The Physiology of Taste (43 page)

1.
This is one more of the Professor’s little affectations.
Fetva, fetfa, fetwa:
it is a decision given by a Mufti or a Moslem official, usually in writing.

2.
Someone wrote in a letter about Byron at Diodati, in 1816, that he was trying very hard to grow thinner, and that “… a thin slice of bread with tea, at breakfast, a light vegetable dinner, with a bottle or two of seltzer-water, tinged with
Vin de Grave
, and in the evening a cup of green tea without milk or sugar, formed the whole of his sustenance; the pangs of hunger he appeased by privately chewing tobacco and smoking cigars.”

3.
The best bread I ever ate in my life, if bread be its staff, was what the Professor called here a
pain de seigle
, which I bought by that very name in a little shop in Dijon, a generous hundred years after his death. It was a curiosity in that so-called “gastronomical center.” The second-best bread was called
pain fédéral
in Switzerland, a few years later, and was a most dark hearty loaf, good fresh and better stale. François who looked after me in a thoroughly housewifish way felt much embarrassed to have it delivered to my door when fine white bread went to his own wife’s. It was wonderful with a smuggled cheese, called Reblochon, which
came across Leman from the French Savoy in midnight boats, and was soft and ripe and mild.

4.
Cadet-de-Vaux (1743–1828) was a renowned chemist who wrote several unexpectedly advanced books on public sanitation as well as dietetics.

5.
According to illustrations (and the cheaper the book the more details there were), a dinner table in the Professor’s day (or night) was a fairly confused thing. There was no formality of seating except for royalty or very high nobility, which must be put on one side or the other of the host. Then came the ladies. Then the men seated themselves, according to their ethical, political, or amorous slants. If the party was a giddy one and “actresses” were present, the seating was even more selective. The host and a chosen guest sat and stood at either end of the table, and tried to carve and serve. They coped with something like the following menu: two soups, two fishes, two removes, six entrées, in the first course; two roasts, two removes, and six entrées, in the second. The waiters flew around madly, for any guest could cry out, “Here, you!” The table was massed with set-pieces, goblets, and whatnots. The more pictures you look at, the crazier it gets, and a dinner party for eight at Mike Romanoff’s seemed cowardly-custardy in comparison in 1947 when no living hostess dared seat mate next to reputed mate, and the blissful surcease of set-pieces was unknown, or hopefully ignored.

6.
It is impossible for any woman as hopelessly attracted to Brillat-Savarin as am I, not to wonder how he managed to live 71 years as a bachelor … and why. Perhaps this is the secret: certainly it is the only revelation of its kind in a basically personal book. Louise, who might, he hints, have become much more than a friend to him, was to be lost forever when he was only twenty. It is a startling coincidence, I think, that the only other mention of any woman who was more than a charming dinner companion to Brillat-Savarin is in his ballade,
THE DEATHBED
. “Louise must weep …” Was there indeed another Louise who might tend him at his last hour, or had the ghost of the pretty Dijonnaise stayed with him all his celibate years?

7.
Here, at least to my loving eye, is the most intimate and revealing moment in the book, as far as the Professor’s private life goes.
At the end of his story of the Foolish Virgin he almost literally says
Harrumph
, like a peppery old Englishman ashamed of the tear in his eye and the tremor in his voice, and he mentions with a surgeon’s coolness one of his favorite scientific treatises and then goes resolutely into the details of his antifat belt. This may or may not be a love story, but the abrupt transition seems very emotional to me.

112:
THINNESS IS THE
state of a person whose muscular flesh, not being filled out with fat, reveals the shapes and angles of his bony structure.

There are two kinds of thinness: the first, being the result of the basic character of the body, is accompanied by health and the complete exercise of all organic functions; the second, caused by the weakness of some organs or the faulty action of others, gives a miserable and puny look to its victims. I myself have known, in the first category, a young woman of medium height who weighed only about sixty-five pounds.

113: It is not a great disadvantage to men to be lean; they are no less vigorous for it, and are much more active. The father of the young lady I just mentioned, although quite as thin as she, was strong enough to pick up with his teeth a heavy chair, and throw it behind him by lifting it over the top of his head.

But thinness is a horrible calamity for women: beauty to them is more than life itself, and it consists above all of the roundness of their forms and the graceful curvings of their outlines. The most artful toilette, the most inspired dressmaker, cannot disguise certain lacks, nor hide certain angles; and it is a common saying that a scrawny woman, no matter how pretty she may look, loses something of her charm with every fastening she undoes.

With sickly ladies there is no remedy for thinness, or rather it is a case for the doctors, and their treatment of it may take so long that the cure itself will arrive almost too late.

But as for women who are born thin and whose digestion is good, we cannot see why they should be any more difficult to fatten than young hens; and if it takes a little more time than with poultry, it is because human female stomachs are comparatively smaller, and cannot be submitted, as are those devoted barnyard creatures, to the same rigorous and punctually followed diet. This comparison is the most tactful one I have been able to find; I needed one, and the ladies will forgive me for it, because of my praiseworthy intentions toward them in developing this chapter.

114: Nature, so varied in her works, has moulds for thinness as well as for obesity.

People meant to be lean are built on a long scale. They have slender hands and feet, lanky legs, flat behind; their ribs show, and their noses are aquiline; they have almond-shaped eyes, wide mouths, sharp chins, and dark hair.

Such is the type in general: some parts of the body can deviate from it, but this rarely happens.

Now and then one sees a thin person who eats a great deal. All such whom I have been able to question have confessed to me that they digest badly and then …, which is, of course, why they continue to be scrawny.

Natural-born weaklings are of every coloring and every type of structure. They can be distinguished chiefly by the fact that they have nothing striking about them, either in their features or their figures; their eyes are lacklustre, their lips pale, and the sum total of their appearance indicates lack of energy, weakness, and something which resembles a kind of misery. One could almost say that they seem to be unfinished creatures, and that the flame of life is not yet fully lighted in them.

115: Every thin woman wants to grow plump: that is an avowal which has been made to us a thousand times. Therefore it is in order to pay final homage to the all-powerful sex that we are going to try here to tell how to replace with living flesh those pads of silk or cotton which are displayed so profusely in novelty shops, to the obvious horror of the prudish, who pass them by with a shudder, turning away from such shadows with even more care than if it were actuality they looked upon.

With a suitably adapted diet, the usual prescriptions relative to rest and sleep can almost be ignored without endangering the net results: if you do not take any exercise, you will be inclined to grow fat; if you exercise, you will still grow fat, since you will eat more than usual. When hunger is knowingly satisfied, you not only restore what energy you have used up, but you add to what you already have, whenever there is need for it.

If you sleep a great deal, it will be fattening; if you sleep little, your digestion will take place faster and you will eat more.

The only problem, then, is to indicate to those who wish to fill out their curves what foods they must always choose for their nourishment; and this task need not be a difficult one if the various principles which we have already established are followed.

In sum, it is necessary to introduce into the stomach foods which will occupy it without tiring it, and to the assimilative powers foods they can best turn into fat.

Let us try to outline the day’s fare of a sylph, whether male or female, who has been seized by the desire to materialize into solid flesh.

Basic plan
. Eat plenty of bread, baked fresh each day, and take care not to discard the soft inside of the loaf.

Before eight o’clock in the morning, and in bed if that seems best, drink a bowl of soup thickened with bread or noodles, but not too much of it, so that it may be eliminated quickly; or, if you wish, take a cup of good chocolate.

At eleven, lunch on fresh eggs scrambled or fried in butter, little meat pies, chops, and whatever you wish; the main thing is that you have eggs. A cup of coffee will do no harm.

The dinner hour depends on how well your luncheon has been assimilated: we have often said that when the ingestion of one meal follows too quickly upon the digestion of another, it is, in legal terms, a form of malpractice.

After luncheon you must take a little exercise: the gentlemen, only if their professions allow it, for attention to business comes first; the ladies will go to the Bois de Boulogne, the Tuileries, their dressmakers, the shops, and finally to their friends’ houses, to chat of what they have seen. We hold that such conversation is highly beneficial, because of the great pleasure which accompanies it.

At dinner take soup, meat, and fish, as much as you wish; but add to them dishes made with rice or macaroni, frosted pastries, sweet custards, creamy puddings, etc.

For dessert eat Savoy biscuits, babas, and other concoctions which are made of flour, eggs, and sugar.

This diet, although it seems very rigid, is really capable of great variety; it has place in it for the whole animal kingdom, and you must take especial care to change the use and preparation and seasoning of the different starchy foods which you will be served and which you will enliven in every possible way, so that you may avoid being surfeited by them, an event which would prove an invincible obstacle to any improvement in your appearance.

You should drink beer by preference,
¹
or wines from Bordeaux or the French Midi.

Avoid all acids except in salads, which refresh the digestion.
²
Sweeten whatever fruits need it; avoid taking baths which are too cold; try to breathe from time to time the pure air of the open countryside; eat plenty of grapes in season; and do not exhaust yourselves by dancing too much at the balls.

Go to bed about eleven o’clock on ordinary days, and not later than one in the morning on special occasions.

If you follow this plan with care and determination, you will soon repair the ravages of nature; your health as well as your beauty will improve; sensual pleasure will profit from the two of them, and the professor’s ears will ring agreeably to the music of grateful confidences.

We fatten sheep, calves, oxen, poultry, carp, crayfish, and
oysters; and from this fact I have deduced the following general maxim:
Everything that eats can grow fat, as long as its food is sensibly and suitably chosen
.

1.
Love has a thinning effect upon most female silhouettes, when it is unrequited (as opposed to the fullness of its satisfaction!). A young woman in Dresden in 1903, pining for a young man in America … they were my parents-to-be … grew so bony as to be almost unstylish, and upon consulting a fashionable Scotch doctor was advised to drink all the beer she could hold, and to carry a few chocolate drops in her petticoat pocket, for between-stein nibbling. She stayed thin, the Scot and the Professor to the contrary.

2.
This pretty phrase, “
la salade … qui réjouit le coeur,”
is often quoted and misquoted. At the expense of being thought dully practical and unpoetical, I truthfully do not think that it means that salads gladden the heart, but that they are light in the stomach and easily digested, and that they bring a feeling of easiness and comfort to the whole belly and especially to the poor overworked organ that perches on top of it, the human heart. Anything which does that is, of course, a gladsome thing.

116:
FASTING IS THE
voluntary abstinence from food for moral or religious reasons.

Even though it is contrary to one of our natural inclinations, or rather to one of our most basic needs, it is nevertheless of the greatest antiquity.

Here is how writers explain its beginnings.

In cases of personal bereavement, they tell us, when a father, a mother, or a cherished child died in a family, the entire household grieved: there was great weeping, and the body was washed and embalmed, and then given the funeral rites proper to its social rank. At these times, the bereaved hardly dreamed of eating: they fasted without realizing that they did so.

In the same way, in public catastrophes, when there was some such affliction as an extraordinary drought, or too-heavy rains, or cruel wars, or plagues, in a word any scourge too strong for human strength and industry, men gave themselves up to lamentation, and blamed all their misery on the anger of their gods. They bowed in humiliation, and offered up the modifications of self-denial. Their miseries ceased, and it was easy to believe they did so because of the tears and the fasting, and to continue to rely upon such apparent remedies.