In praise of gluttony: history’s greatest guzzlers

It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to the bursting point, on anything from quail financière to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beast-like satisfaction of his belly. In fact I pity anyone who has not permitted himself this sensual experience, if only to determine what his own private limitations are, and where, for himself alone, gourmandism ends and gluttony begins.

It is different for each of us, and the size of a man’s paunch has little to do with the kind of appetite which fills it. Diamond Jim Brady, for instance, is more often than not called “the greatest glutton in American history”, and so on, simply because he had a really enormous capacity for food.

To my mind he was not gluttonous but rather monstrous, in that his stomach was about six times normal size. That he ate at least six times as much as a normal man did not make him a glutton. He was, instead, Gargantuan, in the classical sense. His taste was keen and sure to the time of his death, and that he ate nine portions of sole Marguéry the night George Rector brought the recipe back to New York from Paris especially for him does not mean that he gorged himself upon it but simply that he had room for it. I myself would like to be able to eat that much of something I really delight in, and I can recognise overtones of envy in the way lesser mortals so easily damned Brady as a glutton, even in the days of excess when he flourished.

Probably America will never again see so many fat, rich men as were prevalent at the end of the 19th century, copper kings and railroad millionaires and suchlike literally stuffing themselves to death in ­imitation of Diamond Jim, whose abnormally large stomach coincided so miraculously with the period. He ate a hundred men like “Betcha-Million” Gates into their oversized coffins simply because he was a historical accident, and it is interesting to speculate on what his influence would be today, when most of the robber barons have gastric ulcers and lunch off crackers and milk at their desks. Certainly it is now unfashionable to overeat in public, and the few real trenchermen left are careful to practise their gastronomical excesses in the name of various honourable and respected food-and-wine societies.

It is safe to say, I think, that never again in our ­civilisation will gluttony be condoned, much less socially accepted, as it was at the height of Roman decadence, when a vomitorium was as necessary a part of any well-appointed home as a powder room is today, and throat-ticklers were as common as our Kleenex. That was, as one almost forgotten writer has said in an unforgettable phrase, the “period of insatiable voracity and the peacock’s plume”, and I am glad it is far behind me, for I would make but a weak social figure of a glutton, no matter to what excesses of hunger I could confess.

My capacity is very limited, fortunately for my inward as well as outer economy, so that what gluttonising I have indulged in has resulted in biliousness more spiritual than physical. It has, like almost everyone’s in this century, been largely secret. I think it reached its peak of purely animal satisfaction when I was about 17.

I was cloistered then in a school where each avid, yearning young female was allowed to feed at least one of her several kinds of hunger with a daily chocolate bar. I evolved for myself a strangely voluptuous pattern of borrowing, hoarding, begging, and otherwise collecting about seven or eight of these noxious sweets and eating them alone upon a pile of pillows when all the other girls were on the hockey field or some such equally healthful place. If I could eat at the same time a nickel box of soda crackers, brought to me by a stooge among the day girls, my orgiastic pleasure was complete. I find, in confessing this far-distant sensuality, that even the cool detachment acquired with time does not keep me from feeling both embarrassed and disgusted. What a pig I was!

I am a poor figure of a glutton today in comparison with that frank adolescent cramming. In fact I can think of nothing quite like it in my present make-up. It is true that I overeat at times, through carelessness or a deliberate prolonging of my pleasure in a ­certain taste, but I do not do it with the voracity of youth. I am probably incapable, really, of such lust. I rather regret it: one more admission of my ­dwindling powers!

Perhaps the nearest I come to gluttony is with wine. As often as possible, when a really beautiful bottle is before me, I drink all I can of it, even when I know that I have had more than I want physically. That is gluttonous.

But I think to myself, when again will I have this taste upon my tongue? Where else in the world is there just such wine as this, with just this bouquet, at just this heat, in just this crystal cup? And when again will I be alive to it as I am this very minute, ­sitting here on a green hillside above the sea, or here in this dim, murmuring, richly odorous restaurant, or here in this fishermen’s café on the wharf? More, more, I think – all of it, to the last exquisite drop, for there is no satiety for me, nor ever has been, in such drinking. Perhaps this keeps it from being gluttony – not according to the dictionary but in my own ­lexicon of taste. I do not know.

The word financière, for fairly obvious reasons, means richness, extravagance, a nonchalant disregard of the purse, but I sometimes suspect that I use it oftener than it warrants to denote anything Lucullan. I need only reread some Victorian cookery books to reassure myself and justify my preoccupation with the word.

I imagine that now and then, in the remotest dining clubs of London and Lisbon, in the most desperately spendthrift of nouveaux-riches private kitchens, quails are still served à la financière, and unless I am much mistaken they are prepared almost to the letter as Queen Victoria’s kitchen contemporaries did them. Her own chef Francatelli scamps on the sauce but elaborates with pardonable smugness his method for the whole entrée, and his rival Soyer of the Reform Club makes up for it by giving a recipe for the sauce alone that would stun modern gourmets.

Herewith I present them both, chefs-d’oeuvres of two dashing culinary kings, flashing-eyed, soft-lipped prancing fellows if the engravings printed at their own expense in their two cookbooks are even half true.

Soyer’s Sauce à la Financière

Put a wineglassful of sherry into a stewpan with a piece of glaze the size of a walnut, and a bay-leaf, place it upon the fire, and when it boils add a quart of demi-glace; let it boil 10 minutes, keeping it stirred; then add 12 fresh blanched mushrooms, 12 prepared cock’s-combs, a throat sweetbread cut in thin slices, two French preserved truffles also in slices, and 12 small veal forcemeat quenelles; boil altogether 10 minutes, skim it well, thin it with a little consommé if desired, but it must be rather thick, and seasoned very palatably.

This is of course from The Gastronomic Regenerator, which the famous Reform Club’s even more famous chef dedicated to the Duke of Cambridge in 1847. It can be assumed at our safe distance that the Queen’s cook needed no lessons from the Club’s, but even so Francatelli’s sauce recipe is less interesting. His detailed method, though, for preparing the quail with and for the sauce is a fine prose poem to the God of Gastronomical Surfeit, and I give it here for modern pondering.

Francatelli’s Quails à la Financière

Remove the bones entirely from eight fat quails, reserve the livers, and add to them half a pound of fat livers of fowl, with which prepare some forcemeat, and stuff the quails with part of this; they must then be trussed in the usual manner, and placed in a stewpan with layers of fat bacon under them, a garnished faggot of parsley in the centre, and covered with layers of fat bacon; moisten with some wine mirepoix, and braise them gently for about three-quarters of an hour. Prepare a rich Financière sauce, which must be finished with some of the liquor in which the quails have been braised. When about to send to table, warm the quails, drain and dish them up, garnish the centre with the Financière, pour some of the sauce around the entrée, and serve.

This recipe is rather reminiscent of Brillat-Savarin’s method for pheasant à la Sainte Alliance, although less pure, gastronomically speaking. He would, I think, have shuddered at applying it in no matter how simplified a form to quails, of which he wrote, “A man betrays his ignorance every time he serves one cooked otherwise than roasted or en papillote, for its aroma is most fragile, and dissolves, evaporates, and vanishes whenever the little creature comes in contact with a liquid.”

It has always astonished and horrified me that this pretty wild bird, which Brillat-Savarin called “the daintiest and most charming” of all of them, should be so thoroughly unpleasant to clean, once killed. Its innards, supposedly nourished on the tenderest of herbs and grains, send out a stench that is almost insupportable, and hunters dread the moment when they must cope with it, in order to savour somewhat later one of the finest tastes in all the world.

The best of these that I have ever eaten were in Juárez, Mexico, in two shoddy, delightful “clubs” where illegal game was cooked by Chinese chefs, the quails grilled quickly over desert-bush coals, split open flat, and brought sizzling and charred to the table, innocent of grease or seasoning, and served with a dollop of strangely agreeable cactus-apple conserve. They were superb, thus unhampered.

A recipe I would follow if I could is the classical one for Quails in Ashes, Cailles sous la Cendre, a true hunters’ rule, whose prime requisite is a fine log fire! Each clean, emptied bird is wrapped in thickly buttered grape leaves and good bacon. (This is supposedly late summer, when the grain-fattened birds have fled before the guns to the high fertile meadows, just before the vineyards begin to turn gold.) Then they are enclosed in sturdy, buttered “parchment” paper, put in the hot ashes, and left there for a half hour or a little more, with fresher hotter cinders raked over them from time to time. When ready to be served, the paper is cut off, and the inward-reaching layers of bacon, grape leaf, and tender quail send out such a vapour, I know, as would rouse Lazarus.

M. F. K. Fisher died aged 83 in 1992. An Alphabet for Gourmets is reissued by Daunt at £9.99 on Nov 10