Background
Brillat-Savarin was born in 1755 in the town of Belley, Ain, where the Rhône River then separated France from Savoy, to a family of lawyers.
lawyer politician statesman writer
Brillat-Savarin was born in 1755 in the town of Belley, Ain, where the Rhône River then separated France from Savoy, to a family of lawyers.
He studied law, chemistry and medicine in Dijon in his early years and later 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 returned to Belley and was for a year the elected mayor. 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.
His famous work, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste), was published in December 1825, two months before his death. The full title is Physiologie du Goût, ou Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante; ouvrage théorique, historique et à l'ordre du jour, dédié aux Gastronomes parisiens, par un Professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et savantes. The book has not been out of print since it first appeared, shortly before Brillat-Savarin's death.
Quotations:
"To receive guests is to take charge of their happiness during the entire time they are under your roof. "
"The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star. "
Aside from Latin, he knew five modern languages well, and when the occasion suited, wasn't shy of parading them: he never hesitated to borrow a word, like the English sip when French seemed to him to fail, until he rediscovered the then-obsolete verb siroter.