The Physiology of Taste (25 page)

The main things being to hand, that is the quails and the ashy hearth, the rest is simple. The birds are happiest stuffed with “a smooth truffled game forcemeat,” to quote Escoffier, but this is really not necessary. Then each is well wrapped in a buttered grape leaf, in a slice of bacon, and finally in two sheets of sturdy buttered parchment paper. These little packages are tucked deeply into the hot cinders on the hearth for thirty-five minutes, and the laziest of the hunters can be appointed watchman beside them, to keep the ashes and himself just below a glow. When they are served, the outer charred layer of paper is removed, and
they wait on the hot plates for the first prick of the fork, the first ecstatic puff of delicately gamy perfume from their pierced wrappings. They will be ambrosia on earth. They will, like the “pigeons so finely roasted” that Dean Swift wrote about, cry “Come eat me!”

9.
This is what the chef of a small famed restaurant near Cassis-sur-Mer once told me: tie the ankles of a snipe or woodcock together, and hang him head down in an airy place until he is so far gone that the weight of his body pulls him off the hook! He is then ready, at his peak …

10.
This recipe is to be found in “Varieties XII: The Pheasant,” and is also almost unchanged in the American edition of Escoffier.

11.
It is easy to find incredible stories of great oyster-eating, from Roman times until today (or at least yesterday). The emperor Vitellius, for example, ate the “breedy creatures” four times a day, exactly 1200 of them at each meal … and even if they were as small as the little metallic Olympias of the Pacific Coast, that would make a fair sized bulk. And in
THE OYSTER
, published anonymously in London in 1863, it says: “I once heard of an individual who made a bet that he would eat twelve dozen oysters, washed down by twelve glasses of Champagne, while the cathedral clock … was striking twelve. He won his bet by placing a dozen fresh oysters in twelve wine glasses, and having swallowed the oysters, he washed down each dozen with a glass of Champagne. I should not have mentioned this disgusting feat, but to add that he felt no evil effects …, proving incontestably the digestive and sanitary properties of this mollusk.”

12.
There are as many recipes for this fish stew as there are good cook books, of course. Given the basic facts that a matelote (Brillat-Savarin spelled it here with two
t
s) can be made with either red or white wine, and with any kinds of fish from eels to guppies, the tendency among chefs has apparently been to remove the ways of preparing it as far as possible from the waterside taverns where the Professor says it tasted the best. By the time it got to Queen Victoria’s table, for instance, her good Francatelli had turned this simple fisherman’s dish into a revoltingly luxurious mess of forcemeat dumplings, truffles, cream, and such like.

The recipe that to me seems nearest the Professor’s ideal is from a paper-bound “Treatise on Home Cooking in Bordeaux,” which looks unassuming enough for the lowliest inn kitchen, and is in truth larded with more than its fair share of things to make gastronomers sigh aloud.

Take a good carp (or whatever fish you have) and cut it into slices the thickness of two fingers, after having cleaned it properly.

Put a tablespoonful of butter and a chopped onion into a casserole. When it is golden add a tablespoonful of flour, which you will let brown; moisten with a generous pint of red wine and a tablespoonful of strong meat stock. Add a
bouquet garni
, a clove of garlic, 12 good-sized mushrooms, salt, pepper, and 24 little onions which you have peeled and browned lightly but thoroughly in butter.

Let the sauce cook ten minutes. Add the slices of fish to it and let it simmer very gently for 20 minutes. Take out the
bouquet
and the garlic, and then serve with the edges of the casserole encircled with slices of crusty bread fried in the best butter. Eat with spoons, like a
cioppino
.

A
bouquet garni
, it is perhaps useless to explain in this age of oversubscribed gastronomical monthlies and quarterlies, is, according to André Simon, “a fagot of herbs, chiefly parsley, thyme, and bay leaf, also celery, leeks, and so on.” (A fagot, which I myself write with two
g
s, as the Professor wrote matelote with two
t
s, is a bundle of herbs tied together.)

13.
Maurice, Count of Saxe (1696–1750), was a natural son of Augustus II of Saxony and Poland, Marshal of France and one of the most brilliant generals in its history, and the all-demanding lover of many beautiful women. Chief among them was Adrienne Lecouvreur (1692–1730), for many years the idol of Paris at the Comédie Française, where she did much to bring more naturalness and spontaneity to the over-stylized acting of the period. Her life was made tragic by her passion for Saxe, and when she died mysteriously, it was believed to be from poison in a bouquet sent her by the Duchess of Bouillon, her rival for his ruthless and insatiable attentions. He lived many years more, and in his latter ones wrote an extraordinary book on military tactics with the dreamy title,
MES REVERIES
.

14.
“God walks among the pots and pipkins,” Saint Theresa is said to have said. And Brillat-Savarin manages to make plain, with typically nineteenth-century mockery, that Venus too enjoys strolling through even the most monastic kitchens (see, for instance, the incident of the dish of eel), dipping the tip of her finger into this ascetic matelote, that treacherously innocent fish pie, confounding the holy fathers’ vows with what gastronomical chemists may call phosphorus but ordinary men more rightly know as hell-fire.

15.
The most meditative statement I have ever read about Fish, not a fish or the fish but Fish, is a poem from the Japanese. In Japan the seventeen-syllable exercise known as a haiku is considered proper for kings as well as philosophers, and the one I have always remembered, sometimes in spite of myself, could almost as well have been written by an emperor as a thinker. It is, in its own restrained way, full of passion:

It is perhaps easier to slide from the sublime to the ridiculous gastronomically than any other way, so I do not hesitate to add here that a bonito is a striped tunny about three feet long, found in tropical waters. It is contraband in California. I have often eaten fillets of it in a restaurant in Hollywood, where it is served grilled almost black on one side and doused with lemon and melted butter. I have always thought that I would like a chance to cook it myself, and not do it so thoroughly (I feel the same way about every shad roe I have ever tasted), but rather than forgo its delicate flesh I would eat it always in a public place and in solid charcoal form.

16.
The truffle problem (are they or are they not restorative, aphrodisiac, enervating, aperitive, what you will?) can be called moot. It is especially hard for Americans to decide, since there are no native truffles in any of their uncountable kinds of country. (My grandmother claimed to have found
morilles
, most trufflish of mushrooms, in both New York State and Iowa.) The gritty tubers that come in high priced tins or bottles from
France are but poor shadows of what they may once have been. Thin slices of them in restaurant
pâtés
are impressive but tasteless. Thin slices of them warmed in white wine, cooled, then drained and used at home are passable. Whole, they remain gritty tubers, less succulent than the war diet of tulip bulbs in Holland, much less so than what Thackeray described in
MEMORIALS OF GORMANDISING:
“Presently, we were aware of an odour gradually coming towards us, something musky, fiery, savoury, mysterious,—a hot drowsy smell, that lulls the senses, and yet enflames them,—the
truffles
were coming.”

The discreet French lady who relented long enough to talk to Brillat-Savarin was at least honest enough to make it plain that her senses
were
enflamed … which is more than could be claimed by any of us Yankee ladies who had indulged in even the highest priced tin of them, I am afraid.

17.
Here Brillat-Savarin said, “… as there are fagots and fagots,” quoting from Molière’s
LE MEDECIN MALGRE LUI
, in which Sganarelle wants to show that his fagots are better than any others, and says, “Il y a fagots et fagots …”

18.
Here is one of the Professor’s sly ambiguities: just what do the ladies hold most dear? Is it their beauty, their smooth skins, their chastity …? The answer, pretty clearly, in in “X. Chocolate and Its Origins” in Meditation 6, but it need not put an end to all speculation.

19.
Once on a Dutch freighter in 1939 there was a man who lay back in his deck chair sipping tonic water and gin, talking of the old days before he settled down in Surabaya. He had been a planter; now he was full of regrets and wrenching chills.

Hunting had been good then, he said: there were even boys who followed along with baskets to pick up the wild tiger droppings, to let them dry and then screen them and bring them to the masters’ houses … handfuls of the best Java coffee in the world, the beans that had emerged whole from the crucible of digestion, the magically ripe, flavorsome berries that had escaped the long savage bowels to be ground up for the planters’ pleasure.

What? Had we never tasted this most exquisite of coffees? The Dutchman lay back, shaking with fever, laughing into his glass.

20.
Francatelli,
maître d’hôtel
and chief cook to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, said in the twenty-sixth edition of his
Modern
Cook
, which was first published in 1846: “The Cafetière à la Dubelloy … is best adapted for making good coffee.” Here is a straightforward statement, surely, and one made at least twenty years after Brillat-Savarin said the same.

Francatelli on the subject of coffee is interesting, especially since he was writing for Englishmen, those men of ill repute as far as mocha is concerned. His rival Soyer could say as much on the other side of the page, for he admitted in his 1847 edition of the
GASTRONOMIC REGENERATOR
that he had bribed his cook with the promise of a new silk frock to tell him her recipe for coffee … and that she said, proud soul of Albion, “… as soon as I have poured the coffee from the pot, I put another quart of boiling water over it. This I find saves me an ounce of coffee by boiling it instead of water, and pouring it over as before.”

I’ve been to London, but never to see the Queen … yet even so I think that I’ve drunk of this regal coffee, this twice-boiled British brew. (An outraged amateur in Cornwall once swore to me that the coffee in his hotel was made from very old charwomen, dried brown in a slow oven and then crumbled and steeped in water.) It is comforting to know that Victoria’s own chef preferred
café à la Dubelloy
.

Francatelli wrote: “… if you have done reasonable honour to some of the good things which I will suppose your table to have been supplied with, pray let the wine alone for the present, and order up the coffee—
hot, strong
, and
bright!
Let it be made with pure—picked overland Mocha,—fresh roasted pale—coarsely ground,—and pray do forbid your housekeeper to clarify it with egg; but tell her to use a bit of genuine Russian isinglass, not the spurious filth made from all sorts of abominations, and sold at most Italian warehouses under the name of isinglass.”

The best isinglass (genuine Russian, of course!) is made from sturgeon; this is logical if it is logical that the best caviar (also genuine Russian!) is made from or by sturgeon too. It is a kind of gelatin, “very pure in form” the Oxford Dictionary says, which would most probably apply to Francatelli’s reference, although unfortunately I can find no other mention of this usage.

The word itself comes from an obsolete Dutch one,
huisenblas
, sturgeon’s bladder. There may be some connection between this
word and the fact that when an old woman who made the most famous sparkling ruddy beef broth in all Delaware, the kind that was served at weddings and baptisms and such, was asked the secret of her diamond-clear elixir, she held off for a long time and then confessed as delicately as possible that to each gallon of consommé she added at the last one cup of the best bull piss.

21.
It is basically distressing to have to admit that the Professor used his coffee grounds twice, but at least he did it with no fuss about economy! The best use I have ever read about is one I found in a manual of “Helpful household hints” compiled near the turn of the twentieth century by a group of church women in a small American town: “Dried coffee grounds will make good filling for pincushions, and will not pack down nor rust the needles …”

22.
It would probably be an entertaining sortie into the jungle of possible footnotes to find out who the two drunkards were, the one on caffeine and the other, banal soul, on mere alcohol. Like the Professor at least three times in this book, I leave it to those who may come after me.

23.
Karl von Linné, as Linnaeus called himself after he was given a grant of the patent of nobility, was a Swedish botanist, and probably one of the world’s greatest. He lived from 1707 to 1778, and in that time wrote 180 books, most of them important to other botanists and a few of them, like his
GENERA PLANTARUM
, which introduced the use of specific names of plants, still in common use.

24.
One thing the Professor was perhaps too kind to mention: many people who are fighting the foul coils of alcoholism have discovered or been rightly told that chocolate and liquor do not in general marry well. They go serenely to the obligatory cocktail routs, fortified by a cup of hot, if un-ambered, cocoa, or a bar or two of that childhood favorite, Hershey’s. And if, when they feel that they must drink or die, they are still strong enough to fill their mouths instead with chocolate, they survive a little longer.

25.
It sometimes seems that Brillat-Savarin was unduly interested in his own set of restoratives and stimulants, especially for a man as sturdy as he is said to have been. But he lived in a time when, much more than now, the fittest were the ones to survive. Malnourishment sat on every lowly doorstep, and plague still
flitted over the gutters of crowded towns. Rich people, if they avoided the sicknesses of venery, lived much longer than poor ones, but even their life span was short compared with ours, and they suffered abominably from gout and gall-and kidney-stones. Most of all, perhaps, well-fed lassitude weighed them down, and where today the fat people of the world can tickle themselves with nembutal and Seconal and various soothing “neutralizers,” and even the poor can down their daily or hourly cokes, there was nothing in the Professor’s day but to sip tea, grow red-faced over punch, or grasp in desperation for a cup of his famous restorative broth. He was a man with true compassion for his weaker brothers—perhaps because even in his strength he had endured the same faint moments as had they—and he felt with the instinct of a good physician that physical sustenance is of the spirit too.