The Physiology of Taste (18 page)

I shall say no more about this physiological question, except to give one instance which can easily be verified.

A few years ago I went to look at a country house near Paris on the banks of the Seine opposite the island of Saint-Denis, in a little hamlet which consisted mainly of eight fishermen’s huts. I was struck by the number of children who swarmed along the road.

I mentioned my astonishment to the boatman with whom I was crossing the river. “Sir,” he said, “there are only eight families of us here, and we have fifty-three children, forty-nine of them girls and only four boys, one of them my own.” As he spoke, he straightened himself triumphantly, and pointed out to me a little rascal five or six years old, stretched out on the bow of the boat, crunching away happily on some raw crayfish. This little hamlet was called …

From this incident, which happened more than ten years ago, and from various others which I cannot very well recount with discretion, I have been led to think that the reproductive activity induced by a fish diet may well be more exciting than it is full-bodied and substantial; I am even more inclined to believe this since, quite recently, Doctor Bailly has proved, by a series of facts observed during almost a full century, that every time the birth of girls greatly outnumbers that of boys in an annual census, the over-abundance of females is directly due to debilitating circumstances. This may well indicate to us the origin of the pleasantries which have always been made to the man whose wife has just presented him with a daughter.

There is much more that could be said about foods in general, and about the various changes they undergo when combined, but I hope that the preceding discussion will more than suffice for most of my readers. The rest I must refer to the professional treatises, while I finish my Meditation with two observations which are not without interest.

The first is that the processes of animal life are carried out in much the same way as those of the vegetable, which is to say that the restorative current formed by digestion is absorbed in various manners by the sieves or suckers with which our organs are provided, and then becomes flesh, nails, bone, hair, just as the same bit of earth sprinkled with the same water will produce a radish, a lettuce, or a dandelion according to which seeds the gardener has planted in it.

My second observation is that we never obtain in living organisms the same results as in abstract chemistry, because organs which are meant to create life and movement act powerfully upon the elements which are subjected to them.

But Nature, who loves to bring us to a dead halt in our attempts to unveil her, has hidden the laboratory where she performs her miracles; and it is truly difficult to understand, once granted that the human body is made up of lime, sulphur, phosphorus, iron and ten other substances, how all this can continue to maintain its balance and renew itself over many years on nothing, say, but bread and water.

1.
I have tasted spinach prepared almost as fastuously, and must admit that it is delicious. I also like spinach à
la mode de pressure cooker 1947
: take three cellophane packages of washed or frozen spinach, put in cooker, cook two minutes according to directions, drain, stir lightly with lump of sweet butter and salt, and serve very hot. This would seem barbaric and probably inedible to Canon Chevrier.

2.
The reassuring simplicity of this direction must have been of great comfort to many a carver discouraged by the usual elaborate instructions. It is not strange, of course, that the act of cutting meat should be invested with much significance and pomp: from the time of the first stone knives, the first raw or roasted carcasses, it is the man of skill and virile prowess who has been the one to dole out what meat was mete for his dependents. But the art of carving is one that, when learned at all, must be practiced faithfully, and few families now have either the ovens or the appetites (given the incomes) for haunches and hams big enough to work on.

My father is one of the four or five men I know who still make a little show, a kind of precise ballet, of carving, and since our family has shrunk with the passage of time and peace and war he has few chances in a year to stand up to a bird or a great roast of beef. When he does, it is a noble performance, and one that rightly should be done to the sound of trumpets.

What makes his ritual even more impressive is the legend that when he was courting my mother, her father, who felt that although mine-to-be was obviously a gentleman he seemed somewhat unpolished, announced that if he could carve a duck he would do for marriage. Father was warned, he practiced at night in the kitchen of a saloon, and the next Sunday he cut his way through a brace of canvasbacks with a surgeon’s finesse and aplomb, so artfully that he was given not only my mother’s hand but the family whetstone and carving knives. Or so I have been told.

At least he had no need for what is described in Soyer’s
GASTRONOMIC REGENERATOR
as a Tendon Separator. In the 1847 edition of the great chef’s (and inventor’s!) book he wrote, in a long sales talk about his gadget, “To a clever carver, sitting at a homely table or public banquet, it matters little whether all eyes are fixed upon him or a fidgety footman is at his elbow. He quietly distributes the several dainties according to the fancies of the guests, and everything goes on in comfort. But to a person inexperienced, the notion of being placed at either end of the table, to stay the ravenous appetites of some of the guests, causes such a nervous excitement, that it is not an uncommon thing to see the splashing of sauce and gravy on those around—perchance the sudden appearance of an unfortunate limb flying with terrific velocity on a lady’s dress, the whole of the company being thus thrown into confusion—the poor carver’s apologies received with black looks, and the harmony of the party placed in jeopardy.

“It is with a view to extricate society from such an awkward position that the inventor …” and so on, wrote the dashing chef of the Reform Club. Perhaps there are still English gentlemen who “boldly take the carving knife in hand, delighted to comply with the invitation of the Amphytrion,” thanks to Soyer’s Separator, but my good father, amorous and earnest, managed very well without it in an Iowa village in 1902, and I for one am indeed glad.

3.
This is a good example of the Professor’s candid view of life, of man, of the world. In it he discusses without any change of spiritual expression, in the same breath really, the aspect of boiled beef and the fragility of old men’s bones, just as in “Meditation 6” he includes in his essay on the uses of sugar in preserving fruit a speculation as to its possible success in embalming cadavers. There is nothing repulsive about these juxtapositions. They are dispassionate and thoughtful, the attitude of a good doctor which Brillat-Savarin would have liked to be, a good lawyer which he was.

4.
In Paris spicy
boudin
used to be served on Christmas Eve. It seems to me that a little earlier in the year it was brought around, sizzling and rich and
free
, in the larger cafés of Burgundy. And I remember that the prostitutes would snatch at it, daintily
of course but with avidity, as if it could give them some magic strength. If the waiter liked them they could have two or three pieces, and for once there would be no joking about the bulls it had been drawn from. Each fashionably thin pale woman would eat-eat-eat, in a silence straight from
THE GOLDEN BOUGH
.

31:
MY LIST OF
subjects has been made and my whole book has been well-formed in my head since the moment I started to write; however, I have gone forward but slowly, since part of my time must be devoted to more serious labors.

During this period, then, some parts of the material which I believed was my special property have been stripped bare by other writers; elementary books on chemistry and medicine have been widely circulated; and things which I meant to be the first to disclose are now popular knowledge: for instance, I devoted to the chemistry of soup stock several pages which in their substance can now be found in two or three recently published works.

The result is that I have had to edit this part of my book, and I have cut it down so drastically that it is reduced to a few basic principles, to a few theories which it is impossible to propound too often, and to a few observations, the fruit of long experience, which I hope will be new to the great part of my readers.

32: A piece of beef destined to being treated with lightly salted boiling water, in order to draw out its soluble parts, is called
pot-au-feu
.

Bouillon
is the liquid which is left after this operation.

The meat which has thus been drained of its solubles is called the
bouilli
.

The water first of all dissolves part of the osmazome; then the albumen, which coagulates at about 104 degrees Fahrenheit,
forms a scum which is usually skimmed off; then the rest of the osmazome dissolves with the juice or extractive part; and so finally do portions of the outer coating of the fibers, which are pulled off by the continuous movement of the boiling liquid.

To make a good bouillon, the water must heat gradually, so that the albumen will not coagulate inside the meat before it can be extracted; and the boiling must be kept at a simmer, so that the various parts which are successively dissolved may mix together easily.

Vegetables and roots are added to the bouillon to enhance its flavor, and bread or flour pastes to make it more nourishing: the result is called soup.

Soup is a healthy, light, sustaining food which is food for everyone; it soothes the stomach and encourages it to receive and digest more nourishment. People threatened with overweight should eat only plain bouillon.

It is generally agreed that nowhere can be found soup as good as that of France, and I have found this to be very true during my wanderings. This is not too surprising: soup is the basis of our national diet, and centuries of experience have brought it to its present perfection.

33: The boiled beef, bouilli, is a healthy food, which quickly appeases hunger and which is fairly easily digested, but which by itself does not restore any too well the bodily losses, since it has lost a good part of its digestible juices while being boiled.

It is held as a general rule of cookery that boiled beef has lost one-half of its original weight.

We can place in four categories the people who eat bouilli:

(1) Creatures of habit, who eat it because their parents did, and who, following this example with implicit faith, hope devoutly to be so imitated by their own children;

(2) The impatient souls, who, loathing inaction at the dinner table, have formed the habit of hurling themselves immediately at the first thing which is served
(materiam subjectam);

(3) The uninterested, who, never having received from heaven the sacred fire, look on meals as a duty to be performed, place on the same level everything which can nourish them, and sit at table like oysters in an oyster bed;

(4) The gluttons, who, endowed with a hunger whose immensity they try to hide, hurry to pile into their stomachs a first sacrificial victim, to appease the gastric blaze which devours them and to serve as a kind of cushion for the succession of foods which they intend to send down to the same destination.

    Real professors of the science of gastronomy never touch bouilli, both out of respect for its principles and because they have preached from their pulpits this incontestable truth: Bouilli is flesh without its blood.
1*

34: I am a great lover of secondary causes, and I believe firmly that the whole gallinaceous race was created for the sole purpose of filling our larders and enriching our banquets.

Certainly wherever you meet a member of this numerous family, from the quail to the turkey cock, you can be sure of finding a delicate food and a flavorful one, equally good for the convalescent and the sturdiest healthy man; for what one of us, condemned by his doctors to the diet of a desert hermit, has not beamed at the sight of a nicely carved chicken wing, which informed him in its own way that he was about to be given back to polite society?

We do not seem able to satisfy ourselves with the qualities which nature has given to the roosterish clan; art has stepped in; and with the pretext of bettering them we have made them into martyrs. Not only do we deprive them of their means of reproduction, but we condemn them to solitary confinement and darkness, we force them to eat, and by doing so we make them much heavier than they were ever meant to be.

It is true that this unnatural weight of fat is also completely delicious and that it is by means of these damnable practices that we give our capons the finesse and delicacy which make them preferred on the finest tables.

Thus bettered, poultry is for the cook what canvas is for a painter, or the cap of Fortunatus
²
for a conjurer; it is served to us boiled, roasted, fried, hot or cold, whole or cut up, with or without sauce, boned, skinned, stuffed, and always with equal success.

Three districts of the old prerevolutionary France can quarrel over the honor of providing the best poultry, namely Caux, Mans, and Bresse.

As far as capons are concerned, there is some question, and whatever is immediately on the tip of the fork will seem the best; but for fat pullets, the preference goes to those of Bresse, which are called
poulardes fines
and which are round as apples; it is a great pity that they are so scarce in Paris, where they never are found except in hampers from the country.

35: The turkey is certainly one of the most delightful presents which the New World has made to the Old.