35. Translating "Bien Manger Pour Bien Vivre"

July 17, 2022.

Background of the author, Edouard de Pomiane, a pseudonym

Preface written by the legendary Ali-Bab and introduction by author.

I found his writing and his assumptions dated.  They really are based on a Eurocentric foundation, on a world that has since passed away.

de Pomiane's assumptions show that even the most educated among us can barely see over the horizon.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:29

That was prelude number one by Frederick Chopin. Chopin wrote 24 preludes dedicated to the portrayal of emotions in musical form. The first prelude was composed in C major, a key that Christian Schubach described in his 1806 book, Ideas for a System of Aesthetics in Musical Art, as pure, innocent, naive, and simple. Anyway, I don't know if you found that piece to be pure, innocent, naive, and simple, but anyway, this is podcast number 35. Um, I'm Tom Newhouse, and as you know, I'm doing a whole series of podcasts to support my pri my uh nonprofit Project Hope and Fairness dedicated to the liberation of many millions of cocoa farmers who are treated very badly by the West and other countries, by other parts of the world, uh in terms of uh not have being able to make a living out of growing cocoa. So I'm going to start with the subject of today's podcast, which will be the subject of a number of podcasts in the future. Um, it's very exciting. Um, and I wanted to share it with you. From uh 1968 to 2022, I carried with me a dilapidated copy of a book that discusses the science of cooking. Back in 1968, I was a student at Oberlin College. In those days, the college had a 414 program, a four-month first semester, a one-month mid-semester, and a four-month second semester. The middle semester was called Winter Term, and it was designed to help students explore either subjects in more depth or new subjects that perhaps were not offered by the school. At the time I was taking a course in German, a course in calculus, and a course in organic chemistry. I was also taking piano lessons with a student who had studied under my beloved teacher, Miss Genevieve of Turin. So I was dabbling in both art and science. Even then I was very interested in cooking and baking. One day as I was walking the halls of the French department, I saw on the bulletin board next to Henry Grubb's office, Henry Grubbs being a professor there, a notice advertising winter term credit for reading Bien manger pour bien vivre by Edouard de Pomian. I signed up to read the book, and doctor Grubbs, actually Mr. Grubbs, as Oberlin did not believe in encouraging hierarchical titles, lent me his crumbly copy. I do not remember what his motives were. Perhaps he wanted me to write a report that he could refer to later and save himself the trouble of reading the book. Anyway, I also had a copy of the Time Life Cooking of Provincial France written by Julia Child. This book was so much easier to read, it was written in English, and the pictures were so enticing that I never even cracked open the copy of Bien manger pour bien vive. And so this decrepit volume of cracked brown pages has been with me since 1968, burning a hole in my guilty conscience. A couple decades ago, I wrapped it in wax paper to protect it because I was determined not to die with the copy unread. So I guess I'm a man of my word, feeling my uh um days uh becoming less numerous in the future. Um I feel like it's time to read this book, and so that's what these podcasts are dedicated to. A couple weeks ago I decided to take photos of the pages, uh, and uh so that's what I've been doing, and then I've been reading it. Uh, so that way I have a permanent copy. It's written in parochial French, so I can read entire pages without looking up a single word, and I'm translating it into English. As I go along, I make comments wherever I feel appropriate, so it's an annotated translation. I have discovered some interesting things about the author, Edward de Pomion. He was born in Paris, son of Polish parents who fled the January uprising in eighteen sixty three when Poles were trying to free themselves from the Russian yoke. De Pomion's name was actually a pseudonym. His real name, which he reserved for his thousands of scientific writings in professional journals, was Pozerski. He was a good friend of Alibab, considered to be France's best culinary writer, and who writes the preface to this book. Depomion was a scientist, writer, and a radio personality. As a scientist, he ran a laboratory in the legendary Institute Pasteur. He was an expert in digestion. As a writer, he was a firm believer that successful digestion begins with the liking of a food, and so he taught cooking classes that combined science and art, mostly to young women because they were after all the home cooks who would determine the health of the nation. As a radio personality, he had the same goals. However, he was known for being an extremely vivacious person full of joie de vive and love of his fellow human being. So you can see how my connection with this book is quite fortuitous. I have traveled a similar path. Over the years I have owned two restaurants, two bakeries, and one chocolate shop. I wrote a food column called Answers for the Washington Post for seven years, and another column called The Bungling Chef for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner for four years. And I got my PhD in food science and I taught chemistry. My efforts to translate and share this book stem from a similar conviction to De Pomion's. I too believe that for food to be nutritious it first has to be liked. To prepare food that is likable, you need to understand the principles of cooking and you need to understand the underlying science. I taught the chemistry of cooking for 32 years, first in Cornell's School of Hotel Administration and then in Cal Poly's Department of Food Science and Nutrition in San Luis Obispo, California. We start then with one of the mid-20th century's landmark books on the link between chemistry and cooking, because as I have found, Depomion is definitely a creature of his time. Some of his science, though rubber stamped by the world's finest educational institutions and research institutions, is definitely outmoded. Also, some of his social commentary is similarly arcane or even mistaken. The book is written after all in the late 1930s, and a lot has changed since then. But the point is not to tear Dipome down, but to show how the science and how human cultures have changed and how our thinking has changed. He was the best the mid-19 the mid-20th century had to offer. But I think you will learn just how much thinking about science and the culinary arts has evolved since the days just before World War II. We start with the preface. The preface is written by the famous culinary writer, as I mentioned, Alibab, whose name sounds Arabic, but is in fact a modification of Babinski, a very Polish name. Like Depomian, Alibab's parents fled Poland because of Russian aggression. So we begin with his comments on the preface. I am a little tired of books about gastronomy that are written by laboratory geniuses. I am always afraid of finding the formula for the famous synthetic pill that will be that uh with which they are menacing us. A pill that will provide us with our daily rations calculated to save us the time of actually tasting our bread and gains time that we would otherwise waste on enjoyment. What a wonderful notion. And of course, that's a sarcastic comment. And here's my comment. I remember when I lived in France in the early 70s, everyone was uh talking about how modern science was ruining the art of eating, and that eventually we would devolve as a species into instant gratification by eating pills. Of course, this notion is in itself naive because the human senses demand gratification and they're not going to be in the form of pills. We have to chew, we have to smell, we have to uh taste, we have to listen, we have to hear, uh, we have to think about, and you can't do that with a pill. Uh so it was nonsensical. Um and even in the most totalitarian societies that deprive the individual of so many rights, self-gratification is still a fundamental human right. Uh we're back to uh Alibab's uh preface. However, knowing my friend Depomion for a long time, I am comforted that he has entrusted me with his work. Depomion is above all a biologist, but he is also a doctor and an emeritus cook. No one is more qualified than Depomion to write about the science of eating. I just passed an excellent evening reading his work. In his work, he has undertaken the difficult task of explaining to the layperson principles of gastrotechnology, and he has achieved making it palatable and comprehendable for everyone. He provides precise instructions about nutritive qualities of different foods, their digestibility, fundamental procedures and preparation, while maintaining a respect for the integrity of French gastronomy. Bien manger pour bien vivre is a charming book, spiritual and instructive. It is written carefully and deserves to be read, reread, and meditated upon. I wish for the readers the jovial humor and the masterful fork of the author who is walking in the glorious footsteps of that immortal author of La Physiologie du Goût, uh Antoine de Briard Savarin, the great French cookbook writer, cooking writer of the eighteenth century, predating and postdating the French Revolution. And that was signed Alibab, so that's the end of the preface. And now we go to the introduction, which is of course written by De Pomion. Doctors complain bitterly about the excessive education of their clients. Everyone today takes care of him or herself. Everyone knows what others are suffering from. The daily newspaper articles vulgarize to the public everything of which one is either ignorant or what is bothersome or what suggests an illness. The public knows the mechanism of all its sufferings, but knows very little of what gives pleasure. To be able to sit at a table with friends is a great pleasure, the appearance of hors d'œuvre that are well prepared and presented, the joy one experiences to be sitting next to an old friend or opposite a young and pretty face, the reflections of crystals and the chandelier, the old bottle of wine that is airing in the corner of the room. All of this combines to reflect the pleasure of eating. The host has put his or her heart into receiving you. He or she wants to follow the precepts of Bria Bria Savarin to take charge of your happiness during the time you are spending under his or her roof. The hostess contributes her art and the master chef his science. In turn, the guest will certainly repay his debt through admiration and recognition. A few hours later the smoke of exotic cigars and the lighter aromas of oriental tobaccos blur the guests' happy faces. It's all for an enjoyment of the present, while the older guests speak of the past and the younger guests speak of their hope for the future. After such an experience one has dined well. And here's my comment. Obviously tobacco is no longer recommended. And back to his introduction. What has happened to us during such sweet enjoyment? How can we explain the mechanisms of our temporary happiness? We have all dined, but have we eaten? We have admired the order of the meal. Was the staging necessary? We were seduced by the good cooking. How was it cooked? We have digested the food. How was it digested? We comfort ourselves. How did we assimilate the delicate dishes? All of these questions and all of these problems lie at the edges of scientific explanation. I am going to fill the gap and reveal in several pages the principles of the art and science of eating. This book will be neither a medical nor a physiological treatise. One learns nevertheless in just a few pages what foods are, how they are digested and assimilated. One learns how the organism is flattered by a good meal and how it thereby profits. This book will not be a collection of fundamental cooking recipes, but good recipes will come to the reader in and of themselves. Once one understands the general composition of ingredients and one fixes the precise physical conditions under which they are transformed, eventually all of these empiricisms will disappear and blend into real science. The ensemble of all this knowledge constitutes theoretical gastronomy. This is Tom. A side note on empirical science versus theoretical science. Empiricism is best exemplified by the science of Aristotle, in which he made observations and then drew conclusions. For example, Aristotle observed that the Sun rotates about the Earth. We call this geocentrism. But in the seventeenth century, Copernicus finally proved enough provided enough evidence to dispel the old theory and proposed heliocentrism, the theory that the Earth and other planets rotate about the sun. How might theory and empiricism apply to cooking and chemistry? As we will discover later in this book, understanding the theory of how starch is structured, how it behaves in a sauce, allows one to make predictions at the empirical level. The theory that starch molecules are packed into granules that absorb water and the theory that starch molecules come either in linear or branched form allows one to make empirically based predictions on how a sauce behaves as it sits in a pan on the stove, how it starts out thick and then slowly thins. We will learn why this is. This book, and now we come back to Depomion. This book is the result of much practical experience combined with long meditation. It was conceived well before World War II and it was written during the first years of the conflict. Since this time, humanity has completely changed. The world map has been turned upside down. Also, certain chapters, those treating with ethnic foods, will seem outdated. I left them untouched, however, estimating that neither wars nor religions alter racial character. Over the centuries, cataclysms might change a country's political character, but in no way change the basic physiology of those that inhabit it. And here's my comment. The use of the term racial character is troubling, but I left it in because as a translator my role is to elucidate, not to obfuscate. So why would the author use the term racial when referring to cultures? My guess is that post-World War II Europe was still stuck with a colonial vocabulary. For over five hundred years, and that is of course a conservative estimate, Europeans considered themselves to be the superior model of humanity. This, of course, is often called Eurocentrism. Now we back to uh his comment, his introduction. Uh the modifications that human convulsions may cause impact uh may cause impact food availability, but this is uh a passing effect, and in the long term, the people who have suffered from deprivation eventually resume their ancestral habits during calm periods. And here's my comment to that. And as we all know, we are now leaving a calm period and entering a period of calamity and great deprivation caused in the long term by global warming and in the short term by the war in Ukraine. Now we're back to his introduction. Revolutions come and go, but a nation's cuisine remains the same like a magic ring. And here's my comment to his sentence. This, of course, is incredibly naive blanket statement. Post-World War II history shows a real revolution culturally. For example, and it didn't really involve a calamity, it happened because of uh um internationalism. For example, the United States has had a profound influence around the globe. Family restaurants in France have essentially disappeared just as they disappeared in the US. The cuisine of China has profoundly shifted from vegetable-based to meat-based. The Japanese cuisine, the Japanese now eat beef. It was unknown in the nineteenth century. There are many, many more examples of profound shifts in national cuisines. And often the profound shifts did not happen because of a calamity, but because of in the in a quiet period. Back to his introduction. This book addresses itself to all cultivated individuals. It speaks especially to young women who have in their intellectual and scientific baggage what appears to be a hodgepodge of principles bearing seemingly no relationship to daily life? Does the young woman who learns all the basics of physics, chemistry, and physiology know that she has all the knowledge necessary to understand basic cooking techniques? Does she know that her limited theoretical knowledge will help her rise above the encumbering effects of empiricism and routine that limit most cookbooks? The reader of this book will find in its pages the basis for reviving and using her theoretical knowledge, much of it forgotten only too quickly, but the combination of practical culinary knowledge with theories of basic science will bring both to life vivifying and revivifying theory and practice. With this fortunate combination, she will no longer ask for recipes, but will rise above such encumbrance and will analyze and synthesize in her home laboratory, the kitchen. This book also addresses those who worried about their health want a way to analyze their own health and eat accordingly. How can we understand what we can safely tolerate in the rich range of foods that is available to us if we don't understand the interaction of the principles that govern the functioning of our organism with the composition of our foods and the means of preparing them. During our lives the needs of our bodies change multiple times. In each step of our existence certain rules must be followed. Thus eating well does not ever mean eating whatever gives us pleasure. Eating well means combining health and pleasure. By understanding health and pleasure, we can thereby bien manger pour bien vivre or eat well to stay well. And now my comments. This demonstrates two facts. One, the seventy two-year-old man is quite different from the eighteen year old boy who acquired the book, and two, the world has changed a lot since 1945 and is on the verge of potentially even greater change. Translating and annotating this book, however, allows me to apply my knowledge of chemistry and culture on a framework that was conceived at a very different time in human history. I hope that this book and my annotations have piqued your interest. We leave podcast number thirty-five in the minor key of A, Prelude Number Two.