Inspired by French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous aphorism, here’s a tasting menu of symbolic eats, as served in literature

Have you ever had dinner with anyone at which no word has been spoken? I suppose it wouldn’t have been an enjoyable one, although in Filipino we like to say over the dinner table, especially while hungrily eyeing the dishes being served, “Galit galit muna,” meaning, “Leave me alone while I eat.”

Food is a social instrument. To Alexandre Dumas, it is, as he wrote in Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, “a major daily activity, which can be accomplished in worthy fashion only by intelligent people. It is not enough to eat. To dine, there must be diversified, calm conversation. It should sparkle with the rubies of the wine between the courses, be deliciously suave with the sweetness of dessert, and acquire true profundity with the coffee.”

Dumas is best known, aside from The Three Musketeers, for his Count of Monte Cristo but since we are talking about food, let us know him more for his Château de Monte-Cristo, his country home in Le Port-Marly, near Versailles. Here, a true bon vivant, he entertained friends, including many chefs, and cooked for them. What Dumas cooked, he cooked with copious amounts of butter, cream, and bacon. Later in life, in those years before he died in poverty in 1870, he wrote Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. Published posthumously in 1873, the 1,600-page volume contrasted with the circumstances surrounding his death. With its recipes of extravagance, necessitating in some dishes “approximately a kilo of good truffle” and even exotic meats such as kangaroo and elephant, it was a testament to the great appetite for living that Alexandre Dumas brought to the table.

Food in literature, sometimes quite as filling, but often equally memorable, is for the most part imbued with symbolic power. One of my most vivid memories of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere was the chicken tinola. In the third chapter, at a homecoming party in honor of Crisostomo Ibarra at the residence of Kapitan Tiago, a steaming chicken broth was served. In his bowl, Ibarra had the choicest parts, the gizzard and the liver, while in the bowl of an esteemed guest, Padre Damaso, were a bony neck and a tough wing. Insulted, the friar “mashed the squash, took a little broth, let his spoon drop noisily, and pushed his plate forward rudely.” In this scene, the reader has yet to see the full extent of the evil of Padre Damaso, yet already there is a sense of satisfaction over seeing him put in his place at an occasion otherwise convivial and celebratory.

The gizzard and the liver of chicken are also prized in Po-on, or Dusk, the first in the chronological order of F. Sionil Jose’s (Manong Frankie) five-part novel series The Rosales Saga. In the novel, it is pointed out in a passage involving one of the principal characters, a would-be priest who never was on account of the “unworthiness” of his racial origins: “A lightness of spirit lifted him; he would have the first good meal ever since he left the convent. In the late afternoon, before he went to the fields, he had watched his mother dress the chicken; he told her he must have the gizzard and the liver.”

As in the work of Rizal, these choice parts in Manong Frankie’s novel were served in a tinola broth, replete with fresh ginger and green papayas (though the ophthalmologist Rizal’s version had squash, “better for the eyes,” in place of papaya). If you read Po-on, you might be reminded of a K-drama, but only because, though he wrote it in 1984 (some of the novels in the Rosales Saga he wrote as far back as the early 1960s), it is no different than a typical K-drama, in which food or eating plays a starring role. In Po-on, there is mention of food almost every after five pages, from “coffee brewed from roasted corn and flavored with molasses” to “cold chunks of rice and… dried python that was roasted in the morning” or a “supper of May beetles cooked in cane vinegar and coconut oil.”

No wonder, Manong Frankie was generally fond of the Korean telenovela that, as he once told me, always made room for Korean culture, “their way of life, what they eat, where they come from.”

Nick Joaquin’s 1960 essay “Fashions in Food,” which is in his anthology Language of the Street and Other Essays, should give you that much satisfaction in reading about the way we ate back in the 20th century. I didn’t know, for instance, that back in the day, as Joaquin described it, coffee was “plebeian, the drink of servants and provincianos” and that, in more upscale households, the equivalent of coffee was hot chocolate, “boiled in milk and beaten to a froth in a chocolatera, and served, morning and afternoon, in narrow white cups with flowers painted on their sides.”  

Food does have an arsenal of nuanced messages outside of its literal meaning. Peaches, for instance, are more than peaches in the context of André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, in which the fruit proves as sensual as the cultural references, such as Bach’s 1731 cantata, the poems of Ovid, and Claude Monet’s View of Bordighera.

In Lolita, the apricot has as much erotic charge. Vladimir Nabokov uses it a lot to illustrate the beauty of his nymphet—her “apricot mid-riff,” her “adorable apricot shoulder blades,” her “apricot-colored limbs.” Among my favorite, however,is the phrase “the golden-brown glaze of fried-chicken bones,” with which he describes motel floors. To me, it is an acknowledgement of what remains in a room after it has been used for debauchery. Morsels of guilt, like skeletons floating in a secret bowl of soup.

IRL, all these authors except one were enamored of the pleasures of the table.

Dumas was, of course, a great cook.

When his sisters, shocked at how such a small boy could eat so much, asked Rizal, “Why do you eat as if every meal was for your entire lifetime?” he answered prophetically, “Because I will have a short lifetime.”

I imagine that Joaquin was in love with the Filipino breakfast, particularly Rizal's ultimate comfort food, carne asada, if only because he seemed to have great mastery of it, citing beloved breakfast staples like tapsilog, longaniza de jamon, and champorrado with tinapa, tuyo, or dilis.

On the occasions I met with Manong Frankie, it was always over lunch, merienda, or dinner, whether at the now defunct Kashmir on Padre Faura, the Japanese restaurant Tanabe at Adriatico Circle, or at his writing nook on the mezzanine of his bookshop Solidaridad over guinataang bilo-bilo and whisky or wine.

It is not enough to eat. To dine, there must be diversified, calm conversation. —Alexandre Dumas

My mouth waters every time I think of The Physiology of Taste, in which its author, the French epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, declared, “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are.”

But then I’m not sure I believe it when I realize that Nabokov, as I gather from my readings, had no real interest in food. In an article published in the NPR, it is said that Campbell’s soup was often supper in the Nabokov house. Yet his prose, a minefield of hidden messages, is rich with flavors and aromas, sometimes even the stench of food that has long gone sour.