The Physiology of Taste (29 page)
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Authors: Anthelme Jean Brillat-Savarin
It was possible, and in fact rightful, to fear that such considerable payments, which moreover were made every day in bullion, would put a fearful strain on the treasury, and would cause a depreciation in all paper values and be followed by that misery which hovers over a penniless and helpless nation.
“Alas!” cried the moneyed fellows who watched the ominous wagon going to be loaded at the bank in the Rue Vivienne, “alas, there is our silver, flowing out of the country in a flood. By next year we’ll kneel before a crownpiece if we ever see one; we’ll be living like beggars; business will be dead; there will be nothing left to borrow; we’ll have famine, plague, a civil death.”
What actually happened gave the lie to all these fears, and to the great astonishment of everyone who was connected with finance, the national payments were easily met, credit increased, people borrowed eagerly, and during the whole period of this
SUPERPURGATION
the exchange, that infallible measure of the circulation of money, was in our favor: that is to say, we had the arithmetical proof that more money came in to France than left it.
What power is it that came to our aid? What godlike thing was it that caused this miracle? It was gourmandism.
When the Britons, Germans, Huns, Cimmerians, and Scythians poured into France, they brought with them a rare voracity, and stomachs of uncommon capacity.
They were not long satisfied with the official fare which was offered to them by an enforced hospitality; they hungered for rarer delicacies, and before long the Queen of Cities was no more than an immense mess hall. These invaders ate in the restaurants, in the cook shops, in the taverns and the bars, in the stores, and even in the streets.
They stuffed themselves with meat, fish, game, truffles, cakes, and above all with our fruits.
They drank with a thirst as abysmal as their hunger, and always demanded the best wines, hoping to discover unknown pleasures in them, which they were inevitably astonished not to recognize.
Superficial observers did not know what to think of this endless, meaningless eating; but the real Frenchmen chuckled and rubbed their hands together as they said: “Look at them,
under our spell! They have spent more crowns tonight than the Government paid them this morning!”
It was a happy period for everyone who catered to the pleasures of the palate. Véry built up his fortune; Achard began his; Beauvilliers made a third lucky one, and Madame Sullot, whose shop in the Palais-Royal was not more than ten feet square, sold as many as twelve thousand little tarts a day.
*
This still lasts: foreigners flood into our country from every part of Europe, to carry on in peacetime the pleasant habits they formed during the war; they feel helplessly drawn to Paris, and once there they must enjoy themselves at any price. And if our public stock is high, it is less because of the good rate of interest it carries than because of the innate confidence which is felt in a country where gourmands are made happy.
†
58: Gourmandism is far from unbecoming to the ladies:
1
it agrees with the delicacy of their organs, and acts as compensation for certain pleasures which they must deny themselves, and certain ills to which nature seems to have condemned them.
Nothing is more agreeable to look at than a pretty gourmande in full battle-dress:
2
her napkin is tucked in most sensibly; one of her hands lies on the table; the other carries elegantly carved little morsels to her mouth, or perhaps a partridge wing on which she nibbles; her eyes shine, her lips are soft and moist, her conversation is pleasant, and all her gestures are full of grace; she does not hide that vein of coquetry which women show in everything they do. With so much in her favor, she is utterly irresistible, and Cato the Censor himself would be moved by her.
3
Here, however, I must recall a bitter memory.
One day I found myself seated at the dinner table next to the lovely Mme. M … d, and I was silently congratulating myself on such a delightful accident when she turned suddenly to me and said, “To your health!” At once I began a compliment to her in my prettiest phrases; but I never finished it, for the little flirt had already turned to the man on her left, with another toast. They clicked glasses, and this abrupt desertion seemed to me a real betrayal, and one that made a scar in my heart which many years have not healed over.
The leanings of the fair sex toward gourmandism are in a way instinctive, for it is basically favorable to their beauty.
A series of precise and exhaustive observations has proved beyond doubt that a tempting diet, dainty and well prepared, holds off for a long time the exterior signs of old age.
It adds brilliancy to the eyes, freshness to the skin, and more firmness to all the muscles; and just as it is certain, in physiology, that it is the sagging of these muscles which causes wrinkles, beauty’s fiercest enemy, so it is equally correct to say that, other things being equal, the ladies who know how to eat are comparatively ten years younger than those to whom this science is a stranger.
Painters and sculptors have long recognized this truth, and they never portray subjects who, through choice or duty, practice abstinence, such as anchorites or misers, without giving them the pallor of illness, the wasted scrawniness of poverty, and the deep wrinkles of enfeebled senility.
59: Gourmandism is one of the most important influences in our social life; it gradually spreads that spirit of conviviality which brings together from day to day differing kinds of people, melts
them into a whole, animates their conversation, and softens the sharp corners of the conventional inequalities of position and breeding.
It is gourmandism, too, which motivates the effort any host must make to take good care of his guests, as well as their own gratitude when they perceive that he has employed all his knowledge and tact to please them; and it is fitting at this very place to point out with scorn those stupid diners who gulp down in disgraceful indifference the most nobly prepared dishes, or who inhale with impious inattention the bouquet of a limpid nectar.
General rule
. Any preparation which springs from a high intelligence demands explicit praise, and a tactful expression of appreciation must always be made whenever it is plain that there is any attempt to please.
4
Finally, when gourmandism is shared, it has the most marked influence on the happiness which can be found in marriage.
5
A married couple who enjoy the pleasures of the table have, at least once a day, a pleasant opportunity to be together; for even those who do not sleep in the same bed (and there are many such) at least eat at the same table; they have a subject of conversation which is ever new; they can talk not only of what they are eating, but also of what they have eaten, what they will eat, and what they have noticed at other tables; they can discuss fashionable dishes, new recipes, and so on and so on; and of course it is well known that intimate table talk [
CHITCHAT
] is full of its own charm.
Doubtless music too holds a strong attraction for those who love it; but it demands work and constant practice.
Moreover, it can be interrupted by a cold in the nose, or the music may be lost, the instruments out of tune; one of the musicians may have a headache, or feel lackadaisical.
On the other hand, a shared necessity summons a conjugal pair to the table, and the same thing keeps them there; they feel as a matter of course countless little wishes to please each other,
and the way in which meals are enjoyed is very important to the happiness of life.
6
This observation, rather new in France, did not escape the English moralist Fielding,
7
and he developed it by depicting, in his novel
PAMELA
, the different ways two married couples might bring their day to a close.
The first husband is a nobleman, the older son, and for that reason possessor of all the family wealth.
The second is his younger brother, married to Pamela: he has been disinherited because of this union, and is living on half pay, in circumstances so straitened that they border on abject poverty.
The peer and his wife enter the dining room from opposite directions, and greet each other coldly in spite of not having been together at all during the day. They sit down to a magnificently appointed table, surrounded by gold-braided footmen, serve themselves in silence, and eat without pleasure. As soon as the servants have withdrawn, however, a kind of conversation begins between them: bitterness creeps into it; it becomes a quarrel, and they get up in fury, each one to go alone to his apartment, to meditate on the delights of widowhood.
The nobleman’s brother, on the contrary, is welcomed with the tenderest warmth and the sweetest caresses as he comes to his modest dining room. He seats himself at a frugal table; but need that mean that the dishes served to him are not excellent? It is Pamela herself who has prepared them! They eat with joy, while they chat of their projects, of their day’s happenings, of their affection. A half bottle of Madeira helps them to prolong both the meal and the companionship; soon the same bed welcomes them, and after the ecstasies of well-shared love, a sweet sleep makes them forget the present and dream of an even better future.
All praise then to gourmandism, as we thus present it to our readers, and for as long as it does not distract mankind from either his honest labors or his duties! Even as the excesses of Sardanapalus could not make women a thing of horror, so the excesses of Vitellius have not succeeded in forcing anyone to turn his back on a well-ordered banquet.
When gourmandism turns into gluttony, voracity, or perversion, it loses its name, its attributes, and all its meaning, and
becomes fit subject either for the moralist who can preach upon it or the doctor who can cure it with his prescriptions.
Gourmandism as the Professor has discussed it in this Meditation has no true name except the French one,
la gourmandise;
it cannot be designated by the Latin word
gula
, any more than by the English
gluttony
or the German
lusternheit
; therefore I advise whoever is tempted to translate this instructive book to use the noun as I have, and simply to change the article, which is what everyone has done with
la coquetterie
and everything connected with it.
OF A PATRIOTIC GASTRONOMER
I notice with pride
that
La Coquetterie
and
La Gourmandise
,
those two great virtues which our social existence
has evolved from our most imperious needs,
are both of them of French origin.
*
When the army of invasion went through Champagne, it took six hundred thousand bottles of wine from the renowned cellars of M. Moët of Epernay.
He felt repaid for this enormous loss when he discovered that the scavengers did not forget their taste for his wine, and that the orders which he received from the northern countries were more than doubled after the war.
†
The facts on which this section is based were given to me by Monsieur M.B …, an aspiring gastronomer who is worthy of his aspirations, since he is both a banker and a musician.
1.
This is a view not held by either the ladies or their critics in Victorian days. It is a long time since I read
CHROME
YELLOW
, by Aldous Huxley, but I am sure I remember two sisters who languished at table in it, and had heavily laden trays delivered surreptitiously to them in their tower? And Disraeli said, coldly and to the dismay of many a female reader, “If a woman eats she may destroy her spell, and if she will not eat, she destroys our dinner.”
2.
In a literary flight dated “Reform Club, May 14, 1846,” and called
DIALOGUE CULINAIRE ENTRE LORD M. H. ET A. SOYER
, the dashing Victorian chef set down a series of noble platitudes, and ended with this bit of fast-talk:
“SOYER. Permit me to point out to you, Mylord, that a gastronomical reunion without ladies is in my eyes a garden without flowers, the ocean without its waves, a flotilla without sails.”
“LORD M. True enough, such gatherings are the cradle of joviality and good morals, just as debauchery is the tomb of decency itself.”
3.
Byron, who loathed seeing women eat, still wrote ironically, if in a somewhat roundabout style:
“Happiness for man—the hungry sinner!
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.”
This is a comparatively elegant way of saying, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. A Frenchman named Berjane said it more nicely in a book published in London in 1931, called
FRENCH DISHES FOR ENGLISH TABLES
: “A woman who knows how to compose a soup or a salad that is perfectly harmonious in flavour ought to be clever at mixing together the sweet and harsh elements of a man’s character, and she will understand how to charm and keep forever her husband’s heart and soul.”
4.
In spite of the fact (or perhaps because of it!) that according to his own word Brillat-Savarin never married, he obviously spent much thought upon the eternal problem of conjugal life. It was plain to his friends, as it is now to me, that he would have made a good husband: in the opening dialogue with Dr. Richer and he says as much. He was tall as a drum major, Balzac reported. He was thickset, with more than a hint of a paunch … but with handsome legs, he admitted blandly of himself. He could be a tender and sensitive lover, as his sad little story of Louise makes clear. He was the confidant of many attractive women, on every subject from the relative value of lace to the erotic influence of truffles. He was an amiable dinner companion, and at times a witty one, according to almost all of the surprisingly few people who wrote memoirs of him in a period distinguished by the flood of them which flowed from countless voluble minds. His own references to the ladies, no matter how late in years he made them nor how veiled they were in his peculiarly Gallic elegance, are full of gaiety, a sense of real pleasure, and an appreciation as healthy as it was refined. He liked to eat with pretty women, sing to them, tease them. Above all, perhaps, he liked to look at them, no matter whether his eye was purely voluptuous or was tempered by a physician’s appraisal or a confessor’s pity. It may be that his years of exile gave him a fear of too much domestic stability, a hesitation to put down emotional roots when he knew
too well how easily they could be torn up. It may be that the death of Louise, so early in his life, broke his dream of what marriage must be for him. Nothing prevented him, however, from thinking deeply on the subject of what it should be for others, and from reaching certain conclusions which, while not new, have seldom been more simply set forth, directly in this section, and indirectly in many others.
