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Quite possibly the most famous French epicure and gastronome of all, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (April 1, 1755 - 1826) was born in the town of Belley ,where the Rhine then separated France from Savoy, to a family of lawyers in whom eloquence flowed. He studied law, chemistry and medicine in Dijon in his early years and thereafter practiced law in his hometown. Sent to the Constitutional Assembly in 1789 at the opening of the French Revolution, 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 political asylum through exile in Switzerland. He later moved to Holland, and then to the newly-born United States, where he stayed for three years in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Hartford, living on the proceeds of giving French and violin lessons. For a time he was first violin in the Park Theater in New York.
He returned to France under the Directorate in 1797 and acquired the magistrate post he would then hold for the rest of his life. He remained a bachelor, but not a stranger to love, which he counted the sixth sense.
His most famous work, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste), was published in December 1825, two months before his death. The full title is Physiologie du Goût, ou Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante; ouvrage théorique, historique et à l'ordre du jour, dédié aux Gastronomes parisiens, par un Professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et savantes ( "The physiology of taste, or, transcendental gastronomy; a theoretical, historical and topical work, dedicated to the gastronomes of Paris by a professor, member of several literary and scholarly societies").
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: VoltaireFrancois-Marie Arouet ( November 21, 1694— May 30, 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, deist and philosopher. Biography Voltaire was born in Paris to Francois Arouet and Marie-Marguerite Daumart or D'Aumard., RousseauJean Jacques Rousseau ( June 28, 1712 July 2, 1778) was a Swiss-French philosopher, writer, political theorist, and self-taught composer. Biography of Rousseau Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and died in Ermenonville (28 miles northeast of Paris Fenelon , Buffon, CochinCochin can refer to: Cochin China Kingdom of Kochi, a former state of India, merged with Travancore to form the State of Kerala Cochin city, the former name of the city of Kochi, in Kerala. 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 genuine philosophy of EpicurusEpicurus Hellenistic Greek philosopher (born Samos, 341 BC; died Athens, 270 BC). Epicurus was born into an Athenian emigre family — his parents, both Athenian citizens, had moved to an Athenian settlement on the Aegean island of Samos. He returned to Ath lies at the back of every page; the simplest meal satisfied Brillat-Savarin, as long as it was executed with artistry. :
He compared after-taste, the perfume or fragrance of food, to musical enharmonics (Med. ii): "but for the odor which is felt in the back of the mouth, the sensation of taste would be but obtuse and imperfect."
To a modern reader, the anecdotes give more pleasure. One enjoys Brillat-Savarin's tale of a turkey-shoot in Connecticut in 1797 (Meditation vi), more than his scientific explanation of why people who eat fish live longer: