GLORIOUS FOOD.('The Passionate Epicure')(Book Review)

In a small town in eastern France in the eighteen-thirties, the nation's most celebrated gastronome, Dodin-Bouffant, mourns the death of his cook. Alongside him are his three favorite dining companions, equally bereaved by the passing of the culinary genius who helped create Dodin-Bouffant's renown as "the Napoleon of gourmets, the Beethoven of cooking." During the grievous months in which Dodin-Bouffant, a retired magistrate, interviews candidates to fill the vacancy in his kitchen, the four gourmets have to content themselves with the indiscriminately massacred trout and dishonored fowl served up by their local cafe: sad fare to men who are used to consuming, as mere amuse-gueules before a fifteen-course meal, "mushroom and shrimp jellies, tiny preserved trout stuffed with tarragon and chopped olives . . . minute cold boned thrushes, larded with layers of anchovy, small tubs of roe pickled with cloves . . . iced eels stuffed with pounded prawns."

These voluptuaries are the main characters of Marcel Rouff's diverting novel "The Passionate Epicure" (Modern Library Food; $11.95; translated from the French by an Englishman who used the pseudonym Claude), which is loosely based on the life of the gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826). Unlike the amiable gentleman-scholar whose book "Physiologie du Gout" remains the most enduring classic of culinary writing, the fictional Dodin-Bouffant is a Robespierre of the dinner table. His exacting gustatory judgments have disqualified hundreds of prominent men from supping at his house. He has ostracized one candidate "for not having recognized in the cream of a cauliflower sauce the exotic caress of a pinch of nutmeg," and banished another for downing a glass of Pommard after dessert. So the three bons vivants who have the good fortune to remain recipients of Dodin-Bouffant's hospitality are overjoyed when a new culinary superstar, Adele Pidou, passes the tyrant's gruelling scrutiny and is hired as his chef. They resume their blissful epicureanism, dining on "an uninterrupted dream of veal-birds with scented stuffings, unbelievable legs of mutton under the raised skin of which lurked prodigious forcemeat balls, fricassees which made [one] want to live for ever, sheeps' tongues 'in curl papers' (en papillotes)."

Alas, Adele Pidou's very genius, her ability to create that platonic ideal of "absolute and perfect cooking" which it is Dodin-Bouffant's goal in life to savor, catapults her to dangerous fame. An illustrious epicure, the Prince of Eurasia, invites Dodin-Bouffant to dinner, hoping to be invited back, in order to sample Adele's creations. A culinary duel ensues: the Prince offers his guest a dinner of nearly sixty dishes and more than thirty wines and liqueurs. The irascible Dodin-Bouffant, deciding to teach the flamboyant foreigner a lesson in bourgeois frugality, retaliates by offering the Prince a four-course meal whose piece de resistance consists of France's most rustic, down-home fare--a pot-au-feu. Outraged at first by the sight of "the coarse lackeys' dish," which he deems an "insult offered to his rank," the Prince finds that Adele's version of it is no ordinary food:

The beef itself, lightly rubbed with saltpetre and then gone over with salt, was carved into slices of a flesh so fine that its mouth-melting texture could actually be seen. The aroma it gave forth was not only that of beef-juice smoking like incense, but the energetic smell of tarragon with which it was impregnated and the few, very few, cubes of transparent, immaculate bacon in the larding. The rather thick slices, their velvety quality guessed at by every lip, rested languidly upon a pillow made of ...