It’s a Gourmet Pig-Out for the Bountiful People : New Gourmands Taste Life With Eye for Trends, Money to Burn

Lucius Lucinius Lucullus, that old Roman rake who used to pig out on flamingo tongues, locusts marinated in honey and baron of Carthaginian boar, then reload on stuffed dormice after a trip to the vomitorium, may have been born two millennia too soon.

The real age of the gourmand apparently has just dawned in a glitter of takeout three-star restaurants, stainless steel saucepans from West Germany, gourmet shops piled high with 600 brands of cheese and 200 blends of tea, and enough high-tech home kitchen gadgetry to relegate a TV chef like Julia Child to the Stone Age.

Satisfying the whims and cravings of “foodies,” also known in the trade as finger kissers, is a multibillion-dollar industry. Its ramifications range from designer bagel slicers and gourmet popcorn poppers to videocassettes of world-class chefs and an endless proliferation of cookbooks, wine and food magazines, cooking schools, chic caterers and charcuteries serving the very latest in gastronomic gratification.

Minimalist Cuisine

One needs a computerized carte du jour to tell what is haute and what is not on the culinary scene these days. Minimalist cuisine rather than nouvelle now is considered more fine-tuned to the sensitive taste buds of modish connoisseurs of la bonne table. California and Mediterranean cuisine observe the latest uneasy truce between the dilettantes and dietitians. Southern Italian apparently is moving ahead of northern Italian, so polenta, corn meal, is out and melanzane, eggplant, is in.

Woks and waterless cooking seem to have gone off the boil lately, while guilty gourmets who counted calories and shopped for polyunsaturated sunflower oil now salve their consciences with goat cheese and spa cookery.

Since schools of redfish have been blackened almost to the point of extinction, Cajun cooking is giving way to the less flamboyant creole cuisine, although the lines still form at the door of Paul Prudhomme’s K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans hours before the first chili pepper has been sauteed.

Happy Happenings

Prudhomme’s discovery of blackened redfish, like the flash fire that incinerated the Chinaman’s oinkery in Charles Lamb’s “ A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig,” was one of those happy happenings that from time to time turn the culinary world upside down, and set off an occasional smoke alarm when the maitre de cuisine oversells the sizzle.

To the fervent foodie, food is an art form, as rapturous as a Giuseppe Verdi overture, as exciting and sensuous as a music hall poster by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, that Gallic gastronome who always carried his own nutmeg and a grater to flavor a proffered glass of port, as compelling conversationally as the new income tax law or the latest Trevor Nunn musical on Broadway.

On the 5:07 to Westport or East Hampton, your with-it Wall Street overachiever or unindicted arbitrageur no longer natters about the nuances of his wishbone-rigged sloop or the newest Nautilus torture device at the health club.

He, more than she, is apt to argue the heat distribution merits of a blue enameled steel Chantal double boiler, tooled in West Germany, over Caliphon’s hardened aluminum model with nickel-plated cast-iron handles, both in the $75 range, or the advantages of a Le Creuset’s ironwear saute pan over Bourgeat’s copper bottom line or the Corning Glass entry in the lucrative pot and pan market.

More Male-Oriented

Manufacturers of the new generation of food processors and multifunction mixers are now more male-oriented in their advertising, as if bearing out super chef Paul Bocuse’s droll dismissal of the growing number of female executive chefs in top hotels: “Women are good for one thing and it does not take place in the kitchen.”

Modern macho man definitely can stand the heat in the kitchen, but his pampered palate often requires mail-order deliveries of baby veggies from California’s Monterey peninsula, black truffles flown in from Perigord, France, Vidalia onions from Georgia and genuine Seville oranges for his caneton nantais a la bigarade, a duck a l’orange dish.

If real men don’t eat quiche, it’s because they prefer beet ravioli with chive butter and caviar, lamb chops stuffed with rosemary, baked in filo pastry and served on a bed of two-colored sweet pepper sauces, lobster bisque Armagnac and some of the other recherche recipes preached in the gourmet gospels according to Craig Claiborne, Gael Greene and magazines like Bon Appetit, Gourmet, and Food & Wine.

Rich Prose

Like the sauces, the prose here is rich and appetizing, as witness Greene’s paean to the German chef at Quo Vadis, a pasta palazzo in Manhattan: “Savor the audacity of Joachim Splichal’s Riches of the Garden menu and be dazzled. Wild rice and bits of crackling vegetables in a spinach wrap mimic sushi. An astonishment of mushrooms follows: truffle and potato looking like a precious seven-layer cake, voluptuous cepes in silken ravioli pockets, minced mushrooms in small hollows of baby turnips.”

The check at $40 may also be an astonishment, but finger kissers of both sexes spare no expense in feeding their elegant faces.

On weekends they flock to trendy provisioners in the gourmet ghettos of Berkeley, San Diego, Dallas, Baltimore, Denver and similar urban sprawls for exotic delights not found at the corner deli. Last year Sutton Place Gourmet in Washington grossed nearly $15 million purveying 300 brands of beer, 22 varieties of smoked fish, estate-bottled olive oil from Tuscany, wild rice from an Indian tribe in Wisconsin and assorted munchies.

Supermarket Efforts

Now A&P;, Safeway and some other supermarket chains have added delicacy sections to compete with the likes of New York’s Zabar’s, the FAO Schwarz of food freaks, and deluxe victualers mushrooming across the land, even in the grits and gravy belt, with names like A Moveable Feast, Truffles & Flourishes, Let Them Eat Caviar and the American Amber Grain, Fruited Plain and Shining Sea Co.

Madison Avenue recently set out to discover just who squeezes the striped Tunisian melons in the growing glut of specialty greengrocers, who lays down the magnums of Chateaux Lafite and D’Yquem, slurps the $4.50-a-pint ice creams, invests in a steam-snorting $450 espresso machine and in general keeps La Gourmandise , as the French finesse the word for gluttony, in the billion-dollar sales bracket.

Market researchers from Grey Advertising Inc., one of the nation’s biggest agencies, dismissed the Affluent Society as too stagnant in the last decade and the yuppies, the young urban professionals, as too few to make such an impact on the economy.

‘Ultraconsumers’

The study identified a new group of “ultraconsumers,” estimated at 26 million strong, who vary widely in age, income and occupational background but are united by an upbeat attitude toward how they want to spend their lives and their money. They insist on premium products, even if it means going into debt, and place more importance on career satisfaction, fitness and well-being than on having a home and family.

“As a group they feel they can, in fact must, have it all,” said Executive Vice President Barbara Feigin, who heads up Grey’s marketing and research department. “In every category of wish fulfillment, from personal computers to weekend houses, from trips to Europe to membership in health clubs, ultras are light-years ahead of the less-acquisitive traditionalists.”

Build a better corkscrew, like the slim-line model now on the market at $75, or fry a crispier potato chip, the survey seems to say, and ultras will wear out the microchips in your cash registers. Case in point: Six years ago a Hyannis, Mass., auto parts dealer began bubbling up thicker, crisper potato chips with the help of his wife and brother. Now Cape Cod Potato Chips has its own plant, 260 employees, sells 80,000 bags of chips a day and expects to gross $16 million.

Unfertilized Eggs

Yummies or the Bountiful People, as ultras might also be called, find no moral conflict in dutifully holding hands to banish hunger from the land then picking up the phone to order a $649 kilo of beluga malossol caviar, which is the least-salty gathering of the unfertilized eggs of the world’s ugliest fish.

Like Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” they regard degustation as an antidote to pain and stress. “When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me,” Algernon said. “Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink.”

The latter-day hedonism has elevated Frugal Gourmet Jeff Smith, Cajun Chef Justin Wilson and other gurus of gusto to the level of TV evangelists in ratings and fanatical followers.

Working wives enable a second-salary splurge at an egregiously elite restaurant or a $38.50 fixed-price takeout repast from a three-star beanery like New York’s Four Seasons, as well as the incentive for hubby to slip into something comfortable, such as a Normandy housewife’s blue-striped kitchen smock, and whip up a cordon bleu spread worthy of last night out on a transatlantic liner.

Airport Offerings

A decade ago, the decor of airline terminals was dreary with newsstands, fast-food outlets, flight insurance booths and souvenir marts featuring naughty nighties and kiddie bribes bearing legends like “Daddy and Mommy went to St. Thomas and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Now some long bays to the jets are lined with lobster tanks, creperies, Belgian chocolatiers, spice and herb shops redolent with a rainbow range of saffron, turmeric, coriander, basil, thyme, rosemary, mace and other aids to the one pleasure that, as the great diplomat Charles de Talleyrand said, “can be enjoyed three times a day, equally in youth as well as old age.”

At major European airports and railway stations, duty-free gourmet shops, such as the Maison Caviar in Zurich’s ultramodern flugenhof, are as common as and far busier than the liquor, tobacco and perfume outlets. A cosmopolitan clientele is drawn to these epicenters of epicurean exotica, but Americans still predominate despite a diminishing dollar and the threat of terrorism.

Sybarites abroad have their own version of the Grand Tour that begins with a pilgrimage through all 18 food halls at Harrods, where cupboards are piled high with curries and chutneys and 200 blends of tea.

Food Shrines

Next comes an afternoon or a week worshiping at the food shrines around La Madeleine church in Paris. Grouped among the flower stalls are Creplet-Brussol, with its mountains of cheese, Maison de la Truffle, Caviar Kaspia, Le Nombril de Gastronomie, the navel of gastronomy, attended by 20 bakers and chocolatiers who dispose of 8 tons of marrons glaces (glazed chestnuts) and 15 tons of candied fruit a year. And, of course, Fauchon’s, that epicure’s epicerie where the Duke of Windsor always procured the red pepper for his quail eggs and where two dozen chefs serve up escargots nurtured on rose petals, lapin au saupiquet (rabbit in zesty wine sauce), endless varieties of pate de foie gras and other delights.

Then a dash on the TGV, train a grand vitesse, down to Lyon, where the food snoops of Guide Michelin seem to sprinkle most of their stars, or a barge tour of the vineyards lining the Loire, before moving on to Parma and Bologna and other meccas of finger-licking Lucullan luxuries.

“Send a salami to your boy in the Army,” that morale-boosting slogan of World War II, has become a gracious way of giving with the foodies.

Panache and Pretension

They gift friends and fellow cultists with hampers of premium sausages and cheese, Omaha steaks, smoked turkey from New Braunfels, Tex., gumbo from Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, sides of Irish smoked salmon, baby Virginia lamb, special coffee blends from New York’s Sensuous Bean, cases of wine, preserves, ice cream topping, sauces and spreads of their own creation, even a batch of gourmet popcorn “with sweet carmel and meaty macadamia nuts sitting irresistibly in a Royal Copenhagen bowl,” from Marshall Field in Chicago at $75. Panache is always taken with a pinch of pretension.

Like Napoleon’s army, the world of commerce marches on its stomach, although of late the two-martini lunch has been bracketed, if not usurped, by the power breakfast and high tea, where deals are cut along with the cress and cucumber sandwiches, the Black Forest cake and the sherry trifle. When the captain rolls up the silver tea trolley at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco or the Adolphus in Dallas, the captain of industry is faced with a decision between Lapsand Souchong and Formosa Oolong, at about $18 a cuppa with buttered scones.

Perrier and a Slice

High tea is as high as some fast-laners get in this dawn of the new age Bacchus, when happy hour is observed with a Perrier and a slice or a glass of Pouilly-Fuisse.

Although food junkies would rather starve than eat junk food, and sooner sip hemlock than jug wine, their aesthetic appetites amount to only a burp from the great American stomach.

Last year the untutored masses munched $1.6 billion worth of corn tortilla chips, and McDonald’s grossed $11 billion serving 16 million meals a day.

De gustibus, as Lucullus might have said, is all a matter of taste, which accounts for the gross factor in our gross national product.

After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald ordered shredded wheat at New York’s Voisin without hearing a suicide shot perforate the toque blanche, the tall, white chef’s hat, in that star-spangled kitchen.

And Noel Coward boasted, with a soupcon of Shakespeare, of concocting “a consomme devoutly to be wished.”