I should like to contrast these tales of abrupt proceedings and garish scenes with a pleasant picture of peaceful, resigned domesticity. Excellent serving women and good housewives do exist and I hope that some of them will read these pages. The numbers of these fine serving women would be greatly increased if only they were properly paid for their work and were treated with more justice and less caprice. There are still only a few people who follow the advice of the aforementioned Rumpolt, who begins:
‘The master should be in command of his servants but should be able to handle them in a friendly and amicable way. His words of command should not be proud, inflated, overbearing, immodest, violent. He should not rant and rave but should behave with great gentleness, sweetness, friendliness and modesty so that his running of the household takes the form of amicable requests and demands rather than a series of harsh orders. A lot of violent ranting and raving will confuse people, making them more stubborn and unwilling, and little will be achieved.’
Anyone who wishes to devote himself to cookery should grasp the concepts of orderliness, hygiene and punctuality early in life. He should not be allowed to read novels; if he wishes to develop his intellect he should study the natural sciences, history and mathematics; these will exercise his intelligence, improve his memory and give him knowledge which he can later apply to cookery. He should also read my book and no other.
—from The Essence of Cooking, 1822,
translated from the German by Barbara Yeomans
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Politics of Food
HONORÉ DE BALZAC ON EATING
Honoré de Balzac, chronicler and critic of bourgeois values in almost one hundred novels, contributed articles to Grimod de la Reynière’s Almanach. In 1828 he published his food essays as Le Gastronome français.
—M.K.
The prejudiced have such influence over the feeble-minded, they have established such errors to the ruin of truth, that it is perhaps not useless to seriously examine if the viewpoint of temperate people toward food is founded on anything other than a bad stomach
Just as the first advocates of abstinence were undoubtedly maladjusted, the first enthusiasts of moderation were surely people lacking in appetite.
Aristippe observed that philosophers who distrust wealth are penniless. Diogenes was broke when he was a cynic.… That is the way it is with detractors of appetite, of the tendency that is inherent in wellborn men of happy constitution. It is not the first time that charlatans, misguided and well spoken, have come to consider a virtue, that which is a well-organized vice.
However, there is an obligation to challenge those of the empty stomach, be they young or aged. No one questions the advantage of someone well satisfied over the most spiritual sickly person. An empty stomach makes an empty mind. Our reason, completely independent from our beliefs, respects the laws of digestion; and it could be said, perhaps as accurately as La Rochefoucauld said it, that good thoughts come from the stomach.
This leaves unresolved the question of whether the spirit is stronger before or after a meal. Many a writer had inspiration only when eating. There are some people who cannot take on serious questions until they have had something to drink. Ministers have often been seen coming alive only in the evening, because their head, restored, while sleeping, from the fumes of a generous wine, was clearer and conceived more lucid ideas. This was the technique of the honorable M. Pitt.
But the real triumph of the gourmet is in the field of morality. Candor is virtually synonymous with the title bon vivant. Ever since the banquet of the seven wise men and the knights of the round table, dinner is the meeting place of the most crisp minds, the most heroic hearts, and the most independent spirits.
The dinner table is a place of gathering, of delight, of brotherhood; it brings together the pleasure of peace, the ardor of courage, and warrior virtues. The most fearless soldier loses his worth when he is hungry; warriors are fed before battle; and whoever trembled with fear before eating will fear nothing afterward.
—from Le Gastronome français, 1828,
translated from the French by Mark Kurlansky
CURNONSKY ON POLITICAL CATEGORIES FOR GOURMETS
Curnonsky was born Maurice-Edmond Sailland in Anges, France, in 1872. He was one of the most influential food critics of the early twentieth century, although A. J. Liebling once wrote of him, “So many mediocre witticisms are attributed to him that he could not have had much time for eating.” Nevertheless, for several decades, Curnonsky, the author of numerous books and articles, was to many people the man to quote for the last word on anything gastronomic.
—M.K.
To the uninitiated, a gourmet is an obese sexagenarian, with gout, hobbling along, living only to eat and always overeating—and doing little work between meals.
That is not exactly right, and once again, you must distrust hasty generalizations. There are gourmets of all ages. They are even of both sexes, and I know some “gourmettes” who could put the men to shame.
Among all gourmets, there is really only one trait in common: a good sense of humor. Their guileless passion requires a good stomach and perfect organic equilibrium—and each understands the influence of health on character. No doubt the greatest orators have proclaimed, “A great soul is always master of the body it keeps.” But between eloquence and reality there is space for a few qualifications. If you are suffering from kidney problems, or even a simple toothache, your concept of the universe can alter to such an extent that you find yourself questioning the four truths of the Creator.
But that is not to say that gourmets all have the same point of view, especially about cuisine. For as long as I have been around them—and that did not begin yesterday, having grown up with a father and two grandfathers who loved the good life—I have been convinced that they can be classified into the same groups as politicians.
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about it will see that in gastronomy, too, there is an extreme right, a right, a center, a left, and an extreme left.
Extreme right—These are the passionate followers of “grande cuisine,” an educated cuisine, well researched, a bit complicated, that demands a great chef and the best products, what one could call diplomatic cuisine, that of embassies, of grand banquets, of palaces—a cuisine that the real palaces usually can only parody.
Right—The advocates of “traditional cooking,” which only accepts wood-burning fires and dishes that simmer very slowly, predicated on the belief that the only good food is home cooking, with no more than six or eight people, prepared by an elderly women who has been in the employ of the family for thirty years, with a wine cellar stocked with bottles from “before the phylloxera” [in the mid–nineteenth century, European vineyards were decimated by an American aphid and wine producers were forced to replace their root stock with American plants that were resistant to the American insect] and alcohols selected by a great grandfather, with a vegetable garden and hen house on the premises.
Center—The lovers of bourgeois cuisine and regional cuisine: Those who concede that you still can eat well at restaurants and that all over France good inns and fine hotels remain where prepared sauce bases are never used and where butter is butter. The centros keep a taste for the traditional French dishes, and our regional wines. They insist that things “have the taste of what they are” and are never altered or overdone.
Left—Partisans of cooking without affectations or complications and, since they are fond of snacking, a cuisine that can be made in a minimum of time with modest means. These people are pleased with a well-made omelette, a medium steak, a rabbit fricassee, or, indeed, a slice of ham or a cold cut. They do not reject canned food and insist on the charm of a good canned sardine in oil and that a certain brand of canned green beans is at least as good as fresh ones.
They unearth the little hole-in-the-wall where the owner does the cooking. They love to discover, for example, a simple restaurant run by a man from the provinces who gets
products shipped from his native region. He praises country cooking and enjoys little local wines. They are the nomads of gastronomy and it is for them that I invented the word “gastronomade” [Curnonsky’s word for practitioners of gastronomic tourism].
Extreme left—The dreamers, the restless, the innovators who Napoleon had called ideologues; always in search of new sensations and unproven pleasures. Curious about all foreign food, and all the foreign and colonial specialties, they wish they could taste every dish from every climate and country.
But what is most characteristic of them is a fondness for newly invented dishes. Among this group are some very worthwhile people but also some who are a little unsettling, free spirits—but with the difference that here the anarchists have a horror of bombes, a dessert that for them is too classic, an old-fashioned dish. In other words, these are the people on the side of saints and martyrs. Thirty years ago, a gourmet of this type declared that peas were a far too banal shade of green and he decided to produce peas that were grass green. He first treated them in hydrogen peroxide, followed by a strong shot of green malachite with a few flakes of iron. Then, satisfied with the result, and made hungry by hours of work, he ate about a pound of these house specialty green peas.… When I went to see him, eight days later in the hospital, his condition slightly improved, he began to understand that he should have eaten some grass—by the roots.
Do not take this example as the general stereotype. Good cooking, as in other fields, only survives by adapting to changes. I would be mistaken to reject all new dishes and innovations, since for the last thirty years, famous chefs have honored me by naming a dozen new dishes after me.
—from Almanach des gourmands, c. 1950,
translated from the French by Mark Kurlansky
ÉMILE ZOLA ON FAT AND THIN PEOPLE AT LES HALLES
Émile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris was written in 1873 when he was thirty-three years old, an early work that preceded his more famous novels. The book opens on a road into central Paris. Wagons filled with food are making their way into Les Halles, Paris’s newly built central market. While driving her wagon, Madame François, a vegetable vendor, sees “a black lump, lying blocking the road, nearly under a horse’s hoof.” She slows down and a man sorting turnips yells at her. But realizing that the lump is a man, she gets out of her cart to help him off the road. The man, Florent, nearly run over by the caravan of food entering the city, has returned from the infamous penal colony of French Guiana, so weak from starvation that he cannot stand. Despite annoying coworkers, Madame François manages to get him out of the way so that the food can pass without running him over.
This entire novel is a food allegory. Set amid the vendors of Les Halles, against a backdrop of endless food, it is a story about the fat and the skinny, the rebels and the complacent, about who eats and who goes hungry. A character called La Belle Lisa is described, “She was so beautiful, so large, so round, that she made him feel good. Before her, he felt contented, as though he had eaten or drunk something wonderful.”
But plump Lisa was small-minded, as were the many fat characters of the market. Her high-minded brother-in-law, Florent, was distrusted because he was skinny. People question why he was so skinny. One day, walking back after a refreshing day in the country, away from Paris and its “sickening smell of food,” Florent’s friend Claude explained the following.
—M.K.
As though suddenly waking from a dream, he asked, “Do you know ‘the Battle of the Fat and the Thin’?”
Florent, caught by surprise, answered no. Claude excitedly praised this series of prints, pointing out favorite parts: The Fat, bursting from their enormity, preparing the evening glut, while the Thin, doubled over from hunger, looked in from the street, stick figures filled with envy, and then the Fat, seated at the table, cheeks overflowing, drive away a Thin who had the audacity to humbly approach, looking like a bowling pin among the bowling balls.
Claude saw in these drawings the entire drama of mankind. He could classify all people into the Thin and the Fat, two opposing groups, one devouring the other to grow plump and jolly. “You can bet,” he said, “that Cain was a Fat and Abel a Thin. And since that first killing, there have always been hungry Fats sucking the blood out of scanty eaters. It is a constant preying of the stronger on the weaker, each swallowing his neighbor and then finding himself swallowed in turn.… so you see, my friend, watch out for the Fat.”
He fell silent for a moment, following their two shadows as the setting sun stretched them ever longer. Then he murmured, “You and I, we belong to the Thin, you see. Tell me if people with flat stomachs like ours take up much sunlight.”
Florent looked at the two shadows and smiled. But Claude became angry. “If you think this is funny, you’re wrong. I suffer a lot because I am a Thin. If I were a Fat, I could paint when I felt like it, I would have a beautiful studio, I could sell my paintings for their weight in gold. Instead, I am a Thin. I pour my soul out to produce things that only make the Fats shrug their shoulders. I am sure that I will end up dying of it, my skin sticking to my bones and so flat that they could bury me between the covers of a book. And you! You are a Thin, a perfect example, The King of Thins. Remember your argument with the fish sellers. It was spectacular, all those giant bosoms flying at your spindly chest. They were acting out of instinct, hunting the Thin the way a cat chases a mouse. You see, Fats have such a distaste for Thins, they have to drive them out of their sight, either by biting or kicking. That’s why, if I were you, I’d be careful. The Quenus are Fats, and the Méhudins, too. The fact is you are completely surrounded by Fats. That would worry me.”
“And what about Gavard, and Miss Saget, and your friend Marjolin?” Florent asked, still smiling.
“If you want, we can classify everyone we know for you,” answered Claude. “I’ve been keeping a file on them in my studio for a long time with notations on which group to which each belongs. It’s a whole chapter of natural history. Gavard is the kind of Fat who pretends to be a Thin. Not at all a rare species. Miss Saget and Mrs. Lecoeurare are a variety of Thin who should be feared—desperate Thins, capable of anything to fatten themselves. My friend Marjolin, Little Cadine, and La Sarriette are three Fats, still innocent with nothing more than the lovable hunger of youth. I’ve noticed that the Fat, when they are not old, can be charming creatures. Mr. Lebigre, he’s a Fat, isn’t he. Then there’re your political friends, who are mostly Thins, Charvet, Clémence, Logre, Lecailles. But I make an exception for that fat slob, Alexandre, and for the enormous Robine, who has caused me a lot of trouble.”
The painter continued in this vein from the Pont de Neuilly to the Arc de Triomphe. He returned to some of the people to complete their portraits with a few shared defining brush strokes. Logre was a Thin who carried his belly between his shoulders. Beautiful Lisa was all stomach, and the beautiful Norman, all bosom. Miss Saget had surely missed an opportunity sometime in her life to become fat, for she loathed the Fats while still disdaining the Thins. As for Gavard, he was compromising his role as a Fat, and would end up as flat as a bug.
“And Mrs. François?” asked Florent.
Claude was embarrassed. He struggled for an answer and finally stuttered, “Mrs. François. Mrs. François. I don’t know. I never had the urge to classify her. She’s a fine woman, that’s all. She’s not a Fat and she’s not a Thin.”
They both laughed. They were now in front of the Arc de Triomphe. The sun, on the crest of the hills of Suresnes, was so low on the horizon that their shadows darkened the whiteness of the monument very high up, even higher than the group of statues, like two black marks sketched in charcoal. This made Claude even more amused and he waved his arms and bent his body. And then, as he started to walk again he said, “Did you notice, just as the sun set, our two heads flew up to the sky.”
But Florent stopped laughing. Paris started to overtake him again—Paris that cost him so many tears in Guiana and still frightened him. He lowered his head
as he returned to that nightmare of mountains of food, but carrying with him the sweet and sad memories of this day in fresh air, scented with thyme.
—from The Belly of Paris, 1873,
translated from the French by Mark Kurlansky
LU WENFU ON REVOLUTIONARY CUISINE
Lu Wenfu was born in a small village on the north bank of the Yangtze in 1928. In 1944 he first ventured to Suzhou, a southern city famous for its cuisine and the setting for his novella The Gourmet. It tells the story of a fat gourmet and a lean revolutionary. The revolutionary has been made manager of the most celebrated restaurant in Suzhou and is disheartened to discover that after he reorganizes it along revolutionary principles, even good revolutionaries don’t want to eat there.
—M.K.
Gourmets! When you were poor you would have had these classy restaurants torn down, but as soon as you get a little money you all pile in, worried you won’t get a seat, and you want high-class meals too.
The spring of 1957 was a troubled time. The restaurant employees began to write big-character posters saying what they thought of me and hung them in the corridor. Their objections to the food and the drop in business didn’t upset me, but one, signed “our employee,” and accusing me of seeking personal glory at the expense of the restaurant and its employees, made me furious. The adjectives used in the poster and its tone meant it could only have been written by that scoundrel Bao! Of course I had to accept all the criticisms even if they had only the minutest grain of truth in them.
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