Read The Physiology of Taste Online
Authors: Anthelme Jean Brillat-Savarin
68.
Brillat-Savarin infers that anything from the story of the imaginary travels in Greece of the young Scythian Anacharsis
will delight his readers. The book was written by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, who died in 1795 at the age, a ripe one in those days, of 79.
69.
Very little is known about Pierre Motin, except that he flourished in the sixteenth century and died about 1615, and that his poems are found in every collection of that time.
70.
Maynard was a lawyer (1582–1646), and both he and the Marquis de Racan, who wrote religious and pastoral poetry, were pupils of the great poet and critic François de Malherbe.
71.
There is a complex play on words here, with
naître
and
planter
, and it becomes so weightily sesquipedalian with variations on the theme to
inseminate
, for instance, that probably the best thing is to follow the rest of the translators and scamp the issue completely!
72.
The directions for this composition, given its subject, are almost ludicrous today. But at the turn of the nineteenth century, when they were written, they were a serious and sincere expression of an amateur musician’s desire to entertain his friends.
Not only was Death itself an intimate of them all, in those premortician, prehospital days when both great and small must wait for a loved one’s death rattle and then close the lids, but it was considered proper and desirable for any true lady or gentleman to be able to sing, and if need be play the accompaniment, after a pleasant dinner and before the card games and the conversation.
It was the Byronic Age, and tender virgins with soft Attic curls upon their napes caroled passionately of heroes prone upon the battlefield, of noble martyred dogs, and of a babe’s first lisp, as they were to do a decade or so later in the less worldly drawing rooms of America.
Brillat-Savarin may have had more than his share of philosophical detachment, but he also was a knowing observer of his times, and did not even smile at the musical histrionics he asked for as a background to his modishly moribund self-revelation.
73.
According to biographies, President Henrion de Pansey did not die until 1829, at the age of 87. Brillat-Savarin preceded him by a good three years, but could write, months before his death at
71, as a pupil might write of his mentor, with an almost protective affection. (“Aphorism IX.”)
74.
The Professor wrote here, in mild teasing,
un beau titus
, because during the Directory (1795–1799) it was the fashion for the young fops and men-about-town to wear their hair cut shaggily short, except for a few loose locks over their brows and cheeks, in imitation of the bust of the Roman Titus. Older men, more moderate, wore even shorter hair in the style called “Brutus,” if they were not bewigged.
75.
The Vestal virgins were, as their name indicates, chaste Roman girls who cared for the temple of Vesta. They were highborn maidens, of almost unlimited political power, dedicated in childhood to the care of the sacred precincts and trained in obedience and virtue. After thirty years of service they could marry, but as one mid-Victorian writer stated bluntly, “by then they seldom did so.” If ever they broke their vows of chastity they were condemned to be buried alive after lavish public funeral rites.
76.
In the first unabridged English translation of this book, made and published by Nimmo and Bain in 1884 in London, there is a sad note here: “I regret to say that the illustrious author speaks of
Malvoisie de Madére
. Malmsey is a wine from Candia.”
This recalls another note, made in Paris in 1879 by Charles Monselet in his Preface to
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE
. It is somewhat smug: “I add a last note to perpetuate one of my surprises. Neither Brillat-Savarin, nor Grimod de la Reynière, nor even the Marquis de Cussy, have given a great importance to wine. It seems that they only considered it as a digestive element. Provided that it was good, they did not ask for more; and they did not make any distinctions between our innumerable brands of Burgundies and of clarets. Was the exquisite sense of this important part of taste entirely wanting to them? In this respect, at least, we are superior to them.”
77.
Here for the last time the Professor refers sarcastically to “surêne herbé,” which in his time was the worst thing a wine could be called. He told in a note about the village of Suresnes that gave this vinegar its dubious renown. It was indubitably a vinous insult, as he said it.
78.
“Geographical progression,” as
THE WORLD ALMANAC
calls it, was still being made in 1900, and English, French, and Italian explorers pushed their way here and there in Africa; Sven Hedin with the blessing of the King of Norway and Sweden went on an exceedingly dangerous journey through East Turkistan; early in the year the Government of Chile dispatched a group of scientists to Southern Patagonia.
Gastronomically little is recorded of their findings, unless there is some connection between the art of dining and the discovery of many villages filled with skeletons in the country southwest of the Nile’s beginning.
The consumption of champagne, in America at least, fell sharply at the turn of the century (although as one who has never seen such a moment, nor ever shall, I should think the opposite would happen: so many toasts to be drunk, and doubts to be stilled).
Coffee cost about seven cents a pound. Cheese cost nine, and butter eight. A five course table-d’hôte dinner with wine and tip could easily be found in New York for a dollar.
But Brillat-Savarin need never have wasted his tears upon his contemporaries who would not live to know the pleasures of the twentieth-century table: whatever rock-borne delicacies or heady mysterious distillations may have evolved could never convince the new gastronomers that they were as well off as they would have been in 1825. They looked back longingly to the days of the Restoration, when the art of dining was not the prerogative of the overblown financiers, but the privilege of any happy human with a few francs or shillings in his pocket.
It is true that they had soft-shell crabs, which the Professor never knew. They had canvas-back ducks, and diamond-back terrapins. Still they wept, sensing that they had neither the leisure nor the instinctive simplicity for a real
fondue
.
Excellencies!
THIS WORK IN
which I do honor to you has for its purpose the development for all eyes of the principles of that science of which you are the bulwark and the ornament.
I send up in it, therefore, a first wafting of incense to Gastronomy, the youngest of the Immortals, who hardly before she has assumed her starry crown is taller than her sisters, like Calypso, who stood a head’s height above the charming group of nymphs who crowded ‘round her.
The Temple of Gastronomy, chief ornament of the capital of the world, will soon lift toward the skies its mighty porticoes; you will make it echo with your voices; you will enrich it with your talents; and when the academy promised by the oracle establishes itself on the two unshifting cornerstones of pleasure and of need, you, enlightened gourmands, you, most agreeable of table guests, will be its members and its aides.
Meanwhile, lift to high heaven your beaming visages; go forward in all your strength and mightiness; the whole edible world is open before you.
Work hard, Excellencies. Preach, for the good of your science; digest, in your own peculiar interests; and if, in the course of your labors, you happen to make some important discovery, be good enough to share it with this, the humblest of your servants!
I FEEL EVEN MORE
strongly than I did at the beginning of translating this book that it is a well-balanced expression of one thinking man’s attitude toward life. There are few of them, in any language.
The fact that
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE
is about gastronomy has little, nothing really, to do with its author’s innate good taste, nor with his art in making it clear upon each page. I have plumbed every word of his, and after many years of casual enjoyment and two of the most intimate kind, I have yet to find myself either bored or offended, which is more than most women can say of any relationship, whether ghostly or corporeal. For me, the Professor is a continuing delight.
I enjoy the physical picture of him, which may be wishful but is still based on a few descriptions beside his own, and a few engravings, and a few phrases like Charles Monselet’s: “This figure, smiling rather than laughing, this well-lined paunch, this stylish mind and stomach …”
I enjoy his “stylish mind” most of all: his teasing of the priests, and his underplayed pleasure in them when they were good men of any cloth; his tenderness and irony toward pretty women, and his full fine enjoyment of them; his lusty delight in hunting, in a good row, in a cock-snoot at disaster … and the way he made all this plain to me, in a prose perhaps more straightforward than any that has come down to us from his verbose flighty period in French literature.
His restrained discretion, while never simpering or ridiculous, is often deliberately pedagogic. He sometimes harrumphs, tongue in cheek … no insignificant feat either physically or spiritually! He often plays, tongue still in cheek, the safely retired satyr … but never does he grow offensive or even faintly senile.
Deliberately at times he outlines with mocking pedantry the A-B-C, a-b-c of a point. Never does he scorn the plodders of philosophy who have made banalities of such ways of logic. Always there is clear in everything he writes a basic humility, and that is the main reason why I think his book is one meant to last much longer than a century or so. That is why I have spent many months of my best thought and my best (my
vintage)
energy upon it.
In a Western world filled with too many books, too many human beings angry or bored enough to be voluble, it is a good thing that there are a few such distillations as this one. Brillat-Savarin spent about twenty-five years writing it. He spoke of it to almost nobody, and when finally it appeared, a few months before his death and anonymously and at his own expense, his friends were astounded that he had written it, for he had never flashed before them in its full colors the rich tapestry of his mind, but had instead woven quietly and in secret peace.
In the Professor’s time it was considered the unquestioned right of any man of common sense, which he so eminently was, to choose how best he might spend his hours of creation. When young he studied war and love and politics with an ardor and directness and an unclouded simplicity impossible to our own murky days. When he grew older, and withdrew perforce from actual combat, he found himself in the happy state of being able to think, to recollect in tranquillity.
That is perhaps the greatest difference between him and us: by the time we have slugged our way as courageously as possible past the onslaughts of modern engines and bacteria and ideals we are drained and exhausted, and any one of us who reaches the age of seventy-one with serenity and a clear conscience is felt to be an unfair freak. Something must be wrong, we say resentfully; he must have cheated somewhere, taken some secret elixir.
Perhaps we can sip that potion, even vicariously, in the slow reading of a few books like this one, and can feel ourselves encouraged and renewed by the knowledge that if Brillat-Savarin could outride the wild storms of revolution and intrigue and not let them trouble his digestion, as Balzac wrote of him, so in our way can we.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
First included in Everyman’s Library, 2009
Translation copyright © 1949 by the George Macy Companies, Inc.
Originally published by The Heritage Press, New York, in 1949, and subsequently in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1971.
Introduction Copyright © 2009 by Bill Buford
Bibliography and Chronology Copyright © 2009 by Everyman’s Library
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Published in the United Kingdom by Everyman’s Library, Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT, and distributed by Random House (UK) Ltd.
US website:
www.randomhouse.com/everymans
eISBN: 978-0-307-59383-2
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library
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