Word: brillat
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...intermediate category, The Best's Best French Cookbook is the 20th century's Great Book of French Cuisine by Henri-Paul Pellaprat. Francophiles know better. Le plus meilleur livre is the 19th century The Physiology of Taste by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, with entries on the erotic properties of truffles and rules of exemplary dinners: "Let the number of guests not exceed twelve ... the men witty and not pedantic, the women amiable and not too coquettish; the dishes exquisite but few ... the signal to leave not before 11, and everyone in bed at midnight...
...Physiology of Taste, Jean Brillat-Savarin...
...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...
...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...