Food As Metaphor - Balzac's Omelette

I am not knowledgeable enough to validate whether Anka Muhlstein's premise that Honore Balzac was the first novelist to write about food as a prime theme in his stories. What about Fielding's Tom Jones? What about other nations' literature? Yes, Balzac predates Zola's Belly of Paris and Proust's madelaines, but is he obviously and solely the first? I can't say.

Maybe because Muhlstein's literary analysis encompasses all of the Human Comedy, it seems impossible to put one's intellectual arms around. Characters are introduced for their relationship not so much with the taste of food but its presentation. Muhlstein gives enough of Balzac's early life -- the first four years with a wet nurse, shipped off to a boarding school where the food was awful and scarce -- to suggest that his upbringing lacked both the comfort of a family meal around a happy table and no introduction to the mystery of kitchen chemistry. These deficits cannot be overcome in fully developed scenes of comfort and warmth associated with a cook who teaches you how to make something out of nothing or something special out of the best or with a mother whose love is expressed through meals.

His characters' fates are colored along a continuum from the near-starvation of young students to prosperous old men's death by gluttony. Women starved for sexual satisfaction waste away from anorexia. Unfortunately in her presentation any chronology or clear linking of one HC novel's characters to another is lost. Clearly Muhlstein notes Balzac's differentiation between Parisians and provincials and she does overlay this with the evolution of restaurants in early 1800s France, but there does not seem to be any larger perspective as the cultural attitude towards dining evolves.

She notes Balzac equates gluttony with larger character flaws and a righteous demise. She also niches Balzac from his successors, Zola and Flaubert, who are more apt to describe a delicious meal as foreplay. To Balzac, food is an indication of caste and not a vehicle of seduction.

With the sweet pen and pencil drawings inside the covers, laden with oyster shells, skimpy frilly panties nigh to the snails and Camembert, evening slippers that appear to have be used for sipping Champagne, I had hoped the treatise would be more of a 19th Century French version of Allende's Aphrodite. Instead, feasts turn into bouts of drunkenness, ne'er orgies. Alas, this book was no segue from gluttony to lust.