Dinner
Scribbled by Atticus Bergman using Crayola crayons | 22”x30” | 2019
Dinner
In his book The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin proclaimed that “a dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye,” thereby implying that, during his life, Brillat-Savarin not only held passionate opinions about dinners and cheese, but also about the relative value of one-eyed women. All things considered, the intensity of this passage is consistent with the author’s vehement attitude towards boiled beef, men without tongues, and the reckless administration of caffeine to children, which he once described in the following terms: It is a sacred duty for all the fathers and mothers of the world to forbid coffee to their children with great severity if they do not wish to produce dried-up little monsters, stunted and old before they are twenty.
For the most part, Brillat-Savarin’s opinions were confined to the twin categories of food and eating. However that didn’t prevent those opinions from occasionally protruding into the space of medicine, psychology, and geopolitics. For instance, it was Brillat-Savarin’s belief that a diet of starch was largely responsible for the violent subjugation of the Indians. Meanwhile, when it came to the context of his own career as a professional dinner guest, he concluded that “people predestined to gourmandism are in general of medium height.” Aside from deftly characterizing a social milieu that he had studied for decades, this evaluation also attests to Brillat-Savarin’s robust knowledge of statistics, which he demonstrated frequently and with great confidence: “Out of a hundred people who die from an illness of the chest,” the polymath remarked in The Physiology of Taste, “ninety have dark brown hair, long faces, and noses that come to a point.”
Given his tendency towards gratuitous snark, it’s only natural that Brillat-Savarin’s proclamations were reciprocated in the form of raucous defamation. According to the Marquis de Cussy, “Brillat-Savarin ate copiously and ill; he chose little, talked dully, had no vivacity in his looks, and was absorbed at the end of a repast.” A few decades later, Charles Baudelaire described The Physiology of Taste as a “false masterpiece” and issued the following warning: “My friends, do not read Brillat-Savarin. ‘May God preserve those he loves from profitless reading!’”
Even though Brillat-Savarin had been dead for almost half a century by the time that Baudelaire issued this statement, he had not only anticipated such an occasion while he was still alive, but had also prepared an extensive scholarly treatment of the etiological conditions that might induce a poet like Baudelaire to communicate with so much hostility and aggression. As he put it in The Physiology of Taste: “I believe that men of letters more often than not owe the style in which they have chosen to write to the state of their bowels.”
“Out of a hundred people who die from an illness of the chest, ninety have dark brown hair, long faces, and noses that come to a point.”
Jean Anthelme Brillat was born on April Fool’s Day in 1755. Later he was obliged to change his surname to Brillat-Savarin when one of his aunts leveraged her fortune to purchase the naming rights to her nephew, as though he were a baseball stadium or a museum corridor. This humiliation undoubtedly affected his psyche in ways that, by now, are impossible to assess. And yet, what biographers do know is that one day he was mistaken for a professor and, upon discovering how much additional respect was vouchsafed to him as a result of this error, decided to adopt the title going forward. In reality, though, Brillat-Savarin was never a professor of anything. Instead, he worked as a magistrate in the French appellate courts, where he could often be seen editing his manuscript during trials instead of listening to the legal arguments that he was ostensibly there to judge.
On January 21, 1826, Brillat-Savarin attended the thirty-third anniversary of the decapitation of King Louis XVI—an interminably long event which was held in a drafty chapel, resulting a wave of illness that killed off the last few royalists who had not only managed to escape being guillotined during the revolution, but had also endured the arduous—and at times suicidal—lifestyle of uninhibited gluttony that they embraced en masse during the final days of the ancien régime. One of these casualties was Brillat-Savarin, who died approximately two weeks after Louis XVI’s commemoration service, at which point it was said by one of his survivors that he had “left the world like a satisfied diner leaving the banquet-room.”
If his lingering affection for Louis XVI was responsible for the death of Brillat-Savarin, then perhaps it makes sense that Louis XVI’s notorious fondness for dinner was responsible for the decadent king’s own calamitous downfall. In order to avoid being slaughtered by revolutionaries, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette disguised themselves as servants and fled their palace in the summer of 1791. Unfortunately, the thrill of running for their lives also made the two monarchs extremely peckish; however, instead of satisfying themselves with a quick snack, the couple insisted on stopping for a leisurely dinner. Unsurprisingly, the king’s plan of remaining anonymous was promptly foiled when he paid for his meal with a banknote that had his face printed boldly across its middle.
Ultimately, two men were responsible for the king’s arrest, both of whom were named Jean-Baptiste. One of the Jean-Baptistes worked as a postmaster. The other owned an establishment that served food. In more formal settings, the second Jean-Baptiste was also known as Monsieur Sauce. Fittingly, Monsieur Sauce was married to Madame Sauce, who apparently enjoyed being married to him—or at any rate she found the idea of murdering him to be a little excessive. Either way, when Marie Antoinette tentatively proposed that the two women might find it mutually advantageous if she were to sacrifice her husband’s life so that the queen could escape to safety, Madame Sauce politely declined. In retrospect, this was probably a prudent decision on her part. After all, over the course of the following year, the Sauces continued to live their lives in relative tranquility, while the former king and queen were decapitated in accordance with a principle that Brillat-Savarin would later describe in his book: “To carve meat well, care must be taken to have the flesh make a right angle, as nearly as possible, with the knife blade: the meat thus carved will look nicer, will taste better, and will be more easily chewed.”
“My friends, do not read Brillat-Savarin. May God preserve those he loves from profitless reading!”
A century and a half later, the uncanny relationship between violence and flavor was embellished by Witold Gombrowicz in a short story called “Dinner at Countess Pavahoke’s.” In this story, Gombrowicz describes a weekly feast for benevolent aristocrats which—in the spirit of lofty, humanitarian ideals—is designed to be vegetarian, so as to exclude the unwelcome suggestion of murder. Unfortunately, on the occasion of the titular dinner, the food also proves to be exceptionally bland. Apparently the meal’s shocking absence of flavor stems from the fact that, at Countess Pavahoke’s previous banquets, the cook had secretly flavored the food with boiled animal bones. After he was ordered to terminate this outrageous behavior, the dishes suddenly became tedious and impossible to digest—all the dishes, that is, except for the cauliflower. Eventually, it becomes clear that the reason why the cauliflower tastes so much better than the rest of the food has something to do with an eight year old boy named Bolek Cauliflower, who ran away from home earlier that evening, after being starved by his parents and beaten with a belt. When young Cauliflower is discovered outside the house where the benevolent aristocrats are enjoying their vegetarian feast, the boy is so emaciated that one could almost describe his flesh as having been devoured—or at least mysteriously consumed. Meanwhile the guests inside the dining room have already finished their entrée and retired to a boudoir that, appropriately, happens to be decorated with Louis XVI furniture.
In much of his writing, Gombrowicz manipulates the literary physics of hysteria, ambiguity, and buffoonery to explore the indivisible nature of cruelty and decadence. And indeed, given the everlasting bond that exists between those two concepts, it was probably inevitable that, at one point or another, Brillat-Savarin would be disastrously compromised by the barbarous morality of the epicurean dream. On May 31, 1791, less than a month before Louis XVI was forced to flee his palace, the infamous bon vivant stood in front of the French National Assembly and argued against the abolition of the death penalty. Opposing him in this debate was Maximilian Robespierre, who must have found Brillat-Savarin’s eloquence on the matter to be uncommonly persuasive because, immediately thereafter, he proceeded to execute approximately 17,000 of his own political enemies.
Many questions arose in the wake of Robespierre’s so-called Reign of Terror—for instance: what should be done with the bodies of the slain? With respect to this particular conundrum, Brillat-Savarin once again had an opinion to share. In 1747, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf had discovered how to distill sugar from beets. By 1783, his student, Franz Karl Achard, had begun producing it on a more industrial scale in Kaulsdorf, Germany. This, in other words, was the beginning of the modern sugar industry and the genesis of a truly luxurious period when, for the first time, sugar could be acquired by Europeans at prices that grew cheaper by the day. Suddenly the substance was available in kitchens across the continent, where it could be used to engineer innovative desserts and preserve fruit—often with the assistance of gelatin, an ingredient which is typically extracted from the carcasses of slaughtered livestock. Utterly enchanted by the culinary revolution taking place, Brillat-Savarin couldn’t help but wonder: why not use sugar to embalm cadavers? After all, what could be more beautiful than a society that was not only devoted to the sacred doctrine of universal equality, but was also composed of individuals who were formed in God’s true image—individuals, moreover, whose genius for invention had allowed them to develop the technology and resources they required to candy the corpses of the dead?