Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin - The Physiology of Taste: or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy

I FEEL EVEN MORE strongly than I did at the beginning of translating this book that it is a well-balanced expression of one thinking mans attitude toward life. There are few of them, in any language.

The fact that THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE is about gastronomy has little, nothing really, to do with its authors innate good taste, nor with his art in making it clear upon each page. I have plumbed every word of his, and after many years of casual enjoyment and two of the most intimate kind, I have yet to find myself either bored or offended, which is more than most women can say of any relationship, whether ghostly or corporeal. For me, the Professor is a continuing delight.

I enjoy the physical picture of him, which may be wishful but is still based on a few descriptions beside his own, and a few engravings, and a few phrases like Charles Monselets: This figure, smiling rather than laughing, this well-lined paunch, this stylish mind and stomach

I enjoy his stylish mind most of all: his teasing of the priests, and his underplayed pleasure in them when they were good men of any cloth; his tenderness and irony toward pretty women, and his full fine enjoyment of them; his lusty delight in hunting, in a good row, in a cock-snoot at disaster and the way he made all this plain to me, in a prose perhaps more straightforward than any that has come down to us from his verbose flighty period in French literature.

His restrained discretion, while never simpering or ridiculous, is often deliberately pedagogic. He sometimes harrumphs, tongue in cheek no insignificant feat either physically or spiritually! He often plays, tongue still in cheek, the safely retired satyr but never does he grow offensive or even faintly senile. Deliberately at times he outlines with mocking pedantry the A-B-C, a-b-c of a point. Never does he scorn the plodders of philosophy who have made banalities of such ways of logic. Always there is clear in everything he writes a basic humility, and that is the main reason why I think his book is one meant to last much longer than a century or so. That is why I have spent many months of my best thought and my best (my vintage) energy upon it.

In a Western world filled with too many books, too many human beings angry or bored enough to be voluble, it is a good thing that there are a few such distillations as this one. Brillat-Savarin spent about twenty-five years writing it. He spoke of it to almost nobody, and when finally it appeared, a few months before his death and anonymously and at his own expense, his friends were astounded that he had written it, for he had never flashed before them in its full colors the rich tapestry of his mind, but had instead woven quietly and in secret peace.

In the Professors time it was considered the unquestioned right of any man of common sense, which he so eminently was, to choose how best he might spend his hours of creation. When young he studied war and love and politics with an ardor and directness and an unclouded simplicity impossible to our own murky days. When he grew older, and withdrew perforce from actual combat, he found himself in the happy state of being able to think, to recollect in tranquillity.

That is perhaps the greatest difference between him and us: by the time we have slugged our way as courageously as possible past the onslaughts of modern engines and bacteria and ideals we are drained and exhausted, and any one of us who reaches the age of seventy-one with serenity and a clear conscience is felt to be an unfair freak. Something must be wrong, we say resentfully; he must have cheated somewhere, taken some secret elixir.

Perhaps we can sip that potion, even vicariously, in the slow reading of a few books like this one, and can feel ourselves encouraged and renewed by the knowledge that if Brillat-Savarin could outride the wild storms of revolution and intrigue and not let them trouble his digestion, as Balzac wrote of him, so in our way can we.

I: THE UNIVERSE IS nothing without the things that live in it, and everything that lives, eats.

II: Animals feed themselves; men eat; but only wise men know the art of eating.

III: The destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves.

IV: Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.

V: The Creator, while forcing men to eat in order to live, tempts him to do so with appetite and then rewards him with pleasure.

VI: Good living is an act of intelligence, by which we choose things which have an agreeable taste rather than those which do not.

VII: The pleasures of the table are for every man, of every land, and no matter of what place in history or society; they can be a part of all his other pleasures, and they last the longest, to console him when he has outlived the rest.

VIII: The table is the only place where a man is never bored for the first hour.

IX: The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star.

X: Men who stuff themselves and grow tipsy know neither how to eat nor how to drink.

XI: The proper progression of courses in a dinner is from the most substantial to the lightest.

XII: The proper progression of wines or spirits is from the mildest to the headiest and most aromatic.

XIII: It is heresy to insist that we must not mix wines: a mans palate can grow numb and react dully to even the best bottle, after the third glass from it.

XIV: A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.

XV: We can learn to be cooks, but we must be born knowing how to roast.

XVI: The most indispensable quality of a cook is promptness, and it should be that of the diner as well.

XVII: A host who makes all his guests wait for one late-comer is careless of their well-being.

XVIII: He who plays host without giving his personal care to the repast is unworthy of having friends to invite to it.

XIX: The mistress of the house should always make sure that the coffee is good, and the master that the wines are of the best.

XX: To invite people to dine with us is to make ourselves responsible for their well-being for as long as they are under our roofs.

Here it is hard not to quote almost anyone in the world who has thought more than three thoughts, since one of them is bound to be about his nourishment. To tease myself I like to remember what a man said who has perhaps most puzzled and astonished the other thinkers. It was Albert Einstein. An empty stomach is not a good political adviser, he decided quite early in his life, as simply as if he were chalking one more equation on the worlds blackboard.