How often have people extolled the Lacedæmonians and their legislator, Lycurgus. Well, Lycurgus mercilessly commanded poor little children to fast when they looked fresh and fat.[XXII_5] Strange law-giver of a strange people, who never learned to eat, and yet who invented the celebrated “black sauce,” the jus nigrum, for which the entrails of the hare served as the foundation. So true it is that cookery always preserves certain imprescriptible rights over the most fervent disciples of frugality.
Moralists do not cease to repeat that Rome would never have had sumptuary laws had it not been corrupted by cooks from Athens and Syracuse. This is an error. All the ordinances of the consuls proscribed profusion, excess—in a word, all the ruinous expenses of a passionate and ridiculous gastrophagy,[XXII_6] at the same time, respecting the magiric art itself; that is to say, that industrious chemistry which composes, decomposes, combines, and mixes—in a word, prepares different substances which gluttony, delicacy, the fashion, or luxury may confide to it for the space of a few minutes.
Why render the cook responsible for the extravagant tastes and follies of his age? Is it for him to reform mankind? Has he either the means or the right?
What is asked of him? and what can be asked? To understand exactly the properties of everything he employs, to perfect, and correct, if necessary, the savours on which he operates; to judge with a true taste, to degustate with a delicate palate, to join the skilful address of the hand, and the prompt and comprehensive glance, to the bold but profound conceptions of the brain; and above all—it cannot be too often repeated—to identify himself so well with the habits, the wants, even the caprices and gastronomic eccentricities, of those whose existence he embellishes, that he may be able, not to obey them, but to guess them, and even have a presentiment of them.[XXII_7]
Such is, to use an original expression of Rabelais, “toute l’artillerie de gueule,” which the cook can master. It is the sum total of what has been bequeathed to us by some great men, whose scattered instructions, lying here and there in books of morality and philosophy—there are numerous analogies between the act of eating and the art of living well—have been collected with scrupulous care, classed with all the attention we can command, and will serve, we hope, to beguile the studious leisure of the lovers of antiquity and the culinary science.
Mankind had long obeyed that imperious and periodical necessity which has been called hunger, when it announces its presence with its brutal exigencies, before any one thought to form a code of doctrine calculated to guide a sensation which, by its energy and duration, procures us the most thrilling and lasting pleasures.
The primitive nations no doubt gave themselves up to their native gluttony. They eat much, but they fed badly. They did not yet possess gastronomy; and, consequently, they had no cooks, in the serious and complete acceptation of the word.
The heroes of Homer prepared their repasts with their own hands,—and what repasts, gods of taste!—and prided themselves on their culinary talents. Où la vanité va-t-elle se nicher? Ulysses surpassed all others in the art of lighting the fire, and laying the cloth.[XXII_8] Patroclus drew the wine, and Achilles very carefully turned the spit.[XXII_9]
The conquerors of Troy shone more in the combat than under the tent which served them as kitchen.
At length the aurora of the magiric ages began to dawn: it is not a revolution, it is a creation which is preparing to appear. Man has only known hunger; he shall now become acquainted with the charms of an appetite. The King of Sidon learns how to eat, and it is Cadmus, the grandfather of Bacchus, the future founder of Thebes, who takes upon himself to instruct this august mouth.[XXII_10]