Non Disputandum

By Martha Duff

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Translated by M.F.K. Fisher. 443 pages. Knopf. $10.

Brillat-Savarin is best known for the aphorism poached by generations of cookbook compilers: "Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are." It is merely one of dozens to be found in this exhilarating collection of essays, anecdotes and opinions that has become a gastronomic classic.

The author was a wealthy, conservative lawyer who was born in the old province of Burgundy in 1755. He sat out the French Revolution in America, then went home to re-establish himself in the elegant world of the hunt and the salon. He was Mme. Recamier's cousin and she doted on him. Though he was a much sought-after bachelor, his large and glittering acquaintance apparently took him for granted. He seldom appears in memoirs during an age when practically everybody wrote one. But what great company he must have been. To judge by his book, he was a witty, cheerful, pragmatic man with consummate manners, a fine eye for women and a collection of first-rate anecdotes, which he knew exactly how to tell. Happiest of all, he had a cloudless soul.

A Catholic who frowned on the decline of Lenten fasting, he justified cultivation of the senses as the divine right of man as lord of nature. "It is for him that the quail fattens, for him that mocha has so sweet a perfume," he observed simply. It followed naturally that gourmandism should be neither gluttony nor voracity but "the impassioned, considered and habitual preference for whatever pleases the taste."

One of the author's most engaging qualities is his fine appreciation of eaters as well as food. He knew his true peers on sight: "People predestined to gourmandism in general have round or square faces, bright eyes, small foreheads, short noses, full lips and rounded chins." (Dullards of the palate are betrayed by "flat dark hair and a general air of elongation.")

There are other indications. A host should observe his guests when a particular masterpiece appears and "condemn as unworthy all those whose faces do not express their rapture." Among proper feeders there will also be silence during the first course while each man devotes himself "to the great task at hand." Indeed Brillat-Savarin approaches a feast like a happy warrior; nothing pleases him more than "a pretty gourmande in full battle dress."

Had the author confined himself to the table, however, The Physiology of Taste would not have nearly its remarkable scope and variety. Fortunately he was a boundlessly curious man with an appetite for facts that outstripped even his taste for truffled turkey. Though he wrote at leisure over a period of years, his work conveys a sense of excitement that has disappeared from even the best culinary writing. He did, after all, live in a time when major discoveries were still being made in food and its uses. Coffee and chocolate were still mysterious and exotic. Sugar, which had previously been confined to apothecaries' shelves, had been introduced into cooking only a few decades before Brillat-Savarin's time.

A formidable cook, he investigated the properties and uses of all manner of food, and his reports of them are still considered authoritative. But thanks to a faultless sense of pace, his scholarship never becomes oppressive. A chapter on definitions is followed by anecdotes about prodigies of consumption --including an account of a general who downed eight bottles of wine with breakfast, but who won Brillat-Savarin's admiration because he did it "with an air of not touching them."

He was obsessively interested in the digestive process. It was an age when people suffered cruelly from gout, gallstones and kidney ailments. Also, Brillat-Savarin was transparently a frustrated doctor. In the course of an investigation into the sources of taste, he interviewed an Arab whose tongue had been cut out and could barely resist asking for a description of the hideous operation. Needless to say he was also curious about the aphrodisiacal properties of food, and confesses with wry regret that he postponed his research until too late in life to do the right kind of firsthand job on this fascinating topic.

The current book is a re-issue of a limited edition translated and annotated by M.F.K. Fisher 20 years ago. It is clearly a labor of love but suffers somewhat from self-indulgence. The notes contain intrusive personal digressions and scholarly asides. They are not necessary. This is less a reference work than a delightful personal history written with the grand sustaining metaphor of food.

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