GASTRONOMY, MODERN. Is gastronomy an art or a science? This is a question on which epicures and cooks are at issue. La Rochefoucauld wrote that "eating is a necessity, but eating intelligently is an art." Vauvenargues admitted unhesitat ingly that "great thoughts come from the stomach." The doc trine of Epicurus bids us find an agreeable employment for our faculties in the intelligent enjoyment of the pleasures of the table. And finally, to go back still farther, Ecclesiastes himself teaches us that "a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry. . . ." Throughout the ages, meals have been made a time of re laxation, comfort and enjoyment. The feasts of the middle ages were, as we know, assemblies of people desperately hungry after long days of hunting in the forests, trained to violent exercise, capable of wearing heavy armour and of doing justice to a prodigious bill of fare.
In the 17th century, the spirit of order, reason and dignity which characterized the literature of the period found a further outlet in the elaborate organization of banquets : these were con ducted according to a regular programme, involving a whole series of minute observances. The result was that the guests got nothing but congealed gravy.
The eighteenth century, witty, pugnacious, enthusiastic and volatile, introduced into cookery its elegance, its instinct for pleasure and refinement. But modern cookery really dates from the end of the First Empire, the time of Brillat-Savarin and Careme. It was they who substituted the "made dish" for masses of roast meat, piled in pyramidal form and held together by skewers. These enormous, barbaric accumulations of food were yet another Bastille which the French Revolution overthrew.
It may even be said that gastronomy is a perfect art, for so wide a range of enjoyment could not, in the opinion of the present writer be derived from listening to a symphony, hearing a poem read, or gazing at a beautiful building. Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to maintain, not merely that gastronomy is a per fect art, but that it is the only art which is perfect.
Likewise, there are culinary processes which are scientific ap plications of the laws of nature. Roast meat, for example, must be exposed to great heat for a short time in order that a crust may form all over the surface, and then placed in a moderately heated oven and left there as long as possible in order that the browned skin may imprison all the juices of the meat and that these, by a slow process, as it were of digestion, may make the flesh tender.
Again, cooks know that a sauce the principal ingredient of which is the yolk of an egg must never be allowed to boil, or else its elements will become disunited: as we say, they will curdle. They know, too, that, if need be, they can be reunited simply by the addition of the yolk of another egg and a little boiling water. If a dish is too salt, add at once a few spoonsful of milk or a little butter. Many practical examples of the kind could be cited.
As people became more genuinely appreciative of good living, the cooking of the big "palace," which hitherto had satisfied their requirements, lost its popularity. Diners would no longer tolerate those dull, stereotyped meals, at which a chicken's breast is cut up into the tiniest fragments, and the sweets—half-melted ices or palsied puddings, as the case may be—have so unspeak ably depressing an effect.
The motor-car has made it possible for the traveller to avoid having meals in the large towns where the expresses stop, and to try his luck in the restaurants which are now springing up in ever-increasing numbers in the country round. But the adven ture sometimes turns out a misadventure. At many of these restaurants it is always uncertain whether there will be guests or not ; the dishes, therefore, are cooked a long time beforehand and kept in tins, to be warmed up when ordered. The unpleasant sur prises a guest may experience who has the ill-luck to enter an establishment of this kind which is not presided over by a con scientious chef, or a cook careful of her reputation, may easily be imagined.
A first necessity in a good up-to-date restaurant is a cloak-room the use of which is optional. Think of a bachelor, who has two meals at a restaurant daily, being obliged to pay, from June to October, two hundred francs in cloak-room charges for a straw hat ! In a good restaurant, the tables are well placed, the service is simple and the bill of fare consists of a few dishes only—but the preparation of each dish must be a labour of love, executed with care and patience. No orchestra disturbs the quiet of the place. The head waiter does not insist on your ordering what he himself fancies; the proprietor comes to ask your opinion of the Armagnac and the kirsch served to you. And a delightful sur prise awaits you—the bill is moderate. The result is that you leave the restaurant having dined well, your mind at ease, your heart at peace with the world.
Many people, it is certain, do not know that in the Middle Ages, at the Tour d'Argent, the oldest restaurant in Paris, dormouse pastry, mixed dishes of snakes, porpoise, roast swan and crane stuffed with plums were served to the guests. Nor that Frederick the Great made his coffee with champagne and added mustard to give the remarkable drink a still stronger taste. Nor that, before the war, a cook named Jules Maincave gave to the world fillets of mutton with crayfish sauce, beef cooked in kum mel, bananas with Gruyere cheese, sardines with Camembert cheese and herring soup with raspberry jelly.
These last experiments, it must be confessed, are highly un pleasant ; for the ingredients in question could not possibly be made to harmonize, any more than cat and dog. Nor is it at all clear how a mixture, for example, of chocolate and red wine could be rendered palatable.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to go to the opposite extreme and content ourselves with the stereotyped dishes turned out by cooks devoid of imagination. When a writer uses hack neyed words—a habit of which journalism affords only too fre quent examples—we say that he writes in clichés and that he writes badly. When a painter always paints the same picture over and over again, we are quick to compare him to a pho tographer lazily taking a succession of proofs from the same nega tive. Similarly, in the domain of cookery, the most modest dishes should afford a good housewife an opportunity of using her in ventive faculty and her intelligence. There is no reason why the culinary fashions of years gone by should immobilize and enslave us, nor why the gastronomists of to-day should be less adven turous, less eager for knowledge than their predecessors who, throughout the ages, have enriched cookery with a stream of new discoveries. We should not abandon hope of improving on first results. We should pay no attention either to dogmatists who accept the existing order of things, repeat and solemnly hand on to posterity what they have heard from their elders, and irre vocably condemn the unknown as a matter of principle, or to those who take fright at an unfamiliar flavour, like children swallowing their first oyster. If men had always acted thus, if no risks had been taken and no experiments made, whereby alone the adventurous instinct learns self-restraint, the range of our enjoyments would to-day be exceedingly limited. We should be no more tolerant of the conservatism of people who will not eat roast chicken unless surrounded by watercress, or veal unless in the company of carrots or peas, or a leg of mutton with anything else than a dish of haricot beans.
What we should aim at doing is to combine with familiar recipes something which, while setting off their good qualities, yet in troduces an element of surprise and provides what was wanting in them. We should not hesitate to transform a sauce possessing its traditional flavour into something more savoury and unex pected. The harmonies which can be obtained from certain com binations of crisp and fatty substances and of watery and farina ceous vegetables, are worth studying.
Here follow a few recipes in the new style of cookery ; these will give an idea of the kind of dish which harmonizes with a modern dining-room.
If you like you can colour this dish with methylene blue. This is a new idea which has scandalized the whole cooking world. Methylene blue is an absolutely harmless chemical product ; in fact it is actually ordered by doctors as a remedy for digestive disorders, so it cannot do anyone any harm. Dissolve in water as much methylene blue as you can put on the point of a knife. You will get water the colour of an African sky. Boil the beans in this water, and they will take on a greenish-blue shade which will astonish your guests.
These dishes are much easier to make than might be thought from the description. They are far less difficult than most of the recipes of high-class cookery, for which strong bouillon of meat or fish is usually required. Guests may at first be rather suspicious of their novelty, but the first mouthful will remove their appre hensions, and they will soon be in the proper frame of mind to appreciate the new style of cooking. When an unfamiliar harmony of flavours forms itself on the palate, we should try to analyze the sensation just as we identify the different instruments in an orches tra. This is the right way to train our taste. We shall create new sources of pleasurable sensation, and we may even enrich humanity by fresh progress in the culinary art.