Synopsis This classic volume, which has attained the status of a bible among food connoisseurs, contains Brillat-Savarin's incomparable thoughts on food and cookery, as well as other matters of the human spirit.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1995-10-01 | | Illustrator: | Wayne Thiebaud | | Edition Description: | Illustrated |
| Size | | Length: | 355 pages | | Height: | 12.5 in | | Width: | 9.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 56.0 oz |
Industry Reviews "...devotees may wish to seek out the translation by M. F. K. Fisher...in a luxurious new edition...To say that 'The Physiology of Taste' is a cookbook is like saying that Turgenev's 'Sportsman's Sketches' is a guide to hunting....Brillat-Savarin...gives few recipes, though he muses on innumerable dishes, on the scientific reasons for their effect on the metabolism, and on the glow of sociable well-being that is their ideal result. He sprinkles anecdotes like salt, and he defines and defends gourmandisme...The lasting achievement of Brillat-Savarin is that he endowed living with a certain ease...it takes someone like Brillat-Savarin to remind us that cooking need not be the fraught, perfectionist, slightly paranoid struggle that it has latterly become...'The Physiology of Taste' is still the most civilized cookbook ever written. I suspect that Brillat-Savarin might have been bemused by Martha Stewart..." New Yorker - Anthony Lane (12/18/1995)
"The book is a veritable salmagundi, a bouillabaisse, of discourses. in a health-conscious, guilt-ridden age, it has the illicit frisson of a dirty magazine in a monastery." Washington Post Book World - Henry Louis Gates Jr. (12/08/1996)
"[I]nside this encyclopédiste was a thoughtful, witty man....It was Brillat-Savarin who established, as a modern literary convention, the moral discussion of food....He felt that he could know humankind through food, and by telling us his conclusions he tells us about himself." New Yorker - Joan Acocella (12/06/1999)
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