Eating eternity

Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour, wrote Talleyrand. That Napoleon's most gifted advisor should speak so well of eating says much about the importance of food in French culture. From the crumbs of a madeleine dipped intisane that inspired Marcel Proust to the vast produce market where Emile Zola set one of his finest novels, the French have celebrated the relationship between art and food. By decorating a roasted bird with its plumage before serving it to the court, a 17th century chef transformed the experience of eating and drinking. Soon J.S. Bach's Kaffeekantate was praising coffee, more delicious than a thousand kisses, mellower than muscatel wine. Meanwhile, Madame de Sevigne, from the court of Louis XIV, warned her daughter about drinking too much chocolate, lest she bear a black baby. From Jean-Baptiste Chardin's canvases of peaches and cherries to the apples of Paul Cezanne, painters have found in food a persuasive metaphor for the divinity of nature. Salvador Dali's Les Diners de Gala included a recipe for Sodomized Entrees. Ernest Hemingway and other expatriates wrote in Paris's cafes. Roman Polanski scripted the black comedy Do