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Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are. —Brillat-Savarin

Quite possibly the most famous French epicure and gastronome of all, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755 - 1826) was born in the town of Belley. He studied law, chemistry and medicine in Dijon in his early years and thereafter practiced law in his hometown. He acquired some limited fame particularly for a public speech of his in defense of capital punishment. His second surname was adopted by him upon the death of an aunt named Savarin who left him her entire fortune conditioned upon his adoption of her name.

During the French Revolution, there was a bounty on his head and he sought asylum through exile in Switzerland. He later moved to Holland. And then to the newly-born United States, where he stayed for three years living on the proceeds of giving French and violin lessons.

He returned to France in 1797 and acquired the magistrate post he would then hold for the rest of his life. He remained a bachelor.

His most famous work, Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante; ouvrage théorique, historique et a l'ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens par un professeus, membre de plusieurs sociétés litteraires et savantes, was published in December 1825, two months before his death.

The body of his work, though often wordy or excessively - and sometimes dubiously - aphoristic and axiomatic, has remained extremely important and has been re-analyzed throughout 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, which combine to put Brillat-Savarin outside the teach of the hectic and impatient modern reader, Brillat-Savarin discourses on the pleasures of the table, which he treats as a science. His French models were the stylists of the ancien régime: Voltaire, Rouseau Fenelon, Buffon, Cochin and d'Aguesseau were his favorite authors. Aside from Latin, he knew five modern languages well, and wasn't shy to parade them, when the occasion suited. As a modernist, he never hesitated to borrow a word, like the English sip when French seemed to him to fail.

The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star. —Brillat-Savarin

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Ebook (in English translation)