The Pleasures of the Table: An Account of Gastronomy from Ancient Days to Present Times. With a History of Its Literature, Schools, and Most Distinguished Artists; Together With Some Special Recipes, and Views Concerning the Aesthetics of Dinners and Dinner-givingEllwanger, George H. (George Herman)
History
The Pleasures of the Table: An Account of Gastronomy from Ancient Days to Present Times. With a History of Its Literature, Schools, and Most Distinguished Artists; Together With Some Special Recipes, and Views Concerning the Aesthetics of Dinners and Dinner-giving
Ellwanger, George H. (George Herman)
Gastronomy
Fish naturally demands a white wine; but a carp may be prepared--and
doubtless is prepared--so sauced and spiced and aromatised by practised
cloistral hands that a red wine, the favoured colour of the cowl,
may accord with it perfectly. This is not saying that an abbot who
may be as renowned for his gastronomic abilities as for his oratory
necessarily confines himself or his followers to red wine with fish.
Much will depend, of course, upon the mode of preparation,--it is to
be supposed that the cellarer has both red and white wine at command
to draw from as occasion demands; to be confined to a single variety
must be as onerous to the cloth as to the layman. When the celebrated
vineyard of Clos-Vougeot was the property of the Bernardin monks,
before it was confiscated and declared national property, Dom Gobelot
was the father-cellarer. It was he who, after being forced to retire to
private life at Dijon, with a hundred dozen bottles of a famous year
of his vineyard as a souvenir, proudly replied to the young Bonaparte,
conqueror in Italy and returning from Marengo, when he requested some
old Vougeot for his table: "If he wishes some forty-year-old Vougeot,
let him come and drink it here; it is not for sale." And does not
history record that Pope Gregory XVI, in the year 1371, made the Abbot
of Clos-Vougeot a cardinal to express his gratitude for a present of a
basket of his best old wine which the abbot had sent him?
The famous wine of "Est, Est, Est" owes its celebrity to a German
bishop named Fuger, who, while on a journey to Italy, sent his
secretary in advance in order to provide the best accommodations. He
was especially charged to test the wine in all the inns en route, and
wherever he found it best to write the word "Est" on the wall of the
_albergo_. Arriving at Montefiascone, a small town on the highroad from
Florence to Rome, the secretary found the wine so superior that he
was at a loss to describe it until he bethought him of the inscription
that a sultan of Lahore had engraved on the door of his seraglio,--"If
there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here!"
Accordingly, he wrote the word "Est" thrice in large characters on
the wall of the principal inn--a fatal word for the bishop, who
tarried so long and drank so freely that he died ere reaching his
destination--Rome. His tomb exists at Montefiascone. On either side
of his mitre and his arms his secretary had carved a reversed glass,
with this epitaph on the stone: _Est, Est, Est, et propter nimium est
Johannes de Fuger dominus meus mortuus est_. The explanation of the
epitaph and emblems is given by the Roman prelate, Valery. It is still
further averred that the death of Cardinal Mauri, a distinguished
Italian prelate, whose remains were interred near those of the German
bishop in the Church of St. Flavien, was also hastened by his fondness
for the Montefiascone wine. The story of the bibulous bishop was told
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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