The Physiology of Taste (45 page)

With these words he picked up his cane and hat and left us, and we found ourselves hard put to it not to laugh a little at his back.

Before long I had made the invalid swallow a large dose of my elixir of life. He drank it thirstily, and wanted another one, but I ordered a two hours’ wait, and finally served him a second draught before I left.

The next day his fever was gone, and he was almost well. He breakfasted according to direction, continued the dosage of soup, and in another day could take up his usual pursuits; but his rebellious lip did not rise up into place again until after the third day.

Before long this whole affair became known, and all the ladies whispered about it among themselves.

Some of them admired my friend, almost all felt sorry for him, and the gastronomical professor was praised to the skies.

1.
I once watched color and courage creep back into the face of a girl exhausted by childbirth, as she sipped a glass of water
heavily charged with raw sugar and then plunged into the battle again.

2.
This is a rare mixture of classicism and slang: Alexander the Great is supposed to have downed a weird brew handed him by his physician, after one searching look at the face of the man who was whispered to be his enemy; such blind faith in France is named for charcoal burners, or used to be, because those slow quiet men are simple-minded and will believe anything. Of such is the kingdom of Literature …

OMNIA MORS POSCIT
;
LEX EST
,
NON POENA
,
PERIRE
¹

122:
THE SIX MOST
important necessities which the Creator has imposed on mankind are to be born, to move about, to eat, to sleep, to procreate, and to die.

Death is the complete interruption of sensual relations and the absolute cessation of vital action, which perforce leaves the body prey to the laws of decomposition.

These aforementioned basic needs are all of them accompanied by and made more agreeable by various sensations of pleasure, and death itself is not without enjoyment when it comes naturally, that is to say when the human body has passed through all its preordained phases of growth, maturity, old age, and decrepitude.

If I had not determined to make this a very short chapter, I would call to my aid the doctors who have watched the almost imperceptible changes which take place when living bodies change to inert matter. I would quote philosophers and kings and writers who, from the very fringes of eternity, far from being prey to pain and grief, have had cheerful thoughts which they could express with poetic charm. I would recall the reply of the dying Fontenelle, who, when he was questioned about what he felt, replied, “Nothing more than a difficulty to go on living.” But I prefer only to state my personal conviction, based both on analogy and on many observations which I feel have been carefully made, and of which this is the final one:

I had a great-aunt ninety-three years old, who was dying. Although she had been bedridden for some time, she was in full possession of all her faculties, and it was impossible to guess her true condition except by the lessening of her appetite and the weakening of her voice.

She had always been very fond of me, and it was I who sat by her bed, ready to help her most tenderly, but not the least prevented by this from observing her with the philosophical eye which I have always cocked at whatever goes on around me.

“Are you there, my dear nephew?” she asked me in a barely articulated voice.

“Yes, Aunt. I shall do everything I can for you, and I feel it would do you good to take a little really fine old wine.”

“Give it to me, my dear: liquid always flows downward.”

I hurried to lift her up gently, and made her swallow a half glass of my best wine. She instantly grew stronger, and looking at me with eyes which had once been very beautiful she said, “Deep thanks for this last service. If ever you reach my age, you will see that death becomes a necessity, just like sleep.”

These were her last words, and a half-hour later she had dozed off forever.

Dr. Richerand has described with such truth and philosophy the final changes in the human body and the last moments in the individual that my readers will thank me for making known to them the following passage:

“Here is the order in which our intellectual faculties cease and disintegrate. Reason, that attribute of which man pretends to be the sole possessor, abandons him first. At the beginning he loses the power to link his opinions sensibly and, soon after, follows his ability to compare and assemble and combine together several ideas in order to judge their net importance. It is then said that the sick man is out of his head, or that he is unreasonable or delirious. This delirium focuses usually on the thoughts which are most familiar to him, and his dominant passion is easily recognized: a miser confides the innermost secrets about his hidden gold; another man dies in the clutch of religious terror. Happy memories of the distant homeland, you, too, are reawakened in the exile, with all your charm and all your poignancy!

“After the powers of reasoning and judging, it is the faculty of associating ideas which is next struck down by the progressive destruction of death. This happens also in the state known as swooning, as I myself have proven. I was talking once with a
friend, when I felt an insurmountable difficulty in clarifying two ideas upon whose resemblance I wished to form an opinion. I was not completely unconscious, however: I still kept my memory and my ability to feel, and could distinctly hear the people who were around me saying,
He has fainted
, and trying to bring me out of this state,
which was not without a certain pleasure
.

“The next thing to die is memory. The sick man, who even in delirium recognized the people who were near him, now does not know his close associates, and finally ignores those with whom he has lived in the greatest intimacy. Then he stops feeling anything. His senses, however, go out in a successive and set order: taste and smell give no further sign of their existence; his eyes are dimmed as by a dull cloud, and take on a sinister look; his hearing is still sensitive to both sounds and noise. This last is doubtless why the ancients, in order to assure themselves that death had actually occurred, used to shriek into the ears of their corpses. The dying man now cannot smell or taste, and he sees and hears no more. There is still left to him the sense of touch, and he moves about on his bed, stretches his arms this way and that, and changes his position constantly; he reproduces, as we have already said, the movements of a foetus who stirs in its mother’s womb. The death which is about to strike him down cannot terrify him, for he has no more thoughts, and he finishes life as he began it, without any consciousness of so doing.” (Richerand,
NOUVEAUX ELÉMENTS DE PHYSIOLOGIE
, ninth edition, Volume II, page 600.)
²

1.
This says, “Death demands all: to die is law, not punishment.” The succinct profundity of this undoubtedly appealed to Brillat-Savarin’s orderly mind, as well as to the side of his nature which increasingly found itself preoccupied with the physical act of dying and its infinite spiritual ramifications. For many years before his death he had been known to express a fatalistic interest in the act, which at the same time had nothing morbid about it, and the song he composed and this present Meditation are but two proofs of his impersonal concern.

2.
It is perhaps a pity that birth and death are so little watched, in our time. I have always felt that the miracle of parturition, endured or only witnessed, makes any human being wiser and more humble. He who turns away from it is the poorer for his act. And the same may be true of death, which so seldom happens nowadays in the awesome quiet of a familiar chamber. Most of us die violently, thanks to the advances of science and warfare. If by chance we are meant to end life in our beds, we are whisked like pox victims to the nearest hospital, where we are kept as alone and unaware as possible of the approach of disintegration. Those of us who escape bombs and the mad highways have a chance to live much longer than men of the early nineteenth century, but it is hard not to agree with one good reporter of the twentieth who wrote from his cancer-tortured heart, “Science is wonderful … but I sometimes envy my ancestors who died too early to know how painfully life can be prolonged.” For myself, I should like to die like the Professor’s aunt, ancient and aware, at peace in a known room, and in the company of a loved person who was not repelled or frightened by my end. I should like my children to agree with me …

123:
COOKING IS THE
oldest of all arts: Adam was born hungry, and every new child, almost before he is actually in the world, utters cries which only his wet nurse’s breast can quiet.

Cooking is also of all the arts the one which has done most to advance our civilization, for the needs of the kitchen were what first taught us to use fire, and it is by fire that man has tamed Nature itself.

If we take a broad view, we can count up to three different kinds of
cooking
:

The first, which applies to the preparation of food, retains its original name;

The second concerns itself with the analysis of foods and the classification of their basic elements, and it has been given the name
chemistry
;

Finally, the third, which can be called restorative cooking, is best known by the name
pharmacy
.

Even though their purposes are different, these three are alike in the way they use fire and stoves, and in the employ of corresponding kinds of vessels.

Thus, the same piece of beef which the cook turns into soup and
pot-au-feu
the chemist will use to discover how many kinds of matter it consists of, and the pharmacist will dislodge violently from our stomachs if by chance it happens to prove indigestible.

124: Man is an omnivorous animal: he has incisor teeth for cutting into fruits, molars for crushing seeds, and canines for tearing
flesh, and of these last it has been observed that the nearer he comes to the savage state, the stronger and more prominent they will be.

It is very probable that the human race was for a long time and of necessity frugivorous:
¹
man was the clumsiest of the ancient world’s inhabitants, and his means of attack were extremely limited as long as he was unarmed. But the instinct for self-improvement which was a part of his nature was not long in developing; the very realization of his weakness led him to find ways of making weapons, toward which he was also pushed by the carnivorous yearnings already revealed by his canine teeth. Once armed, he made of all the creatures who surrounded him his prey and his nourishment.

This murderous instinct still exists in him: children usually kill whatever little animals are abandoned to their mercies, and would doubtless eat them if they were hungry enough.

It is not surprising that man from the beginning wanted to feed upon flesh: his stomach is too little and fruits have too few nourishing substances in them to be able to replenish sufficiently his bodily losses. He would have done better to live upon vegetables, but this diet demands culinary skills which did not develop for many centuries.

The first weapons must have been the branches of trees, and later came bows and arrows.

It is worthwhile to notice that wherever man has been discovered, in every climate, in every part of the globe, he has always been found armed with these bows and arrows. This uniformity is hard to explain. We cannot well see how the same series of ideas has occurred to individuals subjected to such differing circumstances; it must spring from a cause hidden from us by the veil of time.

Raw flesh has but one inconvenience: its viscous nature makes it stick to the teeth. Aside from this, it is not at all disagreeable to eat. It digests easily, seasoned with a little salt, and must be more nourishing thus than in any other form.

“
MEIN GOD
,” a captain from a Croat regiment whom I had invited to dinner said to me in 1815, “all this fuss isn’t necessary for a good meal! When we are in the field and are hungry we kill
the first beast we come upon; we cut ourselves a good meaty slice of it, sprinkle it with some of the salt which we always carry with us in our
sabre-tasche
,
*
put it between our saddle and the back of the horse, and give it a good gallop. Then (and here he growled like a creature tearing meat apart with his teeth)
gnian, gnian, gnian
, we feast as well as any prince.”

When sportsmen in the Dauphiné hunt in September, they too are armed with salt and with pepper. If one of them happens to bag a plump, perfect figpecker
²
he plucks it, seasons it, carries it for a time in the crown of his hat, and eats it. Such gourmands
³
insist that this is much more delicious than the bird when roasted.

It is plain that we have not completely lost our thrice-removed ancestors’ predilection for raw flesh. The most fastidious palates manage to enjoy sausages from Arles and Bologna, smoked beef from Hamburg, salted anchovies and herrings, and other such delicacies which have never been near fire and which still arouse our appetites.

125: After a long enough time of feasting in the Croatian fashion, men discovered fire, and this was once more a thing of chance, for fire does not happen by itself: the natives of the Marianas are said not to have known that such a thing existed.

126: Once fire was recognized, man’s instinct for self-improvement led him to subject meat to it, at first to dry out the flesh and finally to place it upon the embers to cook.