Usually I
like to cook, but the other day I home late and was too lazy to go to the store. Luckily my neighborhood offers plenty of take-out options; I ordered out from a Chinese
place down the street. I had never eaten
there, but it’s usually pretty busy whenever I walk by. The Yelp reviews said it
specialized in something called “meatless chicken.” It was the most popular thing on the menu.
I ordered
the so-called meatless chicken, along with lo mein and an order of pot-stickers. But when the order arrived and I swallowed a
forkful, I found the dish a little suspicious. The meatless chicken tasted unmistakably
chicken-y – that part they got right. It
was chopped up into small cubes and the texture felt a little spongy, spongy
enough to pass as tofu. But it felt firm
enough to also pass as chicken, chicken so heartlessly raised and artificially
processed, I worried, that it barely qualified as chicken at all. Could the restaurant have made a mistake?
 |
| #meatlesschicken #hautgout #deepfriedgoodness |
The
only way to find out for certain was to order the meatless chicken again,
which I decided to do for lunch today. (Note to self: they have a great lunch special.) This time I was relieved
to experience the same type of meatless meat I had ordered the first time. I now believed myself to
like meatless chicken. The texture felt
more assuredly tofu-like, and the flavor somehow less artificial.
Why
was meatless chicken considered such a delicacy at this place? Yelpers called
it a “specialty” that “brings me back to my childhood,” and “the best fake meat
I ever had.” The glowing reviews made
clear that the appeal of meatless chicken also depended on a combination of appearance,
taste, and texture: “tasty fried, slightly chewy goodness!” A combination of sensory and social qualities made
meatless chicken an acquired taste.
What
conditions must be satisfied in order to transport a food from the realm of the
disgusting to the delicious? Our
enjoyment of food has little to do with just one taste or one texture, but
food’s ability to conform to our expectations of what it ought to taste like. Confirmation
of the chicken’s meatlessness exhorted me to re-evaluate my former sensory
observations.
Has
this always been the case?[1] As some readers might know, I have been
working on a history of food connoisseurship during the 18th
century, and I often find myself struck by the passionate responses that new edible delicacies aroused. Take, for example, the dawn of the 18th
century, when well-to-do tables were invaded by French styles of cooking.[2] The English found French cuisine distinctive
for the culinary artistry that went into making rich cullises, dainty poupetons,
the fricassees and ragouts.
The flavors of these new dishes were considered so strong, so peculiar
and so indescribable that a new word entered the English lexicon to describe
them: they had haut-gout.
 |
| Most French cooks working in Britain were male, but this was the best picture I could find! |
What
was haut-gout? Well, it’s hard to say. While the OED traces it back to 1645, using
it in the same phrase as a “pickant sawce,”
haut-gout wasn’t exactly a flavor. You won’t find it in an English cookbok. Even
so, haut-gout connoted rich and highly seasoned properties that could not be
described in words.[3] For example, the pungency of soy sauce –- enthusiastically
described in 1736 as having “the highest gust in the world” –– opened the taste
buds to pleasurable new sensations. Others, such as Jonathan Swift, were more dubious. “If a lump of soot falls into the soup … stir
it well,” he sarcastically advised in Directions
to Servants (1731) “and it will give the soup a high French taste.”[4] Because haut-gout didn’t represent one
particular flavor, what it actually tasted like was anyone’s guess. Tasting “expensive” could adopt a variety of
guises, leading one to confuse it with the all-out revolting.
Smell
also wielded power over the likeability of various foods. In the Comical
Don Quixote (1702) the stench of garlic breath might be so bad as to deal a
man a “double death” yet it added a “curious hautgoust” to one’s dinner. Moreover, smell ensured haut-gout’s ability to invade personal deoderized spaces. “I have some
curious green rabbits,” a fictional French character observed in a
1719 play, “with an haut-gout that may be smelt from the forecastle to the
great cabbin.”[5]
Finally,
haut-gout was closely linked to the new
textures of food. Indeed, English
writers dwelled upon the French sauce
–– viscous, rich and pungent sauce –– that provided each dish a little
something extra. But what kind of meat
swam in the creamy goo? Who was to say
that the meat was what the cook said it was? How do we know it hadn’t spoiled? Sauce
provided a dish a sense of artful mystery, but it also exhorted the diner to
trust in the cook’s expertise and benevolence. (Indeed, it’s no surprise that the saucier
is still the highest paid position in a French kitchen.) Perhaps our cultural ambivalence about sauce
is innate. The famous British
anthropologist Mary Douglas noticed that “polluting” substances are often
sticky or viscous. Halfway between a
solid and a liquid, sauces defy easy classification.
But
coming back to my original question, did we arbitrate between disgust and
delight the same way then as we do now? I have noticed that 18th century ambivalence towards haut-gout often emanated not only from the strange sensations it elicited, but also from fears over
where a new food’s enjoyment could lead.
Eating foods with questionable sauces or smells was believed to have psychologically
addicting properties, inevitably leading connoisseurs to seek out new gustatory thrills. Such an affliction could
cause genteel eaters to consume substances that lacked culture or cultivation
–– substances such as these dishes below. So much for the civilizing process.
 |
| This image, as well as the French bill of fare above come from the Universal Journal, or British Gazetteer: April 15, 1727 |
Post-script: By
the way, the meatless chicken was ordered from Big Lantern –– 16th
street and Guerrero. Try it out
sometime!
[1] Over the
past fifty years or so, scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds have
written about
taste and disgust. The experimental
psychologist Paul Rozin has published oodles of articles about preferences and
disgust, famously linking disgust to fears of our animal origins. In his lucid and fascinating book, The Anatomy of Disgust, William Ian
Miller treats disgust as an emotion that organizes the social and moral
universe. I’m still searching for more
work on transforming associations of disgust into associations of taste, so if
you know of any work please let me know!
[2]
The rise of French cuisine has been well documented by scholars. For the culinary changes happening in France,
see Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste:
The Rise of French Cuisine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009). For the reception of French
cookery in Britain, see Gilly Lehman, The
British Housewife and Stephen Mennell, All
Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to
the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
[3] During
the late 17th century, botanists became exceedingly interested in
creating taxonomies of flavor, the most famous of which was devised by F.R.S
Nehemiah Grew. (I’ll talk about him in
an upcoming post.) Yet nowhere in Grew’s
taxonomy or anywhere else does “haut-gout” gain any scientific elaboration.
[4] I’ve
always wondered whether Jonathan Swift got food poisoning from a French
fricassee, for he loved to mock Augustan food fashions. The
Modest Proposal –– which recommended turning Irish babies into culinary
delicacies –– can certainly be read as an indictment of connoisseurial
eating.
[5] Thomas
D’Urfey, The Younger Brother, or the Sham
Marquis (London, 1719).
