The Physiology of Taste

Brillat Savarin. The Physiology of Taste; or transcendental gastronomy. Lindsay & Blakiston: Philadelphia, 1854. 8vo (190x130mm) rebacked, original boards, t.e gilt (translated by Fayette Robinson)

BRILLAT SAVARIN [Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)]

The Physiology of Taste: or, transcendental gastronomy illustrated by anecdotes of distinguished artists and statesmen of both continents.

Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1854. First US Edition and first edition in English.

Octavo (200x135mm) blind stamped, gilt decorated original publisher's brown cloth boards, top-edge gilt, xx (pps. ix-x out of sequence),[1],26-347,[1 blank],[4 publisher advertisements]pp. Translated from the last French edition by Fayette Robinson.

Recently professionally re-backed in tan cloth, new end-papers. Very faint foxing to preliminaries. Owner name 'John S Cunningham' neatly stamped and inked to half-title, title-page and contents page; several discrete neat penciled marginal marks.

Brillat-Savarin was a French lawyer and politician during and after the French revolution.  Renowned as an epicure and gastronome, he worked on his Physiologie du Gout, all his life, assembling it just before he died; it was privately published at his expense just two months before his death.  Neither a cookery book nor a memoir, it is rather a discussion of the nature of eating in its widest sense.  It starts with twenty gastronomical "aphorismes", perhaps the best known being  "IV, tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are"; then thirty "méditations" and finishes with twenty-seven 'variétés' in the form of anecdotes, adventures, recipes and inventions.

"For the French and outsides alike, this work early attained the status of an exemplary culinary text, perhaps the exemplary text.... the Physiology of Taste civilizes eating.  Moreover, it socializes food, and it does so by recounting in story after story our social relations with food.... [it] appears to us today as something of a sociology of taste ahead of its time" (Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 31)

Brillat-Savarin spent several years in New York as a refugee from the French revolution before returning to France and eventually becoming a judge on the French Court of Appeal; a post he held until retirement.

"One of the most witty discussions on food ever written... The work is filled with entertaining anecdotes and commentary on good eating, including several pages of impressions about the United States" (Feret, Barbara. Gastronomical and Culinary Literature. The Scarecrow Press, 1979 p. 38).