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The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy

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Overview

A culinary classic on the joys of the table--written by the gourmand who so famously stated, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are"--in a handsome new edition of M. F. K. Fisher's distinguished translation and with a new introduction by Bill Buford.

First published in France in 1825 and continuously in print ever since, The Physiology of Taste is a historical, philosophical, and ultimately Epicurean collection of recipes, reflections, and anecdotes on everything and anything gastronomical. Brillat-Savarin, who spent his days eating through the famed food capital of Dijon, lent a shrewd, exuberant, and comically witty voice to culinary matters that still resonate today: the rise of the destination restaurant, diet and weight, digestion, and taste and sensibility.

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Author Information

Bio of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born in France in 1755 and died in 1826.

Bio of M. F. K. Fisher

Born July 3, 1908, in Albion, Michigan, M.F.K Fisher was raised primarily in Whittier, California, where she enjoyed cooking meals for her family. Encouraged in literary pursuits by her parents, she combined her favorite pastimes-cooking and writing-and began writing about cooking as early as 1929 when she moved to Dijon, France, with her first husband, Alfred Fisher. Fisher was educated at Illinois College, Occidental College, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Dijon. She has written under the names Mary Frances Parrish, Victoria Bern, and Victoria Berne. A prolific author, her work is primarily autobiography and memoir. Her long list of publications includes Dubious Honors (1988) and Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories, 1933-1945, (1993). She also contributed articles to widely known magazines, including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Gourmet. Fisher died of Parkinson's disease on June 22, 1992, in Glen Ellen, California. 030

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Additional Info

Imprint

Everyman's Library

Filesize

2.20 MB

Number of Pages

504

eBook ISBN

9780307593832

Excerpt from: The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

The book is -- what? Does anyone know? Intermittently it is an autobiography, but told principally in dinner anecdotes (except one, which is about a breakfast, but so protracted that it, too, becomes dinner). It is not a cookbook, although the next time you are bestowed with a turbot the size and awkwardness of a small bicycle you will know how to cook it (too big to fit in the oven, the sea creature is effectively steamed in the tub). The difficulty is compounded by the book's opening, which invites us to think of it as something it never becomes. In the first two pages, we learn that a meal without cheese is as incomplete as a woman without an eye, a startling comparison to contemplate. We also learn that a dinner is never boring -- at least for the first hour; that a new dish matters more to human happiness than the discovery of a star; that if, at the end of a meal, you are sated and slurring, you do not know how to eat and drink; and, most famously, that you are what you eat, a succinct expression of food and identity repeated so relentlessly that it is now a modern advertising banality. These ''Aphorisms of the Professor'' (''to serve as a preamble to his work and as a lasting foundation for the science of gastronomy'') represent a lifetime of one-liners, the stuff that, revised, scribbled into a notebook, rehearsed and repeated over a fortified beverage, kept the bachelor scholar from ever having to dine alone. But after page 2, the aphorisms disappear. Instead, there is history. Should we trust it? The Professor is not an historian. Or is he? There is science, more science than history, actually a lot of science. Do we dismiss it because we know better? Do we? Who is this guy anyway?