A Literary Gourmand
IT has been the gift and ambition of but few men to make us taste through their language what they have enjoyed at the table. The essayist makes us relish his favorite author, the critic makes us delight in his favorite picture, the poet makes us share his pleasure in nature; but upon what writer can we place our hand and say he makes us taste his table ?
We believe civilization to be the normal state of man, and we have no literary appreciation of the very bond, sign, result, and utmost refinement of civilization, — a good dinner ! — a dinner that is an obvious work of art, the palpable correspondence of all the fleeting and invisible pleasures of music ! The analogy is indicated in the fact that all great practitioners of music have been gourmands. The whole musical scale can be represented in a dinner. There are dinners that produce a bodily exhilaration and increase the sentiment of life like the sound of martial music.
But some of us believe that a poor dinner is the next thing to virtue, and indigestion the painful path of piety ! — for which reason we eat pies, and piecrust is a sweet and coveted thing. We have barbarously ignored the high literary claims of taste, which makes a servant of the organ of our noblest eloquence, and refines our appetites to delicacies unknown to the voracious maw of animals. We have neither the tongues of donkeys to lubricate thistles nor the taste of dogs ; but an exquisite organ, sensitive to all the fine and complex savors scattered over the world, and for which we have made conquests, extended commerce, and become savant.
Most well-to-do people think that they dine every day. They flatter themselves that they have intelligently provided for the needs of their best friend, the body. How many I have seen with brute insensibility and haste open their mouths and throw down food as in a funnel, ignoring the fact that nature has designed everything to be tested in the reception-room of the mouth, has placed over it eyes to see and please, nostrils to warn and gratify, a palate to satisfy and delight, and an intelligence to direct and discriminate.
Taste has the most powerful and perfect servants ; yet how often we sit down to eat without having invoked the aid of any but the rudest of them, — the hands ! So insensible are we to its claims upon us, that we accept anything from a cook, and enroll in the kitchen, to “get dinner,” an ignorant and uncivilized race of beings. And such a dinner! We have dined like animals; we have merely appeased our appetite ; we have not gratified our taste! Our dinners should be concocted by the most delicate and sensitively organized beings ; then we should be able to say, “We have dined,” — now we merely feed. Then we should rise, stimulated and refreshed, to do delicate and spiritual work, think with ease and gayety, and go through life as though it were a festival.
But what disdain my dyspeptic friends have for such fond dreams ! And how pityingly my pale-faced, dry-skinned, watery-eyed censoress contemplates my gross subjection to the pleasures of the table, and declares, “They who make gods of their stomachs come to no good end ! ” Meantime she lives a thin, starved, sapless life ; sits, chilly, over a low furnace - fire in winter ; has great veneration for doctors, and believes druggists the benefactors of our race. And I imagine what a pretty woman she would have made had she early been converted to the doctrines of the gourmands. Her eyes would now be brilliant, her lips full and red, her conversation agreeable, all her movements gentle and gracious. Sitting opposite to her rounded and luminous face, served by her delicate hands, I should look upon a countenance that would have silenced and pleased Cato the Censor.
It is vulgar and barbarous to be careless about gratifying the taste ; and I believe with Dr. Johnson, who, however, was more of a glutton than a gourmand,— that a man who does not care for his stomach is not to be trusted. Women, who instruct us in all things, — who are Muses and Sibyls,-—can teach us to have a just appreciation of the table. Women are by nature gourmandes. They have the natural daintiness of taste and delicacy of appetite that rejects the rude preparations satisfying savage and masculine hunger.
The English have gluttons; the French have gourmands. A celebrated French gourmand has remarked with pride, that coquetterie and gourmandise, the two grand modifications that extreme sociability has imposed upon our most imperious needs, are exclusively French in their origin. The gourmand is an intelligent and highly cultivated being; the glutton, an offence to gods and men, is a voracious beast with a dirty napkin sitting before an overloaded table. Of such I do not speak. My type is an illustrious one, the celebrated Brillat-Savarin, author of Physiologie du Goût, or Méditations de Gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique, et à l’ordre du jour, dédié aux Gastronomes Parisiens. He was deputy to the États Généraux, later to the Assemblée Constituante, author of an historical and critical essay upon the duel, and of Fragments sur l’Administration judiciare ; “ distinguished as a musician ; speaking perfectly all the learned languages ; instructed as doctor, anatomist, physiologist, chemist, astronomer ; a skilful littérateur, a good hunter, and loved as an amiable and good man. He applied all his knowledge to the art of eating in a work which has been compared with L'Éloge de la Folie, Vert Vert, and LeLutrin, for its charming badinage, and in which is condensed a true French spirit, lucid, sharp, of a prodigious vitality, gracious, fine, and ironical. 5 Balzac, referring to Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût, wrote that “ no prose-writer since the sixteenth century, if I except La Bruyère and La Rochfoucauld, has given to the French phrase a relief so vigorous.”
I have now to appeal to all the good livers of our land, — those little round men, with round, prominent, sparkling eyes, creased with the generous and tender lines of good-nature, the skin florid and fine, the mouth full, and the general air benign and expectant. Assemble ! Heads up, eyes open, nostrils expanded, faces beaming ! I announce to you the apostle of your faith, the advocate of your cause, the exemplar of your life, the justifier of your being ; rich in all the resources of this mundane world, the inimitable teller of “good stories,” apt in his knowledge, learned in the lore of “ dinners, real and reputed.” I have to make you acquainted with the vif and solicitous Brillat-Savarin ! His aphorisms are current in two continents. We speak them as we speak the aphorisms of Shakespeare or of Goethe. As, for example, how often we have heard: —
I. “ Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are.”
II. “The table is the only place where one never feels ennui during the first hour.”
III. “The destiny of nations depends upon their manner of nourishment.”
IV. “ In obliging man to eat to sustain life, the Creator invites him to it by appetite, and rewards him with pleasure.”
V. “ Gourmandise is an act of our judgment by which we grant a preference to things which are agreeable to the taste over those which have not that quality.”
VI. “The pleasure of the table belongs to all ages, to all conditions, to all countries, and to every day. It can be associated with all other pleasures, and it abides the last to console us for their loss.”
Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût is the art and science of life ; it is the explanation of being. It is of a ravishing naturalness, full of the most savory pages that you can imagine, replete with the odors and flavors of things. A pinch of it sprinkled through dusty folios ought to work a kind of magic upon their dry, sapless, barren sentences. Brillat-Savarin describes a sensation, an odor, a flavor, an omelet, a fish, a turkey, with aggravating and inviting naturalness ; and, over his realism he scatters sentiment. He analyzes and reflects without pedantry or tediousness. For example, in his analysis of the sensation of taste, he describes the eating of a peach ; and the description is a marvel of realism with words. Keats’s description of the eating of a nectarine is hardly more expressive; it is second only to Lamb’s savory description of roast pig: —
“When you eat a peach, for instance, you are first agreeably struck by the odor which it emits ; you bite it, and you feel a sensation of coolness and of acidity which invites you to go on eating ; but it is only at the moment when you swallow, and when the morsel passes under the nasal fosse, that the perfume becomes revealed to you, so that the sensation is complete that a peach must give. And it is only when you have swallowed it all, that, judging what you have felt, you say to yourself, ‘ How delicious ! ’ ”
Ah, the dear old gourmand ! and when he speaks of wine he is equally vivid : —
“Alike when you drink: as long as the wine lingers in the mouth, you are agreeably, yet not perfectly, impressed ; it is only at the moment when you cease to swallow that you can truly taste, appreciate, and discover the perfume peculiar to each kind ; and a little interval of time is required for the gourmet to say, ‘ It is good, tolerable, bad, — it is Chambertin ! ’ ”
Brillat-Savarin describes the gradations of pleasure which one derives from the flavor and look of things as neatly and lovingly as a painter defines the tints, the delicate and pure gradations, that distinctly play and mingle in beautiful harmony upon a woman’s cheek ! He supports the dignity of his science by citing its illustrious servitors ; he recommends it to us by the good nourishment and civilizing pleasure it affords. It is royal and democratic at the same time, directing the banquets of kings, and deciding the number of minutes necessary for the cooking of a plebeian egg. The science of gastronomy instructs us in the effect of aliments upon the morality of man, their effect upon his imagination, judgment, courage, perceptions, and it explains his theologies. It enables us to know what we should associate in a good dinner, the order of service, the relation of aliments to climate and temperament ; and teaches us to prepare our food to administer to the highest physical and intellectual life, — how to produce a harmonious action of all the forces of our being.
The following rules are characteristic and instructive : —
“But the impatient reader may ask, How must a dinner be prepared in the year of grace 1825, that will procure in a supreme degree the pleasure of the table ? .
“ I will answer the question. Be attentive, readers, and give ear. It is Gastria, — it is the prettiest-looking of all the Muses, who inspires me ; I shall be clearer than any oracle, and my precepts shall go through the ages.
“ Let not the number of guests exceed twelve, so that the conversation may be general. Let them be selected so well that their occupation may be varied, their taste analogous, and with such points of contact that the odious formality of presentation may be avoided.
“ Let the dining-room be lighted with luxury ; the dinner-table beautifully set; the atmosphere not above sixty degrees.
“ Let the men be witty without pretension, and the women charming without being flirts.
“ Let the dishes be of an exquisite selection, but not profuse; and the wines of the first choice, each one in its degree.
“ Let the progression for the first be from the most substantial to the lightest.
“ Let the movement of eating be moderate ; the dinner being the last business of the day, the guests should be like travellers wishing to arrive together at the same end.
“ Let the coffee be burning and the liquors perfect. The drawing-room should be spacious enough to organize a whist-party for those who cannot do without it, so that there remains space enough for a tête-à-tête.
“ Let the guests be kept by the enjoyment of the company, and reanimated by the hope that the evening shall not be spent without more pleasure.
“ Let the tea be not too strong, the toast artistically buttered, and the punch prepared with care. No one should begin to retire before eleven, but by twelve o’clock everybody must be in bed.”
Brillat-Savarin tells us that the predestined gourmand is generally of a medium size, the face full, the nose short, the lips fleshy, and the chin round. He is chiefly found among financiers, physicians, men of letters, and the clergy in France. The chevaliers and abbes of the eighteenth century were great gourmands ; and at the same time several monastic orders made a profession of good living. The cuismiers of the archbishops were famous as those of kings. The following is a clever bit of character by BrillatSavarin : —
“Those dear friends, what gourmands they were ! It was Impossible to mistake their wide-opened eyes, their shining lips, their smacking tongues. They had a particular way of eating. The chevaliers had something military in their pose; they administered morsels to themselves with dignity ; they worked calmly, and looked horizontally and approvingly from the master of the house to the mistress.
“ The abbés, on the contrary, made themselves smaller to reach their plates ; their right hand became rounded, like the paw of a cat drawing chestnuts from the fire ; their faces were all enjoyment, and their look had a concentrated expression, easier to see than to describe.”
The Physiologie du Goût is composed of thirty meditations, in which, with great ease and naturalness of expression, Brillat-Savarin crowds an immense amount of matter entertaining and instructive to a civilized reader. It is a book that should be translated into English, and placed in every gentleman’s house, — the next generation would show an increase ot refinement, and have the taste and art to get the whole good of life. Our lawyers and doctors and book-makers, instructed by Brillat-Savarin, would have better complexions, better health, and the zest of life. The author of Physiologie du Goût unfolds the whole science of living well, of complete and enjoyable nourishment of the body. He tells us of the gradual perfection of the art of living ; that not until the eighteenth century had it reached its proper development ; that it needed all the other sciences to produce its best results.
In spite of the enormous expense of Roman dinners, we are not to imagine that they dined so well as the French of the last century. Roman dinners were like culinary puzzles, meant to surprise the wondering mind and boyish imagination of the Roman. A Roman dinner with a dish that had a portion of seven thousand choice birds in it, and another that had two thousand kinds of fish, was better as an example of extravagance than of good taste. The Roman dinner was necessarily deprived of many of the choicest concoctions which grace the modern table, because those concoctions were unknown to the ancients. We must believe that the immense increase of commerce and the development of science have enabled us to get up a better dinner than the Greek or Roman cook. We have more fruits, more savors, more excitants, and rare viands do not cost us so much. But the ancients made more use of the fine arts to enrich their festive dinners than we do, and the most beautiful women came to embellish their festivities. Melody and movement, and beautiful forms, were essential to the aesthetic perfection of a Roman dinner, as also the most precious perfumes. But the barbarian hordes from the North made sad work with the delicacies of the Roman cuisine; their ferocious mouths were insensible to the sweetness of the delicate morsels loved by the epicureans ; and they had more pleasure in immense quarters of beef, bleeding, and smoking upon the table, than in the masterpiece of the cook.
The preface to the Physiologie du Goût is good as a page of Montaigne, and an appropriate prelude to a book full of French garrulity, that begets a pleasant and easy temper in the reader. How admirable Brillat-Savarin’s pensketches are you may judge from the following bit, which I take from one of his best stories, relating to his experience while in this country, fifty years ago : —
“ I made the acquaintance of Mr. Wilkinson, a planter of Jamaica, and of a man who was doubtless one of his friends, for he never left him. The latter, whose name I never knew, was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met. He had a square face, bright eyes, and appeared to examine everything with attention ; but he never spoke, and his features were immovable like a blind man’s. Only when he heard a comical word, a sally of wit, his face expanded, his eyes shut, and, opening a mouth as large as a pavilion, he sent forth a prolonged sound like a laugh and a neigh, called in English a horselaugh, after which everything was in order once more, and he resumed his customary taciturnity ; it was an effect like a flash of lightning tearing open a cloud.”
It remains for me to give the biographical notice of Brillat-Savarin which places him before our serious public in all his dignity of judge and patriot. Brillat-Savarin was born at Belley, France, the 1st of April, 1775, of a family whose heads, for several centuries, had discharged judicial functions with distinction. He passed his youth in the quiet and meditative life of the country, studied the great masters of style, for which he had a passionate admiration, without dreaming that in his turn he should become a model and belong to their school. Reading, hunting, and the functions of civil lieutenant, occupied his time until the revolution came to draw him out of obscurity. After serving a term as deputy, he was unanimously chosen president of the civil tribunal of Ain ; afterwards named judge in the Cour de Cassation established by the constitution of 1791 ; later, elected maire of his native city. Traduced before the revolutionary tribunal, he was compelled to take refuge in Switzerland, and finally he embarked for the United States. He settled in New York, gave lessons in French, played in the orchestra of a theatre, and supported himself in exile with dignity and serenity. After three years he profited by the first change of events in France, and embarked for Havre. The Reign of Terror over, he again went into public service, and passed the next twenty-five years of his life as judge and bon-vivant, and gave a characteristic and inimitable book to his countrymen, — called a divine book by Hoffman, — the delight of every free and amiable reader. This grave judge did not disdain to amuse while he instructed, and he carried his moderation and good sense into every-day life. He aimed to grace a brute necessity with all the charms of a fine art; to help others in the same way, he gave his meditations to them in an enduring literary form. His book should supplement Rabelais and Montaigne, and is proof that the mellowness of the old French spirit was still in its contemporary literature at the time when Voltaire had made it sparkle and bite. His Élégie Historique is a delightful bit of humor.
“ First parents of the human race, whose gourmandise is historical, who lost yourselves for an apple, what would you have done for a turkey with truffles ? But in Paradise there were neither cooks nor confectioners.
“ How I pity you!
“ Powerful kings, who ruined superb Troy, your valor will be told from age to age ; but your table was poor. Reduced to a quarter of beef or a pig’s back, you forever ignored the charms of a matelotte and the delights of a chicken fricassee.
“ How I pity you!
“ Aspasia, Chloe, and all you whose forms have been immortalized by the chisel of the Greeks for the despair of the belles of to-day, never did your charming mouths taste the suavité of a meringue à la vanille or à la rose ; you had hardly risen to the height of gingerbread.
“ How I pity you !
“ Gentle priestesses of Vesta, covered with so much honor and threatened with such horrible torture, if you had but tasted those pleasant sirups that refresh the soul, those candied fruits that brave the seasons, those perfumed creams, marvel of our days !
“How I pity you !
“ Roman statesmen, who possessed the world then known, never did your renowned salons know either those succulent jellies, the delight of the lazy, or those variegated ices whose cold could defy the torrid zone.
“ How I pity you !
“Invincible paladins, celebrated by chantres gabeurs when you had split open giants, delivered ladies, exterminated armies, never, alas ! never did a dark-eyed captive present to you sparkling champagne, malvoisie from Madeira, liquors, creation of ‘the great century’; you were reduced to beer.
“ How I pity you !
“Abbés, decorated, mitred ; dispensers of Heaven’s favors ; and you terrible Templars, who armed yourselves for the extermination of the Saracens, — you never knew the sweetness of the restoring chocolate or the Arabic bean that engenders thought.
“ How I pity you !
“ Superb châtelaines, who, during the dearth of the Crusades, raised to the supreme ranks your almoners and your pages, you never partook of the charms of sponge-cake and the delights of macaroons.
“ How I pity you ! ”
The purely instructive part of the book anticipated most of our current knowledge concerning the nature and quality of aliments and stimulants, and is supplemented by several exhaustive pages by Balzac upon modern excitants. In conclusion, I may say, the Physiologie du Goût is a complete and savory book, that makes us know and enjoy the pleasure of a good dinner; and this is no more an every-day occurrence than the sight of a beautiful picture, the reading of a great poem, or the hearing of a fine opera.