The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood

Author:Jonathan Grimwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Historical
ISBN: 9781609451387
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2013-07-06T14:00:00+00:00

I served these two dishes to my guests and was complimented on both. But the truth is taste no longer excited me in the same way. I had eaten everything France had to offer. One pig, one mouse, one owl tastes much like another. Ravens taste little different to crows. Eels from the Seine might taste subtly different to those from the Garonne but they are still eels, even if sauced with a mixture of lovage, dill, celery seed, fried mint and rue, and garnished with pine nuts and honey, as served to the Emperor Tiberius and recorded in De Re Conquinaria by the Roman epicure Apicius.

At a loss, I began improvements on the estate and in the lands beyond, doing things I could have done long before. The marsh was drained in a single season. Huge ditches were cut to take the waters, until long straight lines sliced a landscape that had always been chaotic before. The marsh plants died, of course. The small animals that had lived at the ragged water’s edge died out or moved away. The ducks had nowhere to land that winter and the hunting was bad. Villagers went hungry, refused to eat the cartloads of potatoes I provided and openly cursed me. Their newborn no longer died from the fever but now their mothers had no food to feed them or themselves. I tried to undo the worst of the hunger, even knowing that the really destitute were never dangerous, that it was those on the edge of destitution who could be led against those they held responsible. Even knowing this, I released grain from my own granaries at prices so low the local merchants complained. The peasants, of course, said I overcharged.

I rebuilt roads, planted windbreaks, began building a school for the children of merchants and prosperous farmers. Voltaire himself wrote to me saying he approved of my work and my diligence. He’d heard I was a scientist. I wrote back denying it. The most I could claim was that I kept a book of the things I’d eaten, how they tasted and how that taste made me feel. If wine from vines grown on flinty slopes tastes different to wine from the valleys surely meat should be the same? I’d had my cattle herd split into four, I told him. Split into four and nurtured on uplands and lowlands, rich ground and poor. And having had four cows slaughtered I ate beef from each and discovered I could tell without being told which had been raised where.

Voltaire wrote back a long letter on the nature of taste and begged me to write to him again with news of my experiments. My reputation in the neighbourhood rose. Père Laurant wrote from Paris that he was master of a college now, to ask about the health of my wife and to say he’d heard I corresponded with Voltaire.

Dear Pére Laurant

Virginie continues to favour a quiet life and solitude. But I can truthfully say that

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