
The Physiology of Taste
1825 · 464 pages
Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate, made the table a subject for philosophy: tell me what you eat, he wrote, and I will tell you what you are. No food writer has bettered him.
★ 5.4

Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate, made the table a subject for philosophy: tell me what you eat, he wrote, and I will tell you what you are. No food writer has bettered him.

Sent to the Sorbonne in 1926, Liebling studied restaurants instead. Proust, he argues, simply lacked the appetite to eat properly. What follows is a young man's gluttonous education in Paris.

A Berkeley merchant drives France cellar by cellar, buying from small growers and arguing that filtering a wine bright strips out what you want to drink. Lynch taught Americans to taste for place.