Humors of Gastronomy

Humors of Gastronomy by Agnes Repplier

"Humors of Gastronomy" by Agnes Repplier is a witty and wide-ranging essay that explores the cultural, social, and philosophical dimensions of eating and drinking throughout Western history, drawing on literature, biography, and culinary lore to illuminate humanity's complicated and often contradictory relationship with food. Repplier opens by observing the comic inconsistency of the Ettrick Shepherd and his companions in the Noctes Ambrosianae, who simultaneously celebrate the pleasures of the table as life's supreme joy while condemning women who display any enthusiasm for eating as gross sensualists. From this irony she draws a broader point: throughout recorded history, men have claimed the pleasures of gastronomy as their own exclusive domain while relegating women to the role of cooks and providers, granting them neither credit nor culinary prestige. Even Dr. Johnson dismissed the celebrated cookbook writer Mrs. Glasse with contempt, insisting women were fit to spin but not to write about cookery. The essay then moves through the history of English and European dining, tracing the long battle between native conservatism and foreign innovation at the table. Repplier describes the gradual infiltration of French culinary influence into British kitchens, from the elaborate "subtleties" of medieval banquets to the introduction of delicate sauces in place of plain broths. She notes that forks, imported from Italy, were received by Englishmen with outright hostility as effeminate affectations, and that the gradual displacement of hearty communal eating by more refined and self-conscious dining habits was mourned by writers including Thackeray, Trollope, and Peacock, who railed against the prissy elegance that had drained conviviality from the table. National rivalries in food receive affectionate treatment, with Repplier noting that the British contempt for frog-eating Frenchmen was perfectly matched by French disdain for beef-eating islanders, and that Talleyrand's famous gibe about England having twenty-four religions and only one sauce perfectly captures the mutual incomprehension of neighboring cultures at the dinner table. The central figure of the essay is Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French gastronome whose philosophy of eating Repplier treats with genuine admiration and gentle humor. For Savarin, dining was not a vulgar pleasure but a solemn and exquisite duty, and his recipes and aphorisms alike tremble with earnest concern for the happiness of his fellow creatures. He believed that the discovery of a new dish did more for human happiness than the discovery of a new planet, and that anyone who invited a guest to dinner held that person's happiness in their hands for the duration of the meal. Repplier notes with amusement that Savarin's notions of economical cooking were somewhat unrealistic, as his simplest recipes contain an abundance of costly ingredients. Repplier widens her survey to celebrate the many clergymen and scholars who have contributed to gastronomical progress, from an archbishop who compiled the earliest English recipe collection, to Jesuit missionaries who introduced the turkey to France, to Dean Nowel of St. Paul's, who took justified pride in having given bottled beer to his grateful country. Sydney Smith receives warm praise for his generous table, his celebrated salad dressing, and his sympathetic attentiveness to the dining comfort of his guests, whose contentment he measured with a poet's eye. The essay closes on a note of elegiac humor, lamenting the irretrievable loss of great dishes and recipes from the past: a legendary fish sauce from antiquity whose secret has been lost forever, a celebrated green sauce so magnificent it was said one could eat one's own grandfather with it, a bream pie that vanished with the dissolution of the monasteries, and sack, Falstaff's sack, whose disappearance took the heart of merry England with it. Against these losses Repplier can offer only the consolation of memory and laughter, ending with a verse that asks what has become of last year's snow, suggesting that the pleasures of the table, like youth itself, are most deeply cherished when they are gone.

By Agnes Repplier · First published 1923 · Genre: Essays, Food Writing, Humor · 2,917 words

First lines

"There does not, at this blessed moment, breathe on the earth's surface a human being that willna prefer eating and drinking to all ither pleasures o' body or soul. " So speaks the Ettrick Shepherd, in the fulness of his content, contemplating with moist eyes the groaning supper-table, laden with a comfortable array of solid viands; after which fair and frank expression of his views we are somewhat pained to hear him denouncing in no measured terms "the awful and fearsome vice o' gluttony," as evidenced occasionally in women. His companions, too, those magnificent fellow-feeders, have a great many severe things to say about gudewives who betray a weakness for roasted pork, or an unfeminine solicitude for gravy; and Mr. Timothy Tickler unhesitatingly affirms that such a one, "eating for the sake of eating, and not for mere nourishment, is, in fact, the grossest of sensualists, and at each mouthful virtually breaks all ten of the commandments. " This is the language of an ascetic rather than of a _bon vivant_, but we are in some measure reassured when the same Mr. Tickler confesses, a little later, that, although roast goose always disagrees with him, yet he never refuses it, believing that to purchase pleasure by a certain degree of pain is true philosophy; whereupon the Shepherd, not to be outdone, gives it as his unreserved opinion that, in winter-time at least, "eating for eating's sake, and in oblivion o' its feenal cause, is the most sacred o' household duties."

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essays · gastronomy · food culture · humor · literary criticism · social commentary · culinary history · dining · taste · manners · satire · wit

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