STATUE TO AN EPICURE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 84, 7 January 1928, Page 22

STATUE TO AN EPICURE

A void has been filid at last. StrasClose, who invented pate de foie gras bougr has long had her status of Maitre aux truffes de Perigord. Camembert this year set up her monument to Marie Harel, who invented Camembert cheese. The native town of Brillat-Savarin hungered. as it seemed in' vain, for a status of her greatest son. And now the void in Belley has been filled at last. M. Tardieu, Minister for Public Works, unveiled at Belley on September 7 (re.ports “The Times”! a status of the author of “La Physiologic .du Gout,” who was born there in 1755, to die in Paris in 1826. So the work of nearly six years (for it was just before Christmas in 1921 that the idea, was. first served up to France with Savarinian banquets in Paris and elsewhere) is done to a turn; and Belley, we feel sure, is satisfied. Brillat-Savarin might be surprised to learn that his title to a statue was the book that he wrote late in life and did not live to see it published. He was politician, municipal administrator, soldier, hunter, musician, magistrate at the Cour de Cassation. He had known hard times in Switzerland, in England, in America, where he shot a wild turkey and ate it. But all this would be forgotten if he had not written his wise and amiable book about eating and drinking. I an article contributed to this journal at the centenary of Brillat-Savarin’s death, “A.8.W.” said of this “sober and fastidious epicure,” tha t he did not write from the point of view of the kitchen, but of the guest table. In England we are shyer than ’the French of frankly enjoying and of talking about our food. Perhaps Dr. Isaac Watts’s sluggard helped to frighten our fathers into reticence. Most of our books on eating are written from the point of the kitchen; and, even with Mr. George Saintsbury and Mr. Vacliell at work, wine itself has not been worthily treated for its own i sake. But scattered about our general I

■ | literature there is plenty of proof that > | we are not so dull to the pleasures of the table as we pretend. One of the best banquets in all English is to be found in a very odd place—the second book of “Paradise Regained”; and all the poetic ornament which Miltop has . lavished upon it only serves to . make it clearer that in the food and the wines themselves he had a hearty delight. An American writer has blamed the Puritans for the worst horrors of modern American cookery; but not in food and drink alone was Milton a Puritan, with the tastes of the Renaissance. The temptation of British writers who mention food and drink is to load the board too lieavilv. Female students of the life of Ml Pickwick have been known to protest that they would like the book better if it said less about eating and much less about brandy and waters This, perhaps, is something squeamish. It would not do for Thackeray’s Mr. Spec, who thought that, next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind must like to read about them; who in boyhood had the Barmecide’s feast by heart, and (discerning youth!) found the culinary, passages in Scott his favourites. Mr. Spec would have liked certain things in G. P. R. James, and would have been verv angry with Mereijjh for cutting out’of his novels in middle-age so much that •in vouth he had written about wine. There are breakfasts in Charles Lever that make the mouth water; Peacock’s parsons could make a dyspeptic hearty at his victuals; and,.to come to living writers, what palate is not tickled by bare imagination of a feast devised bv Mr. Phillips Oppenheim ? For all our’ shvness, we have done, pretty well bv food and drink as a subject for literature. And, as our cooking . improves in choiceness and iu variety, England, too. may one day produce het I Brillat-Savarin to se life from the din- | ner table and to see it happy.