The Table Comes First

by Adam Gopnik

  There was still another distinction in the Parisian instance, this one built into the fact of food. Citing classical models had long been the best way to affirm the importance of a new thing. But everyone could sense that the way that Romans and Greeks ate, at least as recorded in their literature, was no way anyone wanted to eat now. The food of the ancient Romans—swans stuffed with live larks, and then refunded in a vomitorium—already seemed too odd to imitate.

  While Carême looks back to classical architectural models for his grand pièces montées, his ideas about the food itself are empirical, practical, and inductive—thought from the bottom up rather than imposed from a noble past. His cookbook begins with the pot-au-feu—the simple braised beef that is still one of the best good things in the French kitchen—which he recognizes as the source of stocks, and he treats it to a chemical analysis. What remained of “Roman” spices—that heady, intoxicating play of ginger and pepper and cinnamon—was banished, too, and replaced by “no high spiced sauces, no dark brown gravies… every meat presented its own natural aroma, every vegetable its own shade of verdure.” Whatever eating was to be, we were going to have to make it up. The scene was probably more open for innovation in cooking than in almost any other field. There are times in the history of culture when the “minor” arts lead the major; the Dutch designer Rietveld’s chairs were “abstract” studies in primary colors before Mondrian learned from him and made it art. Cooking was the first of the modern arts to do entirely without classical sanction and the first to claim it modeled itself on nature alone—and, to a reasonable degree, it actually did so. At Carême’s table you could eat chicken with chervil even before, at Corot’s easel, you could see Italy as it was.

  * * *

  Morals change, then meals; desires drive our diets. Of all the new jobs that the new scene made, the most potent was that of the chronicler of changing desires, the pro food writer—the “gastronomic journalist.” The emergence of journalists, with their natural affinity for eating, was one of the events of the day. Journalists, Grimod de La Reynière tells us, are all big eaters and drinkers: “recognizable by their apoplectic throats, their bushy mustaches, and their puffy bibulous visages.”

  It was Brillat-Savarin, the wandering French food lover and exile of the mixed-up Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period, long resident in the newborn United States, who wrote the first great book about taste and why it matters, that famous 1825 Physiology of Taste. Brillat-Savarin’s book was, or seemed to be, one of the first rule books, the first attempts to put “gastronomy”—the word he made famous—on a semiscientific basis: to make the serious study of cooking and eating one more of the Enlightenment’s subjects, to be pinned in an encyclopedia. Yet though his tone was mock-scientific, his purpose was humane—he was an expatriate essayist, poor guy—and his theme was simple. For Brillat-Savarin, gastronomy is the great adventure of desire. Its subject is simple: the table is the place where a need becomes a want. Something we have to do—eat—becomes something we care to do—dine—and then something we care to do becomes something we try to do with grace. Eating together is the civilizing act. We take urges, and tame them into tastes.

  Brillat-Savarin wasn’t really writing an encyclopedia of sensations; he was writing a book on the reach of pleasures. We chew with our molars, but eat with our minds. “The pleasure of the table is a reflected sensation, originating in various facts, places, things and persons [taking in] all the modifications of society which extreme sociability has introduced among us: love, friendship, business, speculation, power, ambition, and intrigue, all enhance conviviality.” His allied subject was sex, which also began with a gasp and was tamed into a game. “I observe with pride, that gourmandise and coquettery, the two great modifications which society has effected in our imperious wants, are both of French origin,” he wrote. Flirtation, like good cooking, was the way impulse submitted to social discipline—manners.

  Brillat-Savarin became an exile because he had been a political radical: he was a member of the revolutionary National Assembly, a Jacobin, not a lovable old duffer with a few sweet epigrams about food, but a leading voice for liberty. Yet his passion was for the politics of pleasure as Voltaire had proposed them, not the politics of purity as Robespierre and the radicals perverted them. Eating was, for Brillat-Savarin, what fighting wasn’t: mixed, mongrelized, common, and all to the good. What sped him into exile was a horror at the Utopian politics of Robespierre, the man who liked only soft and simple food, and who thought that champagne was the poison of the people’s liberty. The sansculottes came for him, and wrote a death warrant.

  Brillat-Savarin fled France, penniless, in 1792, and it was then that his wanderings took him to America, where he lived and taught French and the violin to American girls in Boston and Philadelphia and New York. He played first violin in a park orchestra. (And loved the good matter, if not the then-inadequate finish, of our East Coast plenty: oysters, shad roe, and scallops.) He went back to France in 1797, with the Terror past, to work as a judge and legal theorist, but the epiphany for Brillat-Savarin as an eater occurred in 1816 when, with France as defeated as any country could be, English and German victors poured into Paris and were converted (and fleeced) by the cultural force of French food and flirtation. He realized—and this was not the last time people would see this in France; the same would follow the even more bitter defeat of the Franco-Prussian War—that the soft power of food and free love (or love for hire) could be more powerful than the steel power of armies.

  To understand why gourmands could be more potent than generals became his purpose. His Physiology of Taste is not a study of an old man’s pleasures; it is a plea for the systematic study of that soft power. Brillat-Savarin’s idea that besoins—needs, wants—become demands and desires was made political through the civilizing act of the table. His program for soft power was based in what he called “social gourmandise”—what we might now call altruistic greed, or, better, unselfish gluttony. Brillat-Savarin’s ideal eater was not the gourmet—the fussbudget with a napkin—but the gourmand, the greedy guy with a date. “Gourmand,” though a word everyone knows, is a hard word to translate. Literally a glutton—but “glutton” in English has overtones of loutishness that the French word doesn’t have. To be gourmand is not just to be greedy for whatever it is they put in front of you but alive with appetite for the special thing you want. To be a gourmand is not to be a gourmet; you’re not finicky. But it is to want the good things in life. It can also be, as Brillat-Savarin recognizes, a perversity: something we have to do cut off from its proper place, and made into a fetish, a wanting. We can’t care too much about dining, but we can care too much about food. The sin isn’t loving the flesh; it’s losing our minds in loving the flesh. A moment of mindful appreciation comes between the observation and the act. Eating well is purely animal if it doesn’t become a way to think about appetite itself.

  Brillat-Savarin was not just a good eater; he was, in every sense, a liberal eater. It was Brillat-Savarin who inspired the first century of food writing in French and English both. (M.F.K. Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin is one of the monuments of the movement.) The tone of food writing remained most often his tone of mock-epic appreciation and semisatirical systemization, systematic but self-mocking, too. His approach—eating for pleasure and writing about what the food was like while meditating on its place in a big picture of life—is still the one that draws us closest to the real meaning of our appetites.

  If Brillat-Savarin was the first philosopher of eating as a humanistic act, he was also, as Alexandre Dumas the elder remarked a little disparagingly, “a man of theory,” who hovered above and around the table and never, as Dumas scoffed, offered an actual recipe. His great rival and bookend, Grimod La Reynière, as he was known—I’ve already had to quote from him at length, as any fan or student of the period must—was a man born to pen and paper, who sat right at it.

  Born in November of 1758, Grimod de La Reynière was the son of a
kind of borderline aristocrat, a tax collector whose license to tax on behalf of the King was usually turned into a habit of stealing on behalf of himself. Grimod had a hideous birth defect; both of his arms were missing hands, and ended, like the lobster-boy’s in a sideshow, in strange fleshy pincers. His shame-filled parents, at a time when birth defects were still seen as signs from God, put about the bizarre story that the boy had been dropped in a pigpen, and that the swine had devoured his hands. (The effect of this lie on a boy who grew up with a special—vengeful?—love for bacon is hard to know for sure, but it’s easy to imagine morbidly.)

  Grimod in any case soon had prosthetic hands and the deformity, as deformity so often does, had only a passing effect on his life: he liked to tease people by putting his wooden hands on a hot stove, leading his friends to do the same, thinking that it wasn’t. Like Brillat-Savarin, he had a bad revolution. (Though perhaps only bad people had good ones.) Starting out as a kind of libertine democrat—“I was a Republican when there was some glory in being one,” he said later, mostly truthfully—just before the revolution he had been, ironically, sent into exile by his rich and well-connected uncle, Malsherbes, as punishment for a series of sophomoric literary scandals. This meant that Grimod sat out most of the revolution in the little southern town of Béziers, where he ate well—“rabbits fed on scented herbs, quails as fat as chickens, aubergines, heaven-sent melons, muscat grapes, and Roquefort cheese fit for a non-dethroned King”—he said, with a wince of irony, and found his vocation writing about it. As word of the bloodletting spread to him—his own uncle was one of Robespierre’s prime victims—food also became a retreat from reality: “I would die of despair if I were not rescued by my good appetite,” he wrote back. Eating was then, as it is now, self-medication, a therapy of the panicked.

  It was after the end of the Terror and his return to Paris that he became both a passionate reactionary—“Never did fanaticism produce a thousandth part of the evils which incredulity causes today,” he said—and the inventor of the first regular food journalist’s magazine, the Almanach des Gourmands, which first appeared in 1803. The magazine, though a bit chaotic, included blind tastings, articles on foods, and a restaurant guide. Grimod himself was a star, with his picture—overweight, sweaty looking, and a little undignified—in the first issue.

  He was a greedy guy, who used his new fame to sponsor eating clubs, where the best of the new restaurants would send free food in exchange for a certificate of approval to put in their windows, and where he could invite the starlets of the day to dine with him. (Though he had a way with those wooden hands he seems, unsurprisingly, to have boasted of his skill at cunnilingus.) The idea of the French journalist as a man in search of free meals and free company and free chatte, too—which Balzac mocks, and which persists into our own day, when the Parisian food critic who pays the bill is a rare bird indeed—was already part of Grimod’s persona, and his self-invention.

  What distinguishes Grimod de La Reynière from the artisanal sound of all prior food writing, even Brillat-Savarin’s, is his taste for aphorism, for summing up a sensual moment in abstract mots. The writer searches for a pregnant phrase to sum up a pleasure just past. Grimod is a first-rate epigram-maker, and still apt today. There is, for instance, his line that “the three things to avoid at the table are ‘a little wine which I bought from the grocer,’ a dinner ‘just among a few friends,’ and amateur musicians.” Or he can be neatly compact, as when he writes, “A gourmand should respect his teeth as an author his talent.” (It need be noted that it was only in the Second Empire, when a Philadelphia dentist visited France and befriended the Empress, that anything like decent dentistry came to Paris.)

  Yet there is a tongue-in-cheek, self-mocking tone to his work, and to French food writing of the period generally, which academics often miss. We have often heard these days about the difference between sincerity (saying what you truly think) and authenticity (being who you really are). There is as big a difference, though, between being sincere and being in earnest. Both Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de La Reynière are entirely sincere in their passion for eating, as they are in their small discriminations, their appetite for order and system. They love food. They really do. But they are never completely in earnest, always kidding about their subject even as they celebrate it, and Grimod’s aphorisms are always to be taken as an instance of the mock-heroic. (With the understanding that mock-heroic is different from the ironic: the ironic says, “I don’t really mean this”; the mock-heroic says, “I mean what I say, but I know that saying so has its absurd aspects.”)

  Brillat-Savarin and Grimod don’t entirely mean what they write, but then they sort of do. When de La Reynière says that “lunch is the meal of friendship, dinner of etiquette, and tea of children; supper alone belongs to love,” he is both summing up the new pecking order of meals (under which, for instance, there really were two kinds of déjeuners—one a true lunch, the other, petit déjeuner, a “little lunch,” or breakfast, a separate meal of chocolate or coffee and bread) and using the Enlightenment turn of mind, with its love of oversimple summary and a neat schedule of emotions, against itself, to mock its own proprieties. It’s a joke, but not just a joke. Grimod is smiling, but he’s not kidding. Or when he writes that “all the other people of Europe theorize and argue; only the Frenchman knows how to talk,” he is in part paying a patriotic compliment to his own people, but also recognizing, as Brillat-Savarin had before him, that the table was the one place where French superiority could still assert itself. It’s a loser’s boast. Even Brillat-Savarin’s most famous mot, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,” is a jest as much as a judgment, not meant to be taken entirely seriously—a prejudice dressed up as an absolute.

  “Playful” is an ugly word in English, since it suggests the opposite of true play: tyrannical teachers, brutish coaches, sadistic bosses, all like to think of themselves as “playful.” So one pauses before saying that the writing of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod is “playful.” But “ludic,” an older and odder word, suits the gastronomes well; they are aware of the absurd aspects of their enterprise even as they undertake it. When Brillat-Savarin writes of his “Dynamometer,” which registers where on the social ladder you belong according to how you choose to eat, or ranks gourmands according to many classes—from the first level, at which you eat truffled turkey, to the fourth, where presumably it’s pot-au-feu right down the line—using “gastronomic tests,” there’s a smile on his prose. He’s kidding around about the French mania for systematization, while taking part in it at the same time. (This tone has its American equivalent later in the nineteenth century; when Melville and Twain write about the confidence man as the most representative and greatest American figure, they really mean it and they don’t. As con men in America, so cooks in France; they really are admired, but admiring them is also a way of making fun of the people, generals and statesmen, whom you are supposed to admire more.)

  This double-talk, kidding the new powers by praising the lower arts, is present in most of Grimod de La Reynière’s best lines about food. When he writes, for instance, that “the cook looks death in the eye more often than the soldier,” he means it—to be a cook is to see a lot of carnage and to know how to evaluate it, to know when to hang the carcass and when to slice it up at once—but he is also suggesting that the soldier’s courage is hardly more useful than the cook’s. Or when he writes beautifully that “the pig is the encyclopedic animal”—meaning that it includes everything from lowly feet to all-purpose bacon and tender filet—he is both offering a lovely summary and joking about those other “encyclopedic animals” the high-minded philosophes attend. There’s your encyclopedia, on four trotters. We miss something essential about the birth of food writing if we miss this tone of sober counter-Enlightenment clowning, its tongue-in-cheek parody of the age’s pieties, a new tone sobered by experience and made lighter by life. There is a noisy form of quietism in Grimod, a lip-smacking form of life doubting
. Nothing works out the way you think it will; you might as well eat. This note of bitter, brilliant, defeated glamour exudes from his work.

  For where Brillat-Savarin’s liberalism is central to his idea of good eating, Grimod’s reactionary politics is key to the passion of his gourmandise. When Grimod writes that a gourmand’s first duty “is to sample everything and have an aversion to nothing,” he is proposing a kind of table-based extension of Voltaire’s great comment, upon being asked to return a second time to a male bordello, “Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.” But we can recognize the chastened wisdom of the postrevolutionary period, too. Loss, defeat—first the moral defeat of hope in the Terror, then the practical defeat of the French by the Germans and English—are the emotional keys to the growth of the food scene in Paris. The thought that we have our greatest triumphs at the table implies that we have been defeated on the field. No successful militaristic nation has ever cared too much about eating. Robespierre and Napoléon, who brought disorder, fear, and eventual defeat to France, were both ascetics. Thinking too hard, trying too hard, can lead to terror and war; thinking alternately with eating is a saner plan. We can organize and systematize all we like about eating—but in the end the animal will return. Whatever we say about food today, we will be hungry again tomorrow.