The Physiology of Taste (22 page)

In this state of affairs a truffle had missed being chewed, and, almost whole, had been precipitated into the chasm of his throat; digestive action had carried it as far as the pyloris, where it stuck; it was this mechanical action which caused the unpleasantness, just as the expulsion of the morsel was the remedy.

Thus it was that he never had indigestion at all, but simply the presence of a foreign body in his system.

This at least was what was decided by the committee of investigation which examined the chief bit of evidence, and which was good enough to name me as scribe of the whole event.

M.S …, nothing daunted, has remained faithfully enthusiastic about truffles: he attacks them always with the same courage; but now he takes care to chew them more carefully, and to swallow them with more prudence; and he is grateful to God, in the joy of his heart, that this wise precaution has prolonged the years of his enjoyment of them.

45: So far has science advanced at the present time that the word
sugar
means a sweet tasting substance which can be crystallized and which, by fermentation, yields carbonic acid and alcohol.

In bygone days
sugar
meant only the thickened and crystallized juice of the cane
(arundo saccharifera)
.

This reed is a native of the Indies; moreover, it is certain that the Romans did not know sugar as an ordinary plant nor in its crystallized form.

A few notations in old books make it easy to believe, however, that the Romans knew that a sweet juice could be extracted from certain reeds. Thus Lucan wrote:

Quique bibunt tenera dulces ab arundine succos.

But it is a long gap between a watery syrup flavored with cane juice to the sugar that we now enjoy; and science in the days of the Romans was not advanced enough to bridge it.

It is in the colonies of the New World that sugar was really born; the cane was imported there about two hundred years ago; and there it thrives. Experiments were made with the sweet juice which flows from it, and little by little they succeeded in producing cane syrup, then refined syrup, then raw sugar, and then molasses and various refinements of sugar itself.

The cultivation of sugar cane has become singularly important, for it is a source of great wealth, for those who grow the cane as well as those who sell its products and refine them, and finally for the governments which collect the taxes on it.

It was believed for a long time that true sugar could develop only in a tropical climate; but toward 1740 Margraff discovered it in several plants of the temperate zones, among others in the beetroot; and this discovery was brought to the point of proof by the experiments which Professor Achard carried out in Berlin.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century our government helped several scholars continue this research, since events had made cane sugar scarce and resultingly expensive in France.

This project was highly successful: it was assured that sugar was fairly abundantly present in much of the vegetable kingdom; it was found in grapes, in chestnuts, in potatoes, and above all in beets.

This last plant became the object of extensive culture and of a mass of experiments which made it very clear that if need be the Old World could, in respect to sugar, get along quite well without the New. France sprouted with factories which operated with varying success, and sugar refining became a national industry: a new art, and one which events may revive, one of these days.

Among these factories the best was established at Passy, near Paris, by M. Benjamin Delessert, a respectable citizen whose name is always connected with whatever is good and useful.

He succeeded, thanks to a series of well-planned experiments, in ridding the manufacturing process of many questionable steps, made no mystery of his discoveries even to other men who might have been tempted to become his rivals in business, was visited by the head of our government, and finally was charged with furnishing his sugar to the royal palace itself.

New events, the Restoration and the Peace Treaty, brought down the price of colonial sugar, and the manufacturers of beet sugar have now lost much of their industrial importance. However, there are still a few who prosper, and M. Delessert produces several thousand pounds of sugar every year, on which he does not lose any money, and by which he is able to keep up with new methods which may once again prove useful.

When beet sugar was plentiful on the market, some prejudiced people, creatures of habit, or merely stupid ones, found that it tasted queer and that it did not sweeten properly; some even insisted that it was unhealthy to use.
*

Countless precise experiments have proved the contrary; and
Count Chaptal has described their results in his excellent book:
APPLIED CHEMISTRY IN AGRICULTURE
, Volume II, page 12, the first edition.

“Sugars which come from these various plants,” the distinguished chemist writes, “are definitely of the same structure and do not differ in any way, once they have been brought by refining to the same degree of purity. Their taste, crystallization, color, and weight are absolutely identical, and any man who is well used to judging or eating these products can be defied to tell one of them from another.”

It is a striking example of the strength of human prejudice and the difficulty there is in overcoming it to learn that among one hundred natives of Great Britain chosen without discrimination there are not ten of them who believe that sugar can be produced from beetroots.

Sugar was introduced to the European world through the apothecary shop. It must have played an important role there, since it used to be a common saying when describing a person who had some essential lack:
He’s like an apothecary without sugar
.

Its origin was enough to put it in disfavor: some said that it was heating to the blood; others that it weakened the chest; still others even held that it led toward apoplexy: but calumny was forced to yield to the truth, and it is more than eighty years ago that this memorable adage was first heard:
Sugar harms only the pocketbook
.

Protected by this uncontrovertible statement, the use of sugar has daily become more widespread and more general, and there is not a single article of food which has undergone more changes and more combinations.

Many people like to eat it in its pure state, and members of the medical profession often prescribe it in this form, especially in hopeless cases, as a remedy that can do no harm and that moreover is not repulsive.

Mixed with water it produces sugar water, a refreshing, healthy, pleasant drink which is sometimes a salutary tonic.

Mixed in larger quantities with water, and then concentrated by heat, it produces syrups which can be combined with any flavor and served at any time of day as refreshing beverages which everyone enjoys for their variety.

Mixed with water which has been skilfully frozen, it produces sherbets, which are Italian in origin, and whose importation into France seems owed to Catherine de’ Medici.

Mixed with wine, it produces cordials, a restorative so well known that in certain countries they are soaked into the toast which is served to young couples on their wedding nights, just as in Persia sheep’s trotters soused in vinegar are served on like occasions.

Mixed with flour and eggs, it produces sponge cakes, macaroons, cracknels, muffins, and that multitude of delicate pastries which make up the fairly new art of baking little cakes.

Mixed with milk it produces the creams, custards, and other dainty preparations which end a meal so pleasantly, by substituting for the substantial taste of the meats their own more refined and ethereal flavors.

Mixed with coffee, sugar accentuates the aroma.

Mixed with
café au lait
, it produces a food which is light, enjoyable, easy to make, and admirably suited to people who must go to their businesses immediately after breakfasting.
Café au lait
is also supremely popular among the ladies; but the cold eye of science has discovered that too frequent a use of it can prove harmful to that which they hold most dear.
¹⁸

Mixed with fruit and flowers, sugar produces jams, marmalades, preserves, pastes, and candied fruits in a conserving process which lets us enjoy their flavors long after the time which nature had meant them to last.

It is possible that sugar, considering it in this last mentioned capacity, might be useful in the art of embalming, which is still but poorly understood in this country.

Finally sugar, mixed with alcohol, produces those spirituous liqueurs which, as is well known, were invented to comfort the old age of Louis XIV, and which, conquering the palate by their strength and the sense of smell by the odorous gases which are united in them, still form one of our greatest gastronomical treats.

The uses of sugar do not stop there, however. It can be said that it is the universal flavoring, and that it ruins nothing. Some people put it in meat dishes, some with vegetables, and it is often eaten with fresh fruit. It is a requisite in the currently stylish mixed drinks such as punch, negus, syllabub, and others of an exotic origin; and its applications have an infinite variety, since they adapt themselves to both nations and individuals.

Such, then, is the substance which Frenchmen in the reign of Louis XIII hardly knew by name, and which for those of the nineteenth century has become a staple food of the first necessity; there is not a woman, especially if she be well-to-do, who does not spend more for her sugar than for her bread.

M. Delacroix, a writer as charming as he is prolific, complained once to me at Versailles about the price of sugar, which at that time cost more than five francs a pound. “Ah,” he said in a wistful, tender voice, “if it can ever again be bought for thirty cents, I’ll never more touch water unless it’s sweetened!” His wish was granted: he is still living, and I hope that he has kept his word.

46: The first coffee plant was found in Arabia, and in spite of the many transplantings to which this bush has been subjected, the best coffee still comes to us from there.

An ancient legend tells us that coffee was discovered by a shepherd, who noticed that his flock was in a state of agitation and even gaiety whenever it browsed on the berries of the coffee plant. Whatever the truth of this old story,
¹⁹
only half of the honor of the discovery must go to the observant shepherd; the rest unquestionably belongs to whoever was the first man to decide to roast the coffee beans.

The beverage brewed from raw beans is truly insignificant; but roasting develops in them an aroma and forms an oil which characterizes coffee as we know it today, and which would have remained eternally unsuspected without the intervention of heat.

The Turks, who are our masters in this instance, do not use a mill for grinding the bean; they break it up in mortars with wooden pestles, and when these implements have been used a
long time they become highly prized and are sold at staggering figures.

It occurred to me to verify, for several reasons, if as a result of this there were any differences in the flavor of the ground coffee, and which of the two methods was preferable.

Therefore I roasted with great care a pound of good mocha; I separated it into two equal portions, one of which I had ground in a mill and the other I pounded with a pestle according to the Turkish manner.

I made coffee with first one and then the other of the powders; I took a similar weight of each, and then poured the same quantity of water on each one, and stirred each with exactly the same force.

I myself tasted this coffee, and then had it sampled by the most devout connoisseurs. The unanimous opinion was that the beverage made from the pounded bean was obviously superior to that which came from the milled coffee.

Anyone can perform the same experiment. Meanwhile I shall cite this rather unusual example of the influence of such-and-such a method of procedure.

“Monsieur,” Napoleon said one day to Senator Laplace, “why is it that a glass of water in which I let a bit of sugar loaf melt seems much better to me than one in which I put the same quantity of crushed sugar?”

“Sire,” the scientist replied, “there are in existence three substances, of which the principles are exactly the same: sugar, sap, and starch; they differ only in certain respects, which are still a secret of nature; and I believe that it is possible, in the friction which is set up by the pestle, that certain amounts of sugar become changed into sap or starch, and cause the difference which occurs in this case.”

This statement was given some publicity, and later observations have confirmed its value.

A few years ago it seemed as if everyone was trying at the same moment to discover the best way to make coffee; this was a result,
almost certainly, of the fact that the chief of state drank a great deal of it.

It was suggested that it be made unroasted, unground, with cold water, boiled for three-quarters of an hour, made in a steam cooker, and so on.

I have tried, in my time, all these methods and all that have been proposed up until today, and I have settled for obvious reasons upon the one which is called
à la Dubelloy,
²⁰
which consists of pouring boiling water upon coffee placed in a receptacle of porcelain or silver pierced with little holes. This first essence is taken out, heated gently to boiling point, put once more through its sieve,
²¹
and the result is coffee as clear and as good as is possible in this world.

I have tried among many other methods to make coffee in a high-pressure pot; but the result was a drink bursting with oils and bitterness, good at its best for scraping out the gullet of a Cossack.

Doctors have propounded various opinions on the healthful properties of coffee, and have not always been able to agree; we can pass to one side of this argument, in order to save ourselves for the most important point, which is its influence upon the organs of thought.