I don’t re-read a whole lot of books. I think I would like to but there are always new (usually new old) books to read. Apropos of nothing though recently I did re-read Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, by A.J. Liebling. I had picked it up quite a while back I think off of a New Yorker recommendation. I would have had a New Yorker subscription based on official advice about where worthy news came from. During the re-read the one thing I was really waiting for was this passage, which had stuck with me since my initial run-through:
I was a student, in a highly generalized way, at the Sorbonne, taking targets of opportunity for study. Eating soon developed into one of my major subjects. The franc was at twenty-six to the dollar, and the researcher, if he had only a certain sum – say, six francs – to spend, soon established for himself whether, for example, a half bottle of Tavel supérieur, at three and a half francs, and braised beef heart and yellow turnips, at two and a half, gave him more or less pleasure than a contre-filet of beef, at five francs, and a half bottle of ordinaire, at one franc. He might find that he liked the heart, with its strong, rich flavor and odd texture, nearly as well as the beef, and that since the Tavel was overwhelmingly better than the cheap wine, he had done well to order the first pair. Or he might find that he so much preferred the generous, sanguine contre-filet that he could accept the undistinguished picrate instead of the Tavel. As in a bridge tournament, the learner played duplicate hands, making the opposite choice of fare the next time the problem presented itself…
A rich man, faced with this simple sumptuary dilemma, would have ordered both the Tavel and the contre-filet. He would then never know whether he liked the beef heart, or whether an ordinaire wouldn’t do him as well as something better… A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost.
He then goes on for much longer than I initially remembered about fish.
I think the profundity of the argument speaks for itself even if, like Liebling did, I have had to add a few more paragraphs to pad this out into a blog post. Actually I think the real power of the argument is that it makes a measure of poverty an essential ingredient to insight, though neither Mr. Liebling nor myself have ever been anything close to real need. But no one ever thinks of themself as rich and here the reader is rewarded for holding on to that notion.
Still, the essential point that you need to try different things and more importantly have reason to seriously consider the merits of what would otherwise be overlooked must be a good guide to developing both literal and metaphorical taste. The even harder skill in turn must be to hold onto that taste once you have the means but no need to employ it. Liebling a bit later does warn about older “eaters” set in their tastes, though maybe he would think one group earned their taste and one simply fell into it. Already I see my own weakness in re-visiting restaurants; the first time around inevitably I choose what I think is the best-looking thing on the menu and so when I go back I can’t be tempted into the second-best thing.
So maybe I am already doomed in Liebling’s eyes, or maybe I just need to go to more variable restaurants. Ideally, the small mom and pop (mère et père?) restaurants that Liebling finds throughout the book. The tragedy is that the book was already written as a memoir of a Paris that no longer existed when Liebling was writing about it, and a century on I figure there is no hope of finding my own beef heart and Tavel. But you never know until you try and maybe, by the time I get there, I will have a strict enough budget to train my taste.
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