The Physiology of Taste (65 page)

Certainly her behavior was circumspect, whether seen through the eyes of her loving niece or the hurt ones of Napoleon, who repaid her for snubbing his offer of a soft bed at court by seeing to it that she became an exile. In 1875, when Miss Lyster translated Amélie’s book about la Récamier, she wrote of “that most courteous and polished of
salons
, where friend and foe met on neutral ground, and antipathies were carefully concealed or ignored …,” and Amélie herself gave a pretty idea of the decorous tone of the famous meeting place when she wrote: “(Aunt Juliette) had early given me permission to pass the evening in the
salon
, warning me, at the same time, never to permit any man, whether young or old, to talk to me in a low voice, and, to prevent this, always to reply so as to be heard by everybody.” It is easy and pleasant to dream of the beautiful room dominated by David’s portrait of la Récamier and by Juliette herself on the couch under it, with the light fluty hum of conversation in the air and the little girl Amélie at her own study table in the alcove, Brillat-Savarin
bending over her to help compose “An Ode To My Cat,” she answering him high and clear above the hum, and her aunt smiling across at her, her aunt always kind, always tactful, always dressed in white …

La Récamier was “elegant, cultivated, but frivolous,” some people said. She was infinitely generous of herself and her goods, a thousand others knew. She was gay, delightful, gourmande, all the friends and Brillat-Savarin too have told us … and only he, the country cousin, dared add gently, affectionately, “She came in late,
as usual
…”

2.
This was 1801–1802.

3.
It is interesting to speculate here upon the temperature of the famous omelet, which Brillat-Savarin says was cooked to the exact point of perfection, and which in his recipe he advises to be eaten the minute it is done. When Madame Récamier was shown into the Curé’s dining room the omelet was already upon his table, and they chatted and he finished his salmon trout while it sat there steaming its precious vapors. Was there perhaps a little flame under it? That seems unlikely, especially with an omelet. We know that the plates were kept hot. But what kept the omelet so?

4.
Here is one of the Professor’s favorite words, both in English and French, as he himself stated … and the fact that he did not bother with another
p
in the past tense has nothing to do with his whole-hearted enjoyment of himself as a neologist.

5.
English people, and Americans who consider themselves purists, at least east of the Rockies, say
tunny, tunny fish
, and even
tuna fish
. Californians invariably say
tuna
.

6.
This favorite phrase of the Professor’s has become almost trite in gastronomical literature, perhaps because it is so good. There is no miracle more heartening than the one which can occur whenever good people eat good food and drink good wine together.

7.
This anecdote is often quoted admiringly as an example of gastronomical ingenuity. I always hated it, for it blurs my picture, undoubtedly a prejudiced one, of the fair courteous gentleman I know the Professor to have been. I think that his trick was stupid and stingy and dishonest, and it pains me.

8.
Nimmo and Bain say here that the Professor referred to Cos lettuces, which were then almost unknown in France. That is quite possible: in cookery books printed in both France and England as late as 1846 there is no mention made of green salads, which have since become almost synonymous with good meals in the French style. Even in America, where Brillat-Savarin was served a raw cabbagy salad not long after the Revolution, such dishes were not the simple ones we might recognize, but intricate combinations of finely chopped and disguised “greens.” The nearest thing to ours that I can find is a recipe from
COMMON SENSE
, by Marion Harland, published in New York in 1871. It is called Summer Salad, and is made of lettuces, mustard leaves, water cress, radishes, and cucumbers, cut into the smallest possible pieces and tossed with a heavy dressing made with hard-boiled eggs. The whole is well mixed and then “heaped in a salad-bowl upon a lump of ice,” and garnished with fennel heads and nasturtium blossoms! The only thing I can remember to compare with it is the Cobb Salad served at the Vine Street “Brown Derby” in Hollywood, a strange, soggy, and delicious mess.

9.
Here Brillat-Savarin used his own phonetic spelling:
YCORY
.

10.
The biggest punch bowl I ever saw was at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, in 1944. It was probably silver, but I am not sure: the great wine-colored room was dark except for the blue and yellow flames that licked up from the Gargantuan tub, and I could see nothing but the soberly gleeful, enjoyably Machiavellian face of Salvatore Lucia as he bent over his master-piece, a
Café Brûlot
for 150 people. This is his recipe, and a sure claim to immortality, if a good doctor in this world of ungood ones needs such spiritual guarantee:

Place the orange and lemon peel, spices, sugar, and rum sugar in a large bowl. Add the Cognac and let the mixture rest several hours in order to extract the aromatic substances. Hold a match under a ladle-full of the Cognac until it is warmed; then ignite the Cognac and transfer the flaming liquor to the bowl. Allow the burning to continue by ladling until the volume of the mixture is reduced by one-quarter; avoid burning the spices and fruits. Finally quench the flames by gradually adding the hot black coffee. Serve immediately in warmed demitasse cups.

11.
This is a fine place to point out that not all of the amusing errors in the Professor’s English were his fault. Often they can be blamed upon the French printers or copy readers: in my edition published in Paris by Garnier Frères in 1870 M. Wilkinson’s apology appears as I have quoted it, but in my 1838 copy published by Charpentier it says, “… but tood hard a drinker for us!” Even Brillat-Savarin, so bland about speaking English like a native, would not say
tood
.

12.
When my mother was a well-chaperoned young Daisy Miller studying “voice” in Dresden, about 1902 or so, she lived in a fashionable
pension
where the other paying guests were for the most part Russians of very high birth. She remembers that they never even looked at anyone but their relatives and the servants they had brought with them, and that after every course they rinsed their mouths and spat into little bowls, and that at the end of the meal the ladies, most of them princesses and such, stood up and reached straightforwardly into secret pockets in their petticoats for fat black cigars. It is possible that Brillat-Savarin would have considered smoking at table, especially by ladies, as much an abomination as he did the spitting.

13.
Pierre Hyacinthe Azaïs (1766–1845) was a moralist and philosopher whose most important work, probably, was a treatise on the law of compensation in human destiny.

14.
Here the Professor invented another word, which I was
perhaps impertinent to translate into less classical English:
PHARMACONOME
.

15.
The General, sarcastically, was using an idiom which is still popular in French for overcharging:
un vrai compte d’apothicaire
.

16.
The best comment on this anecdote, aside from what can be read between its lines, is in Brillat-Savarin’s sixth Meditation, Section 41, a coolly mischievous dissertation on the sexual dangers of a fishy diet, and as much a part of nineteenth-century thinking as an E. B. White editorial may be of the twentieth.

As for what rests between his discreet lines and phrases, the springboard into hilarious speculation lies in the fact that Madame Triguet had once been cook in the establishment of an actress known to all Paris as “The Ace of Spades.” When I think of the little manuals on spices-in-the-kitchen which were sold like hot cakes to the lovelorn in those horny days, I am astonished at the simplicity of the priests of Talissieu.

17.
There is a recipe to be found in more than one French cookbook, and ascribed to more than one prominent man of letters and/or roué, which except for the mysterious spice left from the good old days in the Ace of Spade’s kitchen might well be the one the priests enjoyed. Its directions are to cut the skinned eel into two-inch pieces, lard them generously with fresh truffles, and wrap them in buttered paper. They are then to be roasted in a very hot oven for about ten minutes, taken from their wrappings, and served on a bed of crayfish tails which have been stewed in white wine and highly seasoned with cayenne. Most supposedly exciting dishes have either truffles or crayfish in them, and when both appear, coupled with the sexually significant eel, there might well be some sort of gastronomical nudging of the libido.

18.
Here is another of the Professor’s quirky and somewhat outlandish inventions. It probably means “feeding power,” put most bluntly.

19.
It is surprising to find recipes for this delicious dish still being printed, for it is almost extinct: the reason, to anyone who has ever tried to rub two pounds of fresh mushrooms through a sieve, is obvious.

20.
The Professor writes here of his dear friends the Richerands.
It was at Villecrêne that he did much of the work on his book, as he confesses in his opening dialogue.

21.
A poll of five Germans, taken in 1947: three had never heard this expletive, one blushed faintly, and the fifth, without knowing that I quoted an author who had once been with the French Army in Germany, said that it sounded like old-fashioned soldier slang. Whatever it meant in 1825, it has a rather shocking look about it, in prose so free of exclamatory phrases.

22.
This is a typically classical allusion, made in a period when ladies and gentlemen dressed as much like the Greek gods as public morality would allow, and when Homer was read as currently as Louella Parsons is today, given a corresponding level of literacy. The Gordian knot was an intricate affair of twisted bark, which baffled everyone who hoped to untie it and become king of all Asia, until Alexander the Great arrived to sever it with one shrewd skilful blow of his sword.

23.
Here the translators Nimmo and Bain ask worriedly, “Was the turbot served up cold ‘next day,’ or, if not, how was it kept warm? Our author is silent on so important a subject.” I think it is pretty sure that the fish was indeed served cold, whole, and noble, on a bed of fresh pretty herbs, and with perhaps a mayonnaise … and it is fairly sure that the Professor did not much exaggerate its goodness, although Escoffier would not agree with him that it could stand so long a wait after the cooking. He writes: “It will be found that turbot, especially when sliced, tends to harden, crumple, and lose its flavor while cooking. It is therefore of the greatest importance that the fish should have just cooled after cooking, and that the cooking liquor (which Brillat-Savarin did not have, of course!) should have barely time to set; otherwise evil effects … will surely ensue.” The Professor’s version of a modern pressure cooker obviated such worries, it is plain, and I am surprised that Escoffier, who did not hesitate to copy almost literally the classic recipe for pheasant
à la Sainte Alliance
, passed by this fine method in favor of the tried and very untrue one of boiling
à l’Anglaise
.

24.
Chinese cooks have used something like this method for many centuries, and just lately I have stood in the alley doorway of a restaurant off Portsmouth Square in San Francisco, watching
a boy work a pulley delicately up and down at the Cantonese chef’s signal, to cover the several dishes that steamed under the big metal bell. It was a lively scene, all hisses and white vapors. A hundred dishes must have come to perfection under that pressure in not many more minutes, and none of them stayed there more than ten or so. I ate steamed chicken, fixed into a strange beautiful mixture with datemeat, ginger, cabbage, a dozen other things. Each stood alone strongly, and the whole was mysteriously fragile.

25.
The Professor’s good friend Dr. Richerand, in his introduction to the second edition of
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE
, wrote that Brillat-Savarin was “a member of the Legion of Honor, of the Society for Encouragement of National Industry, of the Society of French Antiquarians, of the Society of Competition of Bourges, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” He was plainly a man who, knowing the measure of his powers, used them richly and wisely, thinking of all men, and himself not the least of them.

26.
This comparatively nonchalant method of making a good soup stock reminds me of Sheila Hibben’s exercise in theoretical gastronomy in her
KITCHEN MANUAL
, which should be read at least twice a year by all modern cooks who have strayed too far from Escoffier, thanks to the tinned vagaries of both peace and war. It takes courage today to write of spending ten hours on a pot of stock, and buying four different kinds of bones (and meat) to do it. It takes a kind of courage even to
read
Mrs. Hibben, but there is a purging excitement about it, just as there is real comedy in the picture of the affectionate and worried old lawyer dashing home to make a pot of his noted restorative broth for his friend, as he tells it in the story of the exhausted M. Rubat.

27.
The only mention I can find of the use of amber is in a recipe labelled bluntly, “Vin Aphrodisiaque,” and it sounds pretty silly: