Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin Quotes

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

Hearing, which, by the motion of the air, informs us of the motion of sounding or vibrating bodies.

No man under forty can be dignified with the title of gourmet.

Frying gives cooks numerous ways of concealing what appeared the day before and in a pinch facilitates sudden demands, for it takes little more time to fry a four-pound carp than to boil an egg.

The Spanish ladies of the New World are madly addicted to chocolate, to such a point that, not content to drink it several times each day, they even have it served to them in church.

I appreciate the potato only as a protection against famine, except for that, I know of nothing more eminently tasteless.

An intelligently planned feast is like a summing up of the whole world, where each part is represented by its envoys.

To know how to eat well, one must first know how to wait.

Meals, in the sense in which we understand this word, began with the second age of the human species.

I will only observe, that that ethereal sense - sight, and touch, which is at the other extremity of the scale, have from time acquired a very remarkable additional power.

Gourmandism is an act of judgment, by which we prefer things which have a pleasant taste to those which lack this quality.

The sense of smell explores; deleterious substances almost always have an unpleasant smell.

La volaille est pour la cuisine ce qu'est la toile pour les peintres. Fowls are to the kitchen what his canvas is to the painter.

I am a strong partisan of second causes, and I believe firmly that the entire gallinaceous order has been merely created to furnish our larders and our banquets.

All men, even those we call savages, have been so tormented by the passion for strong drinks, that limited as their capacities were, they were yet able to manufacture them.

Sight and touch, being thus increased in capacity, might belong to some species far superior to man; or rather the human species would be far different had all the senses been thus improved.

The senses are the organs by which man places himself in connexion with exterior objects.

Alcohol carries the pleasures of the palate to their highest degree.

In the hands of an able cook, fish can become an inexhaustible source of perpetual delight.

The dyspeptic and the drunkard do not know how to eat or drink.

The first thing we become convinced of is that man is organized so as to be far more sensible of pain than of pleasure.

Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.

The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.