Gathering for table-pleasure

JEAN ANTHELME Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) knew from indelible experience that we must eat and drink, or die. When he was 20, and she 18, Louise died in his arms from a severe weight-loss diet. Her tragedy forced him to investigate humanity’s most pressing need, physiologically, psychologically, socially, poetically, and economically. “I looked around me, I took notes, and often, amidst the most sumptuous feasts, the pleasure of observation saved me from boredom,” he explained in the Preface of Physiology of Taste (1826).

Brillat-Savarin portrayed individuals as driven not by avarice but by physical appetites. We meet at meals and their sociability extends through gourmandise, table-pleasure, and marketplace sophistication and networks of production. Altogether, he observed human conviviality, a topic which has enjoyed scholarly interest in recent years, but noticeably missing its basis in meals.

Brillat-Savarin used convive frequently for “guest” (in the sense of a diner), along with convivialité and conviviat for “conviviality”. Conviviality is not just eating together, but the art of sharing pleasure, social bonding, and intellectual exchange and industry at the table and radiating out … ensuring human life is artfully enjoyed, and appreciative of its own history and prospects.

He wrote: “one often finds gathered around the same table all the modifications that extreme sociability has introduced among us: love, friendship, business, speculation, power, solicitations, patronage, ambition, intrigue: that is why conviviality touches everything; that is why it bears fruits of all flavours” (Physiology §74).

To distill Brillat-Savarin’s theory of conviviality into one sentence: In the service of the stomach, a person’s taste abilities support the quest for taste-pleasures, and this activity of gourmandise drives people to cooperate on complex table-pleasure, reliant on hands-on agriculture, trade and industry, all contributing to joyful conviviality, whose progressive refinements have required the sciences, the peak of which is gastronomy.

As well as conviviality on the historical scale, he reported everyday interactions. While some restaurant diners “wait impatiently, eat hastily, pay, and leave”, others are at ease, “as if they were at home, and often try to enter into conversation with the next table” (§140).

He emphasized the responsibilities of the “amphitryon” (host), who ensures guests are cared for. According to his Aphorism XX: “to invite someone over is to take charge of their happiness for the entire time they are under your roof”. Gourmandise also motivates “the guests’ gratitude when they see that they have been expertly attended to.” He underlined: “General Law: Every arrangement of high intelligence requires definite compliments; thoughtful praise is obligatory wherever the desire to please is evident”. He forever condemned “those foolish eaters who swallow the most exquisite morsels with culpable indifference, or who sip fragrant and clear nectar with sacrilegious distraction (§59).

The relatively lengthy Meditation 27, “Philosophical history of cuisine”, chronicles the rise of conviviality. He appreciated that ancient Greeks had “studied how to add value to good food through agreeable conversation, and table talk became a science” (§127). For the French, an important moment came under Louis XV (1715-1774), when eighteen years of peace “easily healed all the wounds caused by more than sixty years of war; the wealth created by industry, and spread by commerce or acquired by traders, blurred the inequality of fortunes, and the spirit of conviviality spread throughout all classes of society” (§132). He had personally witnessed the really major changes in “la science des festins” (science of banqueting) since the Revolution, and he wrote firstly about improvements in French cuisine and then about associated changes in “social customs and institutions”.

The numbers of cuisiniers (cooks), traiteurs (caterers), pâtissiers (pastrymakers), confiseurs (confectioners), magasins de comestibles (provision merchants), and new craftspeople, such as the petit-four makers, kept multiplying, he said, “at an ever-increasing rate”. Proof that “this increase is due solely to genuine need is that their numbers have not hindered their prosperity” (§134). Petit-four makers were a distinct craft between pastry chefs and confectioners. Combining butter with sugar, eggs, and flour, they made “biscuits, macarons, decorated cakes, meringues, and other similar sweets” (§134).

The pastries of Monsieur Achard were so delicate that they came from some “enchanted land.” Queues formed outside Brillat-Savarin’s even nearer neighbor, baker Monsieur Limet, who benefited from the advice of some “first-rate experts” (Varieties 26). Brillat-Savarin lived a five-minute walk to the Palais-Royal, the centre of the new consumer society, where a bundle of very early and very fat asparagus, costing forty francs, would have a potential market of the richest three hundred—the new class of bankers, capitalists, and big merchants—along, he said, with reckless lovers and exuberant revelers. As he watched, the bundle of asparagus walked off from Madame Chevet’s shop with two beefy Englishmen whistling “God Save the King.” Honored by always being greeted personally, Brillat-Savarin was Madame Chevet’s regular visitor, and occasional purchaser (Varieties 15).

Food preservation had become a distinct profession, offering various out-of-season substances (§134). As to the immense progress of horticulture, “heated greenhouses” had drawn attention to tropical fruits; and “various types of vegetables have been gained through cultivation or importation, including the cantaloupe melon, which, producing only good fruit, also provides a daily rebuttal to the proverb – ‘You must try fifty before you find a good one’” (§134). Physics and chemistry aided the culinary arts: “the most distinguished scientists have not considered it beneath them to address our most basic needs, and have introduced improvements, ranging from the simple stew of the laborer to those exquisite and exquisite dishes served only in gold or crystal” (§134).

Decisively leaving the royal courts for the marketplace after the Revolution, table-pleasure advanced not only technically. “Gourmandise began to be distinguished from voracity and gluttony; it was regarded as an inclination one could admit to, as a social quality, valued by the host, beneficial to the guest, useful to science, and gourmands were placed alongside all other connoisseurs with an acknowledged passion”. Now a “general spirit of conviviality seized everyone – invitations multiplied, and hosts beguiled friends with the best dishes from the next social level up” (§135).

Conviviality changed the shape of the day, the pleasure of being together requiring “a more suitable division of time …, allocating to business the period from the beginning of the day until its end, and dedicating the remainder to the pleasures that accompany and follow feasts” (§135). Polite society instituted new forms of meal, more about togetherness than refreshment, such as “fork lunches”, a light meal of eggs, preserved meats, along with “gaiety” and optional “relaxed dress” (§135). Afternoon “tea” was extraordinary in that, “being offered to people who have already dined well, it presupposes neither appetite nor thirst; its only purpose is amusement and its only basis is sweet treats” (§135).

“Political banquets” were grander dinners associated no longer with the aristocracy but with political, business and professional circles. “Finally, restaurateurs appeared: a completely new institution” at which any diner who has the money “can immediately, infallibly, and without any other effort than that of desiring, procure all the positive pleasures of which taste is capable” (§135).

In sum, Brillat-Savarin thrived in a new, self-aware state of conviviality, a new understanding of the social project, driven by the need to eat, being deliberately performed and celebrated. Socialising moved out of the domestic and courtly households and local festivals into a global marketplace, not yet held together by the “invisible hand” of price, but by conviviality. Together with word-of-mouth, food was its own advertisement. Any guest at a sumptuous dinner  – adorned by mirrors, paintings, sculptures, fragrant flowers, music and “pretty women” – would have no difficulty in recognising that “all the sciences have been employed to enhance and set off the pleasures of taste” (§4).