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Reading group: Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, aphorisms and first meditations

Claire Dubois Fellow
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I translate for a living and grew up an hour from Belley, where Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born, so this book has followed me around. Physiologie du goût appeared in 1825, a couple of months before he died. He was a lawyer and magistrate, briefly an exile in America during the Terror, and he wrote the most quoted food book in French: ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.’

It isn't a recipe book. It's a set of thirty ‘meditations’ on the senses, appetite, thirst, sleep, obesity, the pleasures of the table and the history of cooking, written by a man who wanted gastronomy treated as a serious subject, a body of knowledge about everything that nourishes us.

Plan

  • Week 1: the twenty aphorisms at the front, and Meditations 1 and 2 (the senses; taste).
  • Week 2: Meditations 3 and 4 (gastronomy as a science; appetite).
  • Week 3: the meditations on the pleasures of the table and on gourmandise, plus any of the ‘varieties’ at the end that you like.

Translation: M. F. K. Fisher's English (1949) is a classic in its own right, and her notes are sometimes better than the text. Anyone reading in French, join us; I'll compare.

The question I'd like us to keep in view: does he make a case that taste is a form of knowledge, or does he just assume it with great charm?

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5 replies

  1. Joel D'Souza

    Contributor

    Week 1. Aphorism nine, about a new dish doing more for human happiness than discovering a star, is pinned on the wall of half the kitchens I've worked in. Reading it in context it's a joke at the astronomers' expense, not a sincere claim. What surprised me more is how physiological Meditation 2 is: tongue, palate, smell working together. He knew most of what we call taste is smell, and said so.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Claire Dubois

      Fellow

      Joel, yes, and in French there's a nice slipperiness, since ‘goût’ covers both the sense and good judgement. He plays on that from the title onward.

      Helpful · 2
  2. Bec Doyle

    Contributor

    Week 2. His definition of gastronomy as the reasoned knowledge of everything relating to man as he eats is wonderfully greedy. He folds in agriculture, commerce, chemistry and politics. That's the ‘ethical gastronomy’ position two centuries early, though he'd never have used the word ethics. He also notices that the table is where class shows, which a later sociologist would make a career of.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Hugo Marchetti

    Contributor

    Week 3. I'll be the grumpy one. The pleasures of the table, for him, are the pleasures of people with cooks. My grandmother in Marseille cooked well every day of her life and never had time to meditate on it. When he says gastronomy is a science, I want to ask whose knowledge he is writing down. A lot of it came from kitchens where nobody was given a byline.

    1. Claire Dubois

      Fellow

      Hugo, fair, and Fisher half says it herself in her notes. To answer my own question: he assumes taste is knowledge more than he argues for it, but his anecdotes, especially the ‘gastronomical tests’ he designs to sort true gourmands from pretenders, are an argument by example that expertise is discriminating and checkable. That's more than charm. It is also very much a magistrate's book about a magistrate's table.

      Helpful · 1