in America, and that in England it is held in low esteem, being tough and of mediocre flavor. However that may be, the Professor speaks tenderly of his little Canadian creature, which was probably marinated for three or four days, roasted quickly, and served with a touch of juniper in the sauce, as was the custom then with most game … and is still, now and then and happily.

35.
The Professor played a sly trick here with an even slyer jingle which in the original, written about 1750, said:

36.
Brillat-Savarin uses the word
calchup
, an unusual one in French. It, and ketchup, and catsup, probably come from the Chinese
kê-tsiap
, meaning a briny fish sauce, and I am fairly sure
that what d’Albignac used in London was flavored with mushrooms or walnuts, or even elderberries or oysters, and had almost nothing in common with the unctuous scarlet liquid which
is
ketchup to every good Yankee. Here is an excellent recipe, for instance, for Oyster Catsup, which was popular with American housewives when the Professor wrote:

Chop oysters and boil three minutes in own juice and the vinegar, skimming well. Strain through a haircloth, return the liquor to the fire, add wine and spices, and boil fifteen minutes. When cold, bottle and seal.

37.
This name, spelled both Trollet and Trolliet, has lasted longer than many a more philoprogenitive one, for it was the old Bailiff Trollet who taught Brillat-Savarin, one deathless day, to make his first
fondue
…).

38.
This corps, like all hired armies, was made up of every kind of French exile, from escaped murderers to embittered dukes. One of the latter, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, Prince of Conde (1736–1818), headed it and hired it successively to Austria, Russia, and finally England, before it disbanded in 1801.

39.
This is one of the very few places where an undertone of bitterness and of personal disappointment sounds through Brillat-Savarin’s usual debonair attitude toward the hazards of revolution. He had as much cause as any reinstated exile to feel cynical, for he was stripped of his beloved property in Belley even to his little vineyard, but according to everyone who knew him he never complained or sulked, even with a price on his head. Dr. Richerand wrote of him, after his death, “He was forever gay, even as a poor
émigré
.” The Professor’s own attitude toward such harsh fortune is made clear in a dozen places as he discusses his fellow exiles, and never is there a hint of the snobbish martyrdom expressed, for instance, in a letter from Adrien de Mont-morency to Juliette Récamier in 1812: “We must suffer, be silent,
and content ourselves with our own self-respect.” It is true that any kind of exile contains its own spiritual horror, and many of the sensitive intelligent people who fled France in the early part of the nineteenth century suffered deeply, no matter how handsomely they still managed to exist. But in spite of their courage, there was in their attitude a definitely morbid enjoyment which Brillat-Savarin never permitted himself. It is as clear as the contrast between their prose and his: we can read him with an undimmed enjoyment of his clarity, and find him matter-of-fact, straightforward, and cool, compared to most of his contemporaries. Madame de Staël, for example, is little read today, and would embarrass and bore most of us with an idiom which was felt to be both natural and beautiful when she wrote, as in one interminable letter to Juliette Récamier, whose husband had just gone bankrupt: “Ah, my dear Juliette, what has been my grief at the frightful news I have received! How I curse the exile which will not permit me to come to you, and press you to my heart!—May you be composed, dear friend, in the midst of these trials! Alas! neither death nor the indifference of friends menaces you, and these are
eternal wounds
. Adieu! dear angel, adieu!”

40.
The Hippocratic mask or
facies Hippocratica
was a term still common among nineteenth-century doctors, some 2200 years after the great Greek physician first used it, to identify the shrunken livid look that comes over a man’s face at the approach of death.

41.
I like to think this was a young Dézelay, for of all the light white wines in the world it is perhaps the most like limpid spring water, cool from the rocks. But any wine served in a Lausanne restaurant, reputable or not, would be clear, and pleasant, and easy indeed to drink … or so I found, a good hundred and fifty years after the Professor’s stay there.

42.
These orderly dots have made many people wonder. The Nimmo and Bain translation notes: “I suppose our author means to indicate that he does not wish to say anything about his stay in America … Accidentally he has told us some of his adventures there …” This seems rather foolish, for
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE
is one of the least
accidental
books in the world. But probably the most unperceptive criticism I have read was made
in
THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE
in 1877, in a rather sour bad-tempered review of the book which said that the rows of dots plainly showed the boredom Brillat-Savarin had known in America, and the uncongeniality of the country! As for myself, I can see no reason for the dots, but feel that it must have amused the Professor in some way to put them there.

43.
This is another of the Professor’s inventions, and none too good a one, although he liked it enough to italicize it. It could possibly be a mispronunciation of the English
transportation
, used in its most strictly Latin sense.

44.
This is the best example in the whole book of the Professor’s naïve delight in his control of English idiom, and it would be a pity to alter one letter of it. Other translators have not agreed with my feeling: in 1884 Nimmo and Bain noted here: “(We have) taken the liberty of slightly altering a couple of the strongest and choicest English invectives, which our author uses, to prove his perfect knowledge of our language …” These two gentlemen were much fairer than any others of their countrymen who pretended to offer the public a sample of the old Professor’s prose.
Never
was any mention made of the genetic or sexual influences of fish, truffles, oysters, and when some of the anecdotes were included at all, they were sternly altered to suit the literary morals of Victoria’s time. A review of the book in
THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE
in 1877 said: “Some of the stories, though they would have seemed perfectly harmless to the generation which laughed over
TOM JONES
, are a little too unlaced according to the ideas of the nineteenth century.” And in a translation by Simpson published in New York in 1865 and called
THE HANDBOOK OF DINING
;
or, Corpulency and Leanness Scientifically Considered. Comprising the Art of Dining on Correct Principles Consistent with Easy Digestion, the Avoidance of Corpulency, and the Cure of Leanness; Together with Special Remarks on These Subjects. By Brillat-Savarin, Author of the “Physiologie du Goût,”
the introduction counsels: “There are a few passages somewhat free—but, gentle reader, skip them over—they are only poppies in a cornfield—dandelions on the same bank as the blue-eyed violet.” No man would have appreciated this
niceness
more than the Professor.

45.
This gentleman, who was so hospitable to Brillat-Savarin in exile, perhaps owes his lasting name to his recipe, since he left no other heirs. In 1934 his rule for
fondue
was given in a little book called
LA BONNE CUISINE DE SUISSE ROMANDE
, and in it the proportions are less euphonious but more practical (or are they?) than the Professor’s:6 eggs, 300 grams of rich grated cheese, 500 grams of fresh butter. There is no word of the pepper which is mentioned by the Frenchman as the characteristic ingredient. As an old hand at eating if not making this heavenly dish, I think Brillat-Savarin was right. I have several recipes, all from the Vaud or the Valais in Switzerland. Furthermore, almost every little café or restaurant that used to say
FONDUES
in the window made a perfect one, and each was subtly different from the rest. But the best ones were peppery. And the best of all, made late at night by Madame Doellanbach in Vevey, were probably more or less according to this rule, which I translate literally (for want of a better way):