About the Book
The physiology of taste; or, transcendental gastronomy
Brillat-Savarin, among other roles, was the basis of Marcell Rouff's _The Passionate Epicure,_ a fictional book gently combining food and sex (naturally, as a friend of mine remarked, since it's French), which was widely read in English when the translation appeared in 1962. Marcella Hazan and (I believe) Julia Child cited it in their cookbooks. In his preface to the 1962 Rouff, Lawrence Durrell (himself a fashionable author at that time) explained that many in the Brillat-Savarin family "died at the dinner table, fork in hand" and that Brillat's sister Pierrette, two months before her hundredth birthday, spoke at table what are to food fanatics easily the most famous last words ever: "Vite! Apportez-moi le dessert -- je sens que je vais passer!"
About the Author
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Brillat-Savarin was born in the town of Belley, Ain, where the Rhone River then separated France from Savoy, to a family of lawyers. He studied law, chemistry and medicine in Dijon in his early years and thereafter practiced law in his hometown. In 1789, at the opening of the French Revolution, he was sent as a deputy to the Estates-General that soon became the National Constituent Assembly, where he acquired some limited fame, particularly for a public speech in defense of capital punishment. He adopted his second surname upon the death of an aunt named Savarin who left him her entire fortune on the condition that he adopt her name.
He returned to Belley and was for a year the elected mayor. At a later stage of the Revolution there was a bounty on his head, and he sought political asylum at first in Switzerland. He later moved to Holland, and then to the new-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 Directory in 1797 and acquired the magistrate post he would then hold for the rest of his life, as a judge of the Court of Cassation. He published several works on law and political economy. He remained a bachelor, but not a stranger to love, which he counted the sixth sense: his inscription of the Physiognomie to his beautiful cousin Juliette Récamier reads
