The Physiology of Taste (20 page)

39: By game we mean those animals which live in the woods and fields in a state of natural freedom, and which are still good to eat.

We say
good to eat
, because some of these creatures are not properly covered by the title of game, like the foxes, badgers, crows, magpies, screech owls, and others: they are called vermin,
bêtes puantes
.

We classify game in three divisions:

The first begins with the thrush, and continues down through all the diminishing sizes of what are called the little birds.

The second begins with the corncrake and goes on up through the snipe, the partridge, the pheasant, to the rabbit and the hare; it is properly called field game, marsh game, furred game, and feathered game.

The third is best known under the name of venison; it includes the wild boar, the roebuck, and all the other cloven-hooved animals.

Game is one of our favorite delicacies; it is a food at once healthy, warming, savorous, and stimulating to the taste, and is easily assimilated by anyone with a youthful digestive apparatus.

But these qualities are not so inherent that they can be independent of the skill of whoever tampers with them. If you throw some salt, some water, and a piece of beef together into a pot you will have some boiled beef and some soup. For beef substitute some wild boar or roebuck, and you will have absolutely nothing edible; all credit, in this case, must go to the domesticated provender of the butcher shop.

But game, under the command of a knowing chef, undergoes a great number of cunning modifications and transformations, and supplies the main body of those highly flavored dishes which make up truly gastronomical cookery.

Game also draws a great deal of its value from the nature of the country where it has matured: the flavor of a red partridge from Périgord is not that of one from Sologne; and while a hare killed on the plains outside of Paris makes but an insipid dish, a young one born on the sunburned slopes of Valromey or the upper Dauphiné is perhaps the tastiest of all four-legged game.

By far the most important of the small birds, because of its excellence, is the figpecker.

It grows at least as fat as the redbreast or the ortolan, and nature has moreover given it a slight bitterness and a unique flavor so exquisite that they seize upon, flood, and beautify every possible avenue of taste. If a figpecker could grow as big as a pheasant, it would be worth the price of an acre of land.

It is a great pity that this remarkable bird is found so seldom
in Paris; true, a few arrive now and then, but they are completely lacking in the fat which constitutes their especial merit, and it can truthfully be said that they resemble but faintly those which are found in the east or southern parts of France.
*

Few people know how to eat small feathered game; here is the best way, as it was told me confidentially by Canon Charcot, a born gourmand, and a true gastronomer thirty years before the word was known:

Take by the beak a fine fat little bird, salt him lightly, pull out his gizzard, stuff him deftly into your mouth, bite him off sharply close to your fingertips, and chew with vigor: there will flow from him enough juice to fill your whole mouth, and you will enjoy a taste experience unknown to the common herd.

    Odi profanum vulgis, et arceo.
HORACE
.
⁷

    The quail is, among game as it is properly labelled, everything that is most delightful and tempting. One of these really plump little birds is pleasing equally for its taste, its shape, and its color. It is unfortunate to serve it any way but roasted or
en papillote
, because its aroma is extremely fleeting, and whenever the bird comes in contact with a liquid this perfume dissolves, evaporates, and is lost.
⁸

Snipe is still another distinguished bird, but few people know all its charms. It is never at its peak of desirability unless it has
been roasted under the very eyes of a hunter, above all the hunter who has killed it; then the process is carried out according to his personal prejudices, and his mouth waters in a regular flood of anticipation.

Above all other feathered game should come the pheasant, but once again few mortal men know how to present it at its best.

A pheasant eaten within a week after its death is more worthless than a partridge or a pullet, because its real merit consists in its heightening flavor.

Science has studied the expansion of that flavor, experience has put knowledge into action, and a pheasant taken at the peak of its ripening is something worthy of the greatest of gourmands.
⁹

Later on in the Varieties I shall give the method of roasting a pheasant
à la sainte alliance.
¹⁰
The time has come when this method, until now known only to a little group of friends, must spread outside that circle, for the good of mankind. A truffled pheasant is less good than one would believe; the bird is too dry to permeate the fungus; and moreover the gaminess of the one and the delicate odor of the other are self-contradictory as they merge, or rather it can be said that they are unsuitable together.

40: Certain scholars, and they none too orthodox, have argued that the ocean was the cradle of everything that exists; that mankind itself was born in the sea, and that it owes its present state to the influence of the air and of the habits it has been forced to form in this element comparatively new to it.

However this may be, it is at least certain that the watery kingdoms hold an immense number of beings of every form and of every size, who are endowed with vital properties in extremely differing proportions, and according to a system which is not at all that of warm-blooded creatures.

It is no less true that these sea animals offer to us, everywhere and at all times, a vast world of edibles, and that, in the present state of science, they bring to our tables a most agreeable variety.

Fish, less nourishing than red meat, more appetizing than vegetables, are a compromise, a
mezzo termine
which agrees with
almost every temperament and which can even be permitted to invalids.

The Greeks and Romans, although less advanced than are we in the art of seasoning fish, nonetheless were great lovers of it, and carried their appreciation of it to the point of being able to tell by its taste from what waters it had been taken.

They stored it in special tanks; and everyone knows of the cruelty of Vadius Pollio, who fed his sea eels on the flesh of slaves which he had killed expressly, a crime which the Emperor Domitian disapproved of highly, but without doing anything to punish it.

There has always been a heated argument as to which fish is best, fresh-water or salt-water.

The problem will probably never be settled, which is one more confirmation of the Spanish proverb,
Sobre los gustos, no hai disputa
. Every man reacts differently to a thing: his fleeting sensations cannot be expressed in any known symbols, and there is no scale for determining whether a cod, a sole, or a turbot is better than a salmon trout, a fine fat pike, or even a six-or seven-pound tench.

It is agreed that fish is much less nourishing than red meat, whether it is because it contains no osmazome or because, being much lighter in weight for the same bulk, it has less substance. Shellfish, especially oysters, furnish very little real nourishment, which is what makes it possible to eat a great many of them without spoiling one’s appetite for the meal which will follow right after them.

I remember that in the old days any banquet of importance began with oysters, and that there were always a good number of the guests who did not hesitate to down
one gross
apiece (twelve dozen, a hundred and forty-four). I always wondered what the weight of this little appetizer would be, and finally I confirmed the fact that one dozen oysters (including their juice) weigh
four ounces
, which makes the gross amount to
three pounds
. I feel quite sure, then, that these same guests, who were not at all deterred from dining well after their oysters, would have been completely surfeited if they had eaten the same weight of meat, even if it had been the delicate flesh of a chicken.

In 1798 I was in Versailles as commissary of the Directory, and was often in contact with a gentleman called Laperte, who was registrar of the tribunal of that province; he was a great lover of oysters and was forever complaining that he had never had enough of them, “a real bellyful” as I told him he should put it.

I resolved to give him this satisfaction for once, and with just such a plan in mind I invited him to dine with me the next day.

He came: I kept him company through the third dozen, and then let him go on alone. He managed very well without me, and by the end of the next hour was in his thirty-second dozen, eating slowly because the maid who opened them for him was none too skilful.

All this time I was unoccupied, and since it is at table that this is especially painful, I finally interrupted my companion at the moment when he seemed going at his best speed, by saying, “My dear fellow, it’s your fate today not to have that bellyful! Let us begin our dinner.” We did so, and he enjoyed it with the vigor and polish of a man finishing a long fast.
¹¹

41: The ancients produced from fish two extremely strong seasonings,
muria
and
garum
.

The first was nothing but the brine of the tunny, or rather the juice which flowed from it when it was salted.

Garum
, which was more costly, is much less well known to us. It is believed that it was made by pressing the seasoned entrails of the scomber or mackerel, but if that were so its high price would not be justified. There is reason to believe that it was an imported sauce, perhaps that
soy
which comes to us from India and which is known to be the result of letting certain fishes ferment with mushrooms.

Some peoples, because of their differing conditions, are forced to live almost solely on fish; they nourish their animals as they do themselves, and habit soon accustoms these creatures to their unnatural diet; they even fertilize the land on fish, and still the sea
which surrounds them continues to supply them with a never-varying amount of it.

It has been observed that these peoples are less brave than others who live on meat: they are pale, which in itself is not surprising, since the elements of which fish is composed must perforce add more to the lymphatic content of the blood than to its replenishing forces.

Many examples of longevity have also been noted among fish-eating nations, whether because their light and unsubstantial diet saves them from the inconveniences of high blood pressure, or because the essences of this food, which are supposed to form light fishbones and cartilages which are not meant to last very long, act in human beings to hold back that general hardening of all parts of their bodies which is the natural cause of death.

However that may be, fish in the hands of a skilled cook can become an inexhaustible source of gustatory pleasures; it is served whole, cut in fillets, or sliced, boiled in water, fried, simmered in wine, cold, hot, and always equally acceptable; but there can be no praise more justly given to it than when it appears as a matelotte.

This stew, although it is a customary bargemen’s dish and is at its best as cooked by the tavern keepers who feed them along our river banks, nonetheless owes a matchless delicacy to this rough origin; and fish lovers never see it appear without crying out with delight, either because of its clean wholesome taste, or because it combines several good qualities, or because it can be eaten almost indefinitely without any fear of either satiety or indigestion.
¹²

Analytical gastronomy has long tried to determine what effects a fish diet has on animal economy and the opinion is unanimous that they are strongly sexual and awaken in both sexes the instinct of reproduction.

Once this result was admitted, it was found that there are two causes of it so obvious that they can be understood by anyone: (1) various ways of preparing fish in which the seasonings are plainly excitant, such as with caviar, pickled herrings, marinated tunny, salted cod, stockfish, and the like; (2) the various essences with which the fish is imbued, which are above all inflammable
and which are converted into oxygen and turned sour by the processes of digestion.

A still profounder analysis has discovered a third and even more active cause of the sexual effects of a fish diet: the presence of phosphorus, which occurs already formed in the milt, and which always appears in decomposition.

These physical truths were without doubt unknown to the ecclesiastical law makers who imposed a Lenten diet on various priestly orders, such as the Carthusians, the Franciscans, the Trappists, and the barefoot Carmelites as reformed by Saint Theresa; for it is impossible to believe that they could deliberately have wished to make even more difficult that vow of chastity already so antisocial in its observances.

Doubtless, in this state of affairs, a great many astounding victories have been won, and thoroughly rebellious instincts have been overthrown; but also how many defeats! How many falls from grace! These latter seem to have been well attested to, since they have succeeded in giving to more than one order of monks a reputation comparable only to that of Hercules among the Danaïdes, or of Marshal Saxe with Mademoiselle Lecouvreur.
¹³

This theory of the heating effects of fish can be clarified by an anecdote which must be old enough, since it has come down to us from the Crusades.

The Sultan Saladin, wishing to prove to what point he could push the continence of the dervishes of his country, took two of them into his palace, and for a certain period of time fed them upon the most delicious meats.

Very soon the signs of their self-denials began to melt away, and they regained some of their normal weight.