The Physiology of Taste (67 page)

Madame Doellanbach would not make this for more than four or five people at a time. They sat around her table, behind the cash register in the alcove, and cut bread into little squares and dipped them on their forks into the gently bubbling pot. Whoever lost his bread in the mixture, or let it fall off, once twirled and coated, on the way to his mouth, must pay a round of kirsch … with one for the cook, of course. As the Professor said, miracles were seen …

46.
Here Brillat-Savarin used the word
miss
, but did not italicize it as was his custom with such English terms, which had become part of the upper-class French idiom.

A hundred years later
miss
meant something prim and unattractive indeed, and I knew an old lady who had been governess for fifty years to the Burgundian aristocracy who bristled and sidled and snapped when she was so addressed. “MEEsss?” she would demand in English which had become almost unrecognizable after so long away from London. “MEEEsss?” And dutifully the greying viscount would correct himself, “Miss Lyse …”

47.
I knew a man in good repute in French Switzerland who owned an ancient but awesome limousine (this was in about 1937) which he rented to rich tourists with himself as chauffeur; and as a sideline he ran an upstairs bar before the official opening hour for any place selling alcohol. It was a bleak small room at the top of a flight of clean stairs in the working quarter of the town. Men lined up quietly from about 6:30 in the morning, and shuffled up the stairs and through the dismal chamber and down another stair onto the street. They were most of them good men. Without a word they put a few sous (the price had not wavered much with wars and such) onto a little table by the door, were handed a small thick glass of local
schnapps
, drained it as they walked the next few paces, put it on another small table by the exit door, and went out. Nothing was said, either in the room or out of it. The liquor was almost surely untaxed and therefore contraband. The sale of it was against the law at that hour. The room was unlicensed. The men were not supposed to drink before going to their jobs. My friend had been blandly undisturbed for many years …

A little fat boy used to stand on a street in St. Petersburg in 1911, and watch the workers file into another such place, owned by the government this time.

Each Russian as he came out held a little bottle of vodka with a special cork in its mouth, and with a practiced
blop
of his hand on the bottom of the flask he would push out the cork and drain down the good hot stuff.

48.
See “Meditation 12,”, and “Varieties,” VIII.

49.
This generous soul was the Professor himself, quoting from his
ESSAI HISTORIQUE SUR LE DUEL
, which was published in 1819. In 1802 his
VUES ET PROJETS D’ECONOMIE POLITIQUE
appeared and then quietly disappeared, a dismal failure which may explain the hesitancy he expressed to his friend Richerand about letting his
PHYSIOLOGIE DU GOÛT
see the light. When it finally was published, a few months before his death in 1826, it had been refused by Sautelet, the one editor he shyly and secretly consulted, and was brought out anonymously at his own expense. And aside from these works and, undoubtedly, some legal papers, he left nothing except the tantalizing mention, several times, of his “secret journal … secret memoirs …” Nothing vaguely like a diary by Brillat-Savarin has ever been spoken of by his friends or heirs, and it is probable that his own references to such a thing were a part of his teasing nature, his sly discreet delight in implying that he could say much more.

50.
Félicité Ducrest, Countess of Genlis (1746–1830), was a popular writer who has perhaps been best, if most mercilessly described, by the two good Victorians Nimmo and Bain who had courage enough to publish an “unexpurgated” translation of Brillat-Savarin in London in 1884. They seldom lost their Olympian and calm discretion, but of the wordy countess they permitted themselves to write in a footnote here: “… a well-known female author of numberless novels and other works, now completely and deservedly forgotten.”

51.
This is a typical impasse, gastronomically, which can lead almost any amateur chef both up and down the garden path: Count M … may have referred to the blood pudding which modern cookery calls
boudin
, or he may have meant any of a hundred dishes prepared with little poached dumplings which were called
boudins
by the chefs of his period; “à la Richelieu” can be simply the sauce covering the noncommittal
boudin
or it can be any of a thousand ways of serving the dish which were ascribed to or named after the Cardinal according to a cook’s whim; the method probably included either and/or both lobster-coral and truffles, and could as easily have been called à
la Cardinal
. Anything labelled Soubise is somewhat easier to identify, or at least cover, with a patina of smooth onion sauce. There is a recipe in Escoffier in which a square of lamb is browned and stewed with onions, which are then put through a sieve with Bèchamel to make a Soubise, which in turn is poured over the
meat. There is not a single note of wistfulness in my observation that I have never been served this dish, nor would I look down upon any candidate, political or otherwise, who was as ignorant of it as am I.

52.
In the Æ
NEID
it says, “He nodded, and all Olympus did tremble with that nod.”

53.
Here is some more of the Professor’s teasing: the hilly section of Paris known as Montmartre rises at most 400 feet above the level of the River Seine. Brillat-Savarin knew the place as one of ageless worship, for temples have stood on its summit since before the Druids until now when Sacré Coeur gleams there, and like all the other pilgrims he also knew the many taverns and cafés (like
Le Moulin Rouge)
where the thirsty climb toward spiritual peace could be made easier by a drink or two and a good look at the comforts of the flesh.

54.
Sirius or the Dog Star is supposed to be about 8½ light years away from the Earth. For some reason its inhabitants were supposed to be at least that much hungrier than earthly inhabitants.

55.
Brillat-Savarin’s punch is equally unknown today, or at least is not served as it was in his time, as a matter of course in any pleasant evening. The nearest thing we have to it, except in homes at the New Year and in a few private clubs which doggedly cling to the ancient and supposedly safe patterns of their founders, is coffee mixed with flaming spirits. It is a fine comforting tipple, whether made in a little French railroad station with questionable coffee and worse rum, or at Antoine’s in New Orleans with a fussier fillip of tourist-wise quality. The best recipe for it, perhaps, and one which can be made for Lilliput or Gargantua according to your mathematical skill, is Dr. Lucia’s.

56.
According to Escoffier, both land-and water-rails “are prepared fresh; or, if it is thought necessary to hang them for a few days, at least they should not be allowed to get high.” They are in general treated like quail … and there are also a few diners “who know how delicious a whole brochette of tiny fried birds may be.” Such gastronomers, unconsciously or not, are why there are no more of the “black clouds of rice-birds” that once darkened Louisiana skies and lightened the fine dinner tables there:
I myself was given a recipe by a very old lady from Biloxi, which started, Take 300 plump plucked birds …

57.
Wise Solomon counselled: “Let us crown ourselves with rose-buds, before they be withered.” And some two hundred years before the Professor decided much the same thing, Robert Herrick sang, in his advice to the Virgins,

58.
This is one of the most ridiculous of the Professor’s inventions,
OBéSIGèNE
. It so shook the translators Nimmo and Bain that in 1884 they called it “barbarous”! Dietetically, as well as semantically, the word betrays the Professor: he watched his weight with the intense preoccupation of any movie star.

59.
This is a term used especially in freemasonry, to designate the doorkeeper or watchman of secret meetings.

60.
In a cheap (
1
franc 10 centimes) and delightful (illustrations by Bertall) edition (Paris, 1852) of the Professor’s master-piece, there is a solid and sincere piece of hack writing by Emile de Labédollière, in a Preface which tells better than most what Brillat-Savarin seemed like to people who remembered him some twenty-five years after his death:

“Physically he was very tall, so that he had been named the drum major of the Court of Appeals. Since he enjoyed lengthy meals, all the while managing to avoid indigestion and tipsiness, he had acquired a girth proportionate to his height. His fleshy face was none too expressive. His careless way of dressing, with a generous shirt collar and full trousers bagging over his shoes, gave him the appearance of an undistinguished bumpkin. Usually he preferred to listen rather than talk; he hardly seemed to come to life until the end of a good dinner, and then his conversation had the subtle effervescence of champagne which at last has been poured from its long imprisonment; but people with whom he had no close relationship state almost unanimously that he was uncommunicative, heavy, and absent-minded, and that he never unveiled in his meetings with them
the classicism, the finesse, and the wide general knowledge which he proved in
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE
to possess.”

Labédollière adds, “as for us who were not his contemporaries, we should count ourselves fortunate that he gave sparingly of himself, to pour all the treasures of his soul into the book he has left us.”

61.
Eos, called rosy-fingered, was the goddess of the dawn. Romans knew her as Aurora. She loved Tithonus, and had a son by him, and successfully demanded that he be made immortal. But she forgot to ask that he stay young, and when she grew tired of his creaky senile feebleness she changed him with no recorded pangs of regret into a grasshopper. It is doubtful that even the reputed powers of French truffles could have saved him from his fate.

62.
This costly
vin de paille
(straw-wine) is indeed soft and generous, and also heady, made from grapes ripened slowly on straw mats.

63.
The translation of this jolly song published in what is called “the Arthur Machen
PHYSIOLOGY
” by Peter Davies, London 1925, could probably not be much bettered:

64.
It is easy to read into this anecdote, from the first casual sentence to the last jaunty one, most of the Professor’s humanly weak and wonderful traits. He manages to imply a great many things about the Prot couple. He does not
say
that they were a typical pair of newly arisen politicians in a most unsavory government, but it is plain that as a royalist or at least a federalist he despises their social crudeness. He does not
say
that Madame
had bad manners, but he manages to make his boredom at her single-track conversation very evident. He does not
say
that she was a wrinkled old singing teacher, but he lets it be known that her cultured interest in “the finer things of life” once, long ago, earned a living for her. He does not
say
that he used her ruthlessly, mischievously, desperately, but the cynicism behind his bland descriptions of their two hearts beating together, of their mingled voices, of his heartfelt kiss, could be distasteful if it were not so urbane. And as for the dinner with the legal gentlemen, which gave the fortunate beginning to his trip, it is underlaid with such innate charm as to be unforgettable. It is everything admirable about a man with his back to the wall who can yet dine and drink and sing with gaiety as well as good manners. Brillat-Savarin admits as much, with the amused tolerance of an old man. He surmises that being a Frenchman did it, but there are a few like him in every country, now as then.

65.
This Epistle, “To Maecenas,” is from the translation printed in London in 1684. It is by Thomas Creech:
“Horatius.—Odes, satyrs, and epistles of Horace, done into English.”
It well bears out the Professor’s theory that gastronomy in its ancient limited form could offer little sublimation but an alcoholic one to the men who then as now must whip themselves to find existence justifiable.

66.
In Act II, Scene I of
MACBETH
, Shakespeare wrote about drink, “It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.” These blunt words are etched on the hearts of many a tipsy would-be lover …

67.
Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) wrote, about “Breakfast in Cold Weather”: ‘Here it is, ready laid.
Imprimis
, coffee and tea; secondly, dry toast; thirdly, butter; fourthly, eggs; fifthly, ham; sixthly, something potted; seventhly, bread, salt, mustard, knives, forks, &c. One of the first things that belong to a breakfast, is a good fire. There is a delightful mixture of the lively and the snug, in coming down to one’s breakfast-room of a cold morning, and seeing everything prepared for us,—a blazing grate, a clean tablecloth and tea-things; the newly washed faces and combed heads of a set of good-humoured urchins …”