STATUE TO AN EPICURE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20268, 29 November 1927, Page 7

STATUE TO AN EPICURE.

A void has been filled at last. Stras-' bourg has long had her statue of Maitr« Close, who invented pate de foie gras aux truffes de Porigord. Camembert this year set up her monument to Mane Hard, who invented Camembert cheese. The native town of Brillat-Savarin hungered, as it seemed in vain, for a statue of her greatest son. And now the void in Bolley has been filled at last. M. Tardieu, Minister of Public Works, unveiled at Belley on September 7 (reports The Times) a statue 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 sis years (for it was just before Christmas in 1921 that the idea was first served up to France with Savarinian banquets m Pans, and elsewhere) is done to a turn; and Belley, we feel sure, is satisfied. HrillatSavarin 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 published. He was much more , than an epicure. He was politician, municipal administrator, _ soldier, hunter, musician, magistrate at the Cour de Cassation, ido had known hard times in Switzerland, m England, in America, where he shot a wild turkey and *at© it. But all this would, be forgotten if he had not written hiswise and amiable book about eating and drinking. In an article contributed to, this journal at the centenary of BriilatSavarin’s death, “A.8.W.” said of this “sober and fastidious epicure, that no did not write from the point of view of the kitchen, but of the guest table. in England we are shyer than the French ot frankly enjoying and of talking about our food. Perhaps Dr Isaac Watts s sluggard helped to frighten our fathers into re-' tree nee. Most of our books on eating are written from the point of view of the kitchen; and, even with Mr George Samtebury and Mr Vachcll at work, wine itse.f has not been worthily treated for its own sake. But scattered about our general literature there is plenty of proof that we are not so dull to the pleasures of the table as w© pretend. One of the best banquets in all English is to be found in a, very odd place—the second book ot “Paradise Regained”; and all the poetic ornament which Milton has lavished upon ■ it only serves to moke itr 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 Funtan, with the tastes of the Renaissance. The temptation of British writers who mention food and drink is to load the' board too heavily. Female students of the life of Mr 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 water. 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 thmgs : in G P. R. James, and would have been very’angry’with Meredith for cutting out. of his novels in middle-age so much that, in youth 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 pa.ate is not tickled by bare imagination of a feast devised by Mr Phillips OppenheimfFor all our shyness, we have done pretty well by food and drink as a subject for. literature. And, as our cooking improves in choioeness and in variety, England, too, may one day produce her Brillat-Savann, to see life from tho dinner table and to see it happy.