Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

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(1755-1826) French lawyer, politician, and gastronome who achieved fame through a book, Physiologie du Gout (Physiology of taste). His name is given to a consommé, baba, and several other dishes.

Brillat-Savarin, Anthelme (1755-1826). French writer on gastronomy with deep intellectual roots in 18th-c. philosophy, whose work has become increasingly celebrated, in recent times by Roland Barthes. His Physiologie du goût (1825) is notable for its vitality, originality of style, and abundance of pithily expressed aphorisms, many of which have entered into common currency.

— Brian Rigby

Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme (1755-1826) French lawyer, politician, and gourmet whose masterpiece, published in the last year of his life, was Physiologie du Gout, or Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante (The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy), the only philosophical meditation on cooking.

The author of the best-known work of gastronomy, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826), was born in Belley in the region of Bresse, studied law in Dijon, became a lawyer and president of the civil court at Ain, a mayor of Belley, and a commander of the National Guard. In 1789 he was chosen to be a deputy to the National Assembly. In 1793 the Revolutionary Tribunal accused him of "moderatism" and he fled to Switzerland, Holland, and finally America. In New York he supported himself for three years by teaching French and playing the violin in the John Street Theatre, but he also traveled north through New England, where he hunted game in good company, and south to Philadelphia where he met Thomas Jefferson. Returned to France in 1796, he was appointed judge to the Supreme Court of Appeals in Paris.

As a bachelor gourmand, he entertained often in his home on the Rue de Richelieu and frequented such stylish restaurants as Grand Véfour and Beauvilliers. Known to be a learned and witty man, he wrote treatises on a number of different sciences and wished to make a science of culinary art.

In 1826, he published anonymously the Physiologie du goût: Méditations de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique et à l'ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens (Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy: a theoretical, historical and contemporary work, dedicated to the gastronomes of Paris), a collection of aphorisms, epigrams, anecdotes, and essays on subjects as diverse as chemistry, physiology, nutrition, obesity, appetite, gourmandism, digestion, dreams, frying, and death. He even included a miniphilosophic history of cuisine from man's discovery of fire to the tables of Louis XVI.

Although his aim was didactic, his gift was for storytelling—his anecdotes rather than his analyses make his work live. His timing and his tone were right for the new bourgeoisie of Paris and the form of his Physiology helped establish the popularity of a new essayistic genre, the profile. Translated into many languages, his work has enjoyed a wide readership because of his light and easy style, his facility with a phrase—so quotable that his aphorisms have become clichés—and finally his intellectual solidity in placing the physical and aesthetic pleasures of food in the social–scientific context of human behavior.

In short, he took the subject of food seriously in a new way. Instead of elaborating an aesthetics of taste, based on the idiosyncrasies of individuals in the manner of his aristocratic contemporary Grimod de la Reynière, Brillat-Savarin attempted to find general principles that would liberate taste from autocratic authorities. His attempt to provide a scientific basis for all the pleasures of the table was compatible with the reasoned conservatism of the Enlightenment that had earlier sent him into exile. His Physiology is a remarkably egalitarian work.

At the same time, he epitomizes the urbane civility of a man born in the country who rose to high office in the city in the new ranks of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Others, striving to improve their social standing, could identify with him. As Brillat-Savarin outlined them, his standards of excellence were no longer defined by professional chefs of the court or by grand banquets of court cuisine, but by the quality of ingredients and a care of preparation that anyone could learn. He rhapsodizes over cheese, eels, or truffles not because they are extravagant luxuries but because they are part of a well-stocked larder that any man of means could buy and serve at home. For the convenience of his readers, he took care to include the names and addresses of his favorite Parisian suppliers of groceries, pastries, and breads. In effect, although a habitué of the best restaurants in town, he was essentially addressing the home cook and the home diner.

Although writing almost two centuries ago, he describes a culinary world that seems familiar to any inhabitant of a large cosmopolitan city in the early twenty-first century. In praising the Parisian table, he does not ascribe its virtues to an indigenous French character, but rather to the fruits of an increasing internationalism. He lists which ingredients come from France, which from England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Africa, Holland, and America. He concludes: "a meal such as one can eat in Paris is a cosmopolitan whole in which every part of the world makes its appearance by way of its products" (Revel, Culture and Cuisine, p. 218 ). He fancied himself a citizen of the world and as a result his name has become synonymous, at least in the Western world, with food's most civilized expression of wit and humanity.

The Physiology of Taste

"Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are" (Fisher, p. 3).

"The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star" (p. 4). "A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye" (p. 4)

"Let one open any book of history, from Herodotus to our own days, and he will see that, without even excepting conspiracies, not a single great event has occurred which has not been conceived, prepared, and carried out at a feast" (p. 54).

"Whosoever pronounces the word "truffle" gives voice to one which awakens erotic and gastronomical dreams equally in the sex that wears skirts and the one that sprouts a beard" (p. 93).

Bibliography

Boissel, Thierry. Brillat-Savarin, 1755–1826: Un chevalier candide. Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1989.

Doucet, Henri. Un Brillat-Savarin du XXe siecle. Vienne, Isère: Doucet, 1994.

Fisher, M. F. K., trans. M. F. K. Fisher's Translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. New York: Knopf, 1971. Valuable glosses.

Lalauze, Adolphe, trans. Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du goût: A Handbook of Gastronomy, New and Complete Translation with Fifty-Two Original Etchings by A. Lalauze. New York: Bouton, 1884. Preface by Charles Monselet.

MacDonogh, Giles. Brillat-Savarin: The Judge and His Stomach. London: Murray, 1992.

—Betty Fussell

Quotes:

"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."

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"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." —Brillat-Savarin

For the cheese from Normandy, see Brillat-Savarin cheese

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1 April 1755, Belley, Ain – 2 February 1826, Paris) was a French lawyer and politician, and gained fame as an epicure and gastronome: "Grimod and Brillat-Savarin. Between them, two writers effectively founded the whole genre of the gastronomic essay."^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 2 Influence 3 Quotes 4 Footnotes 5 External links

Biography

Brillat-Savarin was born in the town of Belley, Ain, where the Rhone River then separated France from Savoy, to a family of lawyers. He studied law, chemistry and medicine in Dijon in his early years and thereafter practiced law in his hometown. In 1789, at the opening of the French Revolution, he was sent as a deputy to the Estates-General that soon became the National Constituent Assembly, where he acquired some limited fame, particularly for a public speech in defense of capital punishment. He adopted his second surname upon the death of an aunt named Savarin who left him her entire fortune on the condition that he adopt her name.

He returned to Belley and was for a year the elected mayor. At a later stage of the Revolution there was a bounty on his head, and he sought political asylum at first in Switzerland. He later moved to Holland, and then to the new-born United States, where he stayed for three years in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Hartford, living on the proceeds of giving French and violin lessons. For a time he was first violin in the Park Theater in New York.

He returned to France under the Directory in 1797 and acquired the magistrate post he would then hold for the rest of his life, as a judge of the Court of Cassation. He published several works on law and political economy. He remained a bachelor, but not a stranger to love, which he counted the sixth sense: his inscription of the Physiognomie to his beautiful cousin Juliette Récamier reads

"Madam, receive kindly and read indulgently the work of an old man. It is a tribute of a friendship which dates from your childhood, and, perhaps, the homage of a more tender feeling...How can I tell? At my age a man no longer dares interrogate his heart."^[2]

Title page of "La Physiologie du Goût" ("The Physiology of Taste") by French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) with a portrait of the author. 1848 edition.

His famous work, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste) , was published in December 1825, two months before his death. The full title is Physiologie du Goût, ou Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante; ouvrage théorique, historique et à l'ordre du jour, dédié aux Gastronomes parisiens, par un Professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et savantes.^[3] The book has not been out of print since it first appeared, shortly before Brillat-Savarin's death.^[4] Its most notable English translation was done by food writer and critic M. F. K. Fisher, who remarked "I hold myself blessed among translators." Her translation was first published in 1949.

The body of his work, though often wordy or excessively - and sometimes dubiously - aphoristic and axiomatic, has remained extremely important and has repeatedly been re-analyzed through the years since his death. In a series of Meditations that owe something to Montaigne's Essays, and have the discursive rhythm of an age of leisured reading and a confident pursuit of educated pleasures, Brillat-Savarin discourses on the pleasures of the table, which he considers a science. His French models were the stylists of the Ancien Régime: Voltaire, Rousseau, Fenelon, Buffon, Cochin and d'Aguesseau. Aside from Latin, he knew five modern languages well, and when the occasion suited, wasn't shy of parading them: he never hesitated to borrow a word, like the English sip when French seemed to him to fail.

The genuine philosophy of Epicurus lies at the back of every page; the simplest meal satisfied Brillat-Savarin, as long as it was executed with artistry:

Those persons who suffer from indigestion, or who become drunk, are utterly ignorant of the true principles of eating and drinking.

Influence

Brillat-Savarin cheese, the Savarin mould, a ring mold with a rounded contour, and Gâteau Savarin are named in his honor.

His reputation was spread to a wide television audience by Chairman Kaga of the TV series "Iron Chef" which introduced to millions the mot "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."

Brillat-Savarin is often considered as the father of low-carbohydrate diet. He considered sugar and white flour to be the cause of obesity and he suggested instead protein-rich ingredients.

Sure enough, carnivorous animals never grow fat (consider wolves, jackals, birds of prey, crows, etc.). Herbivorous animals do not grow fat easily, at least until age has reduced them to a state of inactivity; but they fatten very quickly as soon as they begin to be fed on potatoes, grain, or any kind of flour. ... The second of the chief causes of obesity is the floury and starchy substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment. As we have said already, all animals that live on farinaceous food grow fat willy-nilly; and man is no exception to the universal law. Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme (1970). The Physiology of Taste. Penguin Books. pp. 208-209. ISBN 978-0-14-044614-2. 

Eneas Sweetland Dallas wrote Kettner's Book of the Table, a Manual of Cookery, 1877, a treatise on gastronomy based on the work of Brillat-Savarin. Dallas published his book under the pseudonym of A. Kettner.

Quotes

• He compared after-taste, the perfume or fragrance of food, to musical enharmonics (Meditation ii): "but for the odor which is felt in the back of the mouth, the sensation of taste would be but obtuse and imperfect."
• An avid cheese lover, Brillat-Savarin remarked: "A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye."
• "The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star."
• "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."
• "A man who was fond of wine was offered some grapes at dessert after dinner. 'Much obliged,' said he, pushing the plate aside, 'I am not accustomed to take my wine in pills.'"

Footnotes

1. ^ Stephen Mennell, All manners of food: eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, 2nd ed. 1996, p. 267.
2. ^ Quoted by Anne Drayton, Introduction to The Physiology of Taste, 1994, p. 11.
3. ^ "The physiology of taste, or, Meditations of transcendent gastronomy; a theoretical, historical and topical work, dedicated to the gastronomes of Paris by a professor, member of several literary and scholarly societies"
4. ^ Mennell, 1996, p. 268.

External links

• Ebook (in English translation)
• Text of The Physiology of Taste
• Works by Brillat-Savarin at Project Gutenberg

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