Word: brillat-savarin
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...little late to run. On the shelves are strange labels: Granola, mung beans, Tiger's Milk, lecithin, all at nonsensical prices. Vitamin E, he learns, is expected to cure everything but the common cold; Vitamin C takes care of that. Adelle Davis has become the Brillat-Savarin of the counterculture. Her self-help books beckon from the paperback rack: Let's Get Well, Let's Have Healthy Children, Let's Eat Right To Keep...
...writing. He did, after all, live in a time when major discoveries were still being made in food and its uses. Coffee and chocolate were still mysterious and exotic. Sugar, which had previously been confined to apothecaries' shelves, had been introduced into cooking only a few decades before Brillat-Savarin's time...
...indications. A host should observe his guests when a particular masterpiece appears and "condemn as unworthy all those whose faces do not express their rapture." Among proper feeders there will also be silence during the first course while each man devotes himself "to the great task at hand." Indeed Brillat-Savarin approaches a feast like a happy warrior; nothing pleases him more than "a pretty gourmande in full battle dress...
...reports of them are still considered authoritative. But thanks to a faultless sense of pace, his scholarship never becomes oppressive. A chapter on definitions is followed by anecdotes about prodigies of consumption -including an account of a general who downed eight bottles of wine with breakfast, but who won Brillat-Savarin's admiration because he did it "with an air of not touching them...
...obsessively interested in the digestive process. It was an age when people suffered cruelly from gout, gallstones and kidney ailments. Also, Brillat-Savarin was transparently a frustrated doctor. In the course of an investigation into the sources of taste, he interviewed an Arab whose tongue had been cut out and could barely resist asking for a description of the hideous operation. Needless to say he was also curious about the aphrodisiacal properties of food, and confesses with wry regret that he postponed his research until too late in life to do the right kind of firsthand job on this fascinating...