Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/174

“Dis moi que tu manges, et je te dirai ce que tu es”—tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are—says Brillat Savarin, the high-priest of gastronomy. Such a doctrine, if it could be carried into practice, would doubtless be a most useful one; but it must be confessed that it is at least as difficult to tell a man’s character from his favourite dish as from his handwriting, and requires an experience in the science of the table which is rarely given to ordinary diners-out. What conclusions, for instance, would be drawn from the fact that Queen Elizabeth liked roast goose; that James I. preferred cock-a-leekie, and William III. asparagus; or that Lord Eldon’s favourite dish was liver and bacon; or that George III., again, loved boiled mutton and turnips beyond all other dishes; or that the Duke of Wellington was so utterly indifferent to what he ate and drank that his cook—one of the best in Europe—resigned his office in despair?

Brillat Savarin, however, is not alone in his opinion; for a famous bon vivant of the time of the First Empire, the Marquis de Cussy, went even further, and maintained that the genius and character not only of a man, but of a nation, could be learned from a study of its cookery, and that history might thus be rewritten on strictly gastronomical principles. From this point of view characteristic dishes—such as sauerkraut, caviare, maccaroni, pillau, and roast beef—would each of them have their separate historical value; and important conclusions might be drawn from the familiar pot au feu, which is, we suppose (though M. de Cussy does not tell us so), the national dish of France.

This ingenious theory opens out for us an almost boundless field of inquiry and conjecture; and some historian of the future—the Niebuhr or Mommsen of gastronomy—will no doubt trace the close connection of cause and effect between cookery and history, from Belshazzar’s feast to a modern Lord Mayor’s banquet. Nay, he might begin his work from the time of Adam; for, after all, what caused the fall of man? It was not, as people vainly suppose, mere feminine curiosity on the part of Eve, but la gourmandise, which tempted her to eat the forbidden fruit in Paradise, just as it tempted Persephone to eat the pomegranate in Hades. This, at least, is the opinion of M. Alexandre Dumas; and he further tells us that the destinies of the chosen people were entirely changed by the insatiable appetite of Jacob’s elder brother. With such authorities to support him, our historian would go boldly on to show how time after time the fate of nations has been decided by the gastronomic failings of the master-spirit of the age; how the progress of great conquerors has been checked by their ignorance or violation of the first principles of cookery; how the career of Alexander was cut short by his inordinate love of the table; and how Napoleon I. lost the decisive battle of Leipsic owing to a fit of indigestion caused by his dining off a shoulder of mutton and onion sauce. After all, it may be further argued, what is Diplomacy itself—the great peace-preserving machine of modern