The Groaning Board

By Melvin Maddocks

CONSUMING PASSIONS by Philippa Pullar. 278 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

There are still those who believe a civilization travels on its stomach. Now they have their theorist, their Toynbee of the gourmets, in Philippa Pullar, a perfectly smashing English girl with a Cordon Bleu Certificate of Cookery and a graceful prose style.

In chronology and scope, Miss Pullar's bibliography runs from Juvenal's Satires to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Tracing the vagaries of English appetite from the Roman occupation to the present, she has written a history of taste in the fullest sense of the word.

Straight off, the Romans illustrate one of Miss Pullar's pet theses, which Americans, engulfed in cookbooks and cholesterol, might ponder: gluttony is the consequence of another sin, boredom --acedia. Affluent Roman days, according to Miss Pullar, were "great plains of monotony punctuated with affairs and mealtimes," often conducted simultaneously. (In a special appendix the twin hungers for food and sex are related by Miss Pullar, who is now at work on a biography of that priapic trencherman, Frank Harris.)

The Romans may have been better engineers than cooks. They concocted trick buns that squirted, fitted wings to cooked hares in order to impersonate Pegasus, and rigged dining-room ceilings to rain flowers. Every meal a production number. But the recipes themselves, Miss Pullar maintains, have been underestimated by culinary historians. She favorably compares Roman sweet-and-sour contrasts with Chinese cooking, their well-sauced meats with Creole dishes.

When the Romans introduced their rich ways to England, the Britons scorned these foreigners "who bathe in warm water, eat artificial dainties." This establishes a motif that runs through Miss Pullar's history: puritans v. orgiasts. But gradually the natives came round. By the time those other invaders, the Vikings, had introduced their rollicking ways, canons had to be published forbidding drinking in church.

Still, Anglo-Saxon palates were hearty rather than decadent. Lots of meat broths and stews were the order of the day. Salt was obligatory in cheese and butter as well as on meat, making home-brewed ale equally obligatory. All lips smacked through the age of Chaucer.

What would have happened, Miss Pullar speculates, if the Puritans had not forbidden spices as exciters of passion, and generally brought to a crisis the English gourmet's problem, which she defines as "the neurosis between the soul and the body"? The English tradition, she thinks, "might have blossomed as richly as that of the French." After Cromwell, mourns Miss Pullar, "nothing was ever quite the same again." "Mighty Roast Beef" became the national dish.

For Miss Pullar, her history, and history in general, goes downhill after the Industrial Revolution. "Not since Imperial Rome can there have been so many signposts to gluttony," J.B. Priestley wrote of the Edwardians. (Edward VII's breakfast: haddock, poached eggs, bacon, chicken and woodcock.) Yet coexisting with gluttony, comparatively unimaginative gluttony, was malnutrition. Only one of three Englishmen of military age was found fit for World War I.

The welfare state, Miss Pullar complains, has leveled things out, but only at the price of turning England into a giant supermarket. She writes: "There is no excellence any more, or very little," looking far beyond her cookbooks to a civilization she judges tragically out of tune with nature. "Sterility, not fertility, is the great cry," she protests. " 'Life is one animal,' Samuel Butler said. And slowly we are killing it."

Today's Englishman, Miss Pullar concludes, has come full circle and ended up like the Romans, with bread-and-circuses. But what she finally cannot forgive him is the poor quality of the bread.

Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.