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Brillat-Savarin was a lawyer and served as a judge in France's highest court, writing this alongside his profession for much of his life. The book was published anonymously in December 1825, and he died two months later, before it had made any impact at all.
It isn't a cookbook. It is a series of observations arranged as meditations on taste, appetite, digestion, obesity, thinness, dreams, death and the restaurant as a phenomenon, plus a theory of frying and a number of recipes. The aphorisms at the beginning are among the most quoted lines in the entire genre, and the modern expression ‘you are what you eat’ is a simplification of one of them. The tone is idiosyncratic and often funny, which probably has something to do with the two years he spent in exile in New York during the Revolution, where he supported himself by playing violin in a theatre and teaching French.
Brillat-Savarin cheese is named after him, which seems an appropriate fate for someone who spent his life taking food seriously without ever becoming solemn about it.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 384
Language: English
First published: 1825
The Kitchen Lab Selection
This is the text in which someone first treated food as a subject worth thinking about. Two hundred years later, every food writer still writes in relation to it, usually without knowing it. It is the oldest book in our range but also one of the cheapest, which makes it easy to approach. You do not need to know how to cook to enjoy it. It is enough to think that meals are one of the better things about being human, and in practical terms this is the book that invented that idea.
