Books: Non-Fiction

“High Cookery”

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE —Brillat-Savarin —unabridged translation—Boni & Liveright ($3.50). The man of today is stamped as a barbarian by nothing so indelibly as by his abandonment of the art of dining well. That art reached its apogee a century ago in France. The great Careme, chef successively to the courts of Russia, Austria and Britain, and to the Rothschilds, probably then achieved in his sauces the ultimate refinement of la haute cuisine (“high cookery”—superb food). “I would eat my own father with sauces such as these,” ex-claimed the celebrated glutton Grimod de la Reyniere.

The present volume is by no such glutton, but by his contemporary gourmand, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, perhaps the most refined, curious and diverting commentator upon taste who ever lived. Balzac did him the honor to model his own Physiology of Marriage upon the Physiology of Taste of Brillat-Savarin. An unabridged translation of the latter work, on the 100th anniversary of the death of Brillat-Savarin, with an introduction by fastidious Editor Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair, is by way of being a delicate effort to elevate U. S. civilization.

Lawyer, provincial mayor, globetrotter, potent government official, Brillat-Savarin was yet first and foremost the Boswell to his own Johnson. While his social and convivial self toasted with discreet enjoyment the good things of the world, his meditative, whimsical alter ego was at work upon the essays here collected. Since Brillat-Savarin was rich, he had no need to print during his lifetime. He wrote at leisure, as a gourmand should, and deigned to publish in his old age a book constantly rewritten, mellowed and refined throughout his lifetime.

He traces with mock profundity the awful and mysterious path of solids and liquids through the system. As a running fire to this weighty discourse anecdotes of the great at table pop like champagne corks, snap like crunched marrow bones. There is rare eating and rich reading here.

Maxims and Observations: “The dyspeptic and the drunkard are incapable of either eating or drinking.”

“The truffle is the very diamond of gastronomy.”

“Mucilage owes its nutritive quality to the various substances to which it serves as a vehicle.”

“The roasting of the cocoa bean . . . requires a certain tact which is akin to inspiration.”

“Water is the sole beverage which really appeases thirst.”

” ‘Coquetry’ and ‘gourmandise’ . . . are both of French origin. . . . Gourmandise has no name except in French.”

“The joys of the table . . . mix with all other pleasures, and remain the last to console us for their loss.”

“Heaven Trees”

HEAVEN TREES—Stark Young— Scribner ($2). When Critic Stark Young of the New Republic was a small boy, he lived (he now pretends) on a big, easygoing plantation near Memphis. It was called “Heaven Trees,” a place of calm walks and lawns, fragrant with myrtle and syringa. His gentle Southern kinfolk were surrounded with their slaves, cottonfields and traditional propertied indolence, the men riding blooded horses and holding long argument over cold juleps; the ladies, pert and lovely to behold, keeping the large household continually open to visitors for a night, a week, a year and a day.

Stark Young is only 45, so that only by hearsay could he have known these relatives of his at “Heaven Trees” before the Civil War. But his keen understanding and prodigious talent for transcribing subtle values have made of them, with no particular plot or thesis, as wholly real and charming a group of personalities as you are likely to meet in many a year.

Uncle George Clay is the central figure, a patriarchal country doctor of many opinions and few patients, the patron saint of practical joking, as prodigal of his considerable wit and scholarship as he is of his money. He sits in his big chair playing with his “chilluns,” drinking punch, arguing temperance, theology, education; jesting coarsely, slyly, uproariously; secretly planning, and executing, gruff generosities.

His wife is Aunt Martha, whose capable hands are so smoothly white that her little nephew sees how they make the rest of her seem dark; he thinks she lights the candles with her fingertips.

Miss Mary Cherry, a perpetual guest, is Uncle George’s prize opponent in argument. She quotes Scripture in her bass voice with venomous effect; nags him for a sot and schemes against him about his daughter’s marriage. Parson Bates, a hard-drinking, ruddy giant who mispronounces “sacrilegious,” is a third party to their wrangles.

Georgia is the marriageable daughter, doll-like, laughing, dreamy, but “smart where the skin’s off.” Randall Oliver is her forbidden suitor, a cool young elegant, tailored by Rambeaux & Rambeaux of Memphis; and Charles Boardman, whom Georgia later married, rides off to college with a slave, two horses, dogs and his gun. Such central story as the book has is that of Cousin Ellen Stark, who comes to “Heaven Trees” from chill and granite Vermont, there to unfold from a pale violet of a girl into the rarest Southern orchid of them all.

What is lacking in episode is made up in anecdote: Grandfather McGehee’s second wedding, to which the bride never came for a reason which he long disdained to reveal; Cousins Hester and Micajah McGehee, who stuck a pin in their candle to show whose turn it was to talk; the first Communion of Uncle George’s black man, Solomon, who reported that the parson had given him the cup with the words: “Pass de goblet an’ say, ‘Brethren, jink ye all dis.'”

“An’ I junk it all,” said Solomon