Physiologie du gout, ou meditations de gastronomie transcendante.

BRILLAT-SAVARIN, Jean Anthelme.

Item Number: 108412

Paris: A. Sautelet et Cie, 1826.

First edition of Brillat-Savarin’s most famous work; one of the founding texts of gastronomy. Octavo, bound in half calf over marbled boards with gilt titles and tooling to the spine, morocco spine labels, marbled endpapers, all edges marbled. In near fine condition with light toning to the extremities.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du gout, or Physiology of Taste, has been in print ever since its first publication, and is one the most famous of all gastronomic essays. Brillat-Savarin was a lawyer from Belley in the French Alps, and a bachelor who spent most of his life in Paris eating at the best tables. His tastes were shaped by both rural and metropolitan traditions of eating, and further diversified by a brief period as an émigré which took him as far as the USA and shooting wild turkeys in New England. The work opens with a series of aphorisms, the most quoted of which is 'Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are.' Initially published in two volumes only two months before the author’s death, the work was republished in 1838 by Charpentier and accompanied by a preface by Honoré de Balzac: the Treaty of Modern Excitants. Reissued again in 1839, it was accompanied by a new appendix of Balzac which served as "product of appeal": Physiology of marriage.