Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

French lawyer, politician and gastronomic writer

Biography

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (Belley, 1755 – Paris, 1826) was a French lawyer and politician whose name entered the history of gastronomy through a single book, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste), published in 1825. He lived through the last years of the Ancien Régime, the Revolution, the Directory and the Consulate, and together with Grimod de La Reynière he is regarded as one of the founders of the gastronomic essay as a literary genre. Sources give his birth date as either 1 or 2 April 1755, a small discrepancy worth noting. His reputation rests on the book, but he was also a magistrate and a public figure during the turbulent decades that followed 1789.

Brillat-Savarin was born in Belley, the main town of the Bugey region, which had been absorbed into France under the Treaty of Lyon of 1601. He came from a family of lawyers on both sides: his father was a leading lawyer in the town and his mother was the daughter of the royal notary. He was the eldest of eight children. In his household and in the surrounding region, good food was treated with great seriousness, and as a boy he picked up unusual culinary knowledge from his parents' friends, including a three-day method for cooking spinach, the custom of eating small game birds such as ortolans, and a way of preparing chocolate for drinking. His formal schooling was more conventional. He entered the Collège de Belley around 1764 or 1765. The college had been founded as a religious institution, but its outlook was secular: theology was not taught, and the library held works on agriculture and science alongside authors such as Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. There he took up the violin, an instrument he loved for the rest of his life.

In the spring of 1774 he enrolled at the University of Dijon to study law, though he also followed medical courses and attended the chemistry lectures of Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, who became a friend and adviser. After graduating in 1778 he went back to Belley to practise law, and in 1781 he was appointed lieutenant civil of the bailliage, a magistrate's post in the local court. As his standing grew, he became involved in efforts to ease the hardship of the poor, who had suffered through years of financial crisis and poor harvests. He first visited Versailles in 1787, though the purpose of that trip is unclear. Riots in Grenoble in June 1788 made it plain that royal authority had badly weakened, and Louis XVI was obliged to summon the Estates General, which had not met since 1614. In 1789 Brillat-Savarin was elected to represent the Third Estate of Belley. One of his biographers described him as having nothing of the revolutionary in his temperament, and in the National Constituent Assembly he spoke against dividing France into eighty-three departments, against the introduction of jury trial and against the abolition of capital punishment.

When his term ended in 1791 he returned to the department of Ain as president of its civil tribunal. But as politics in Paris grew more radical after the monarchy was abolished, his royalist sympathies made him unwelcome, and he was dismissed. His standing with his fellow citizens remained strong enough that in December 1792 he was elected mayor of Belley. For almost a year he tried to shield the town from the excesses of the Revolution, but when the Terror began in September 1793 he feared arrest and execution, and he fled France at the end of that year. According to tradition, while staying with relatives in Moudon he learned the recipe for fondue that later became attached to his name, although its true origins are disputed. From Switzerland he moved to the Netherlands and then sailed for the United States, landing in New York on 30 September 1794.

He spent nearly two years in America, in New York, Philadelphia and Hartford, earning a living by teaching French and the violin. He even played first violin at the John Street Theatre in New York. He returned to France in late August 1796, by which time the Directory had replaced the extremists of the Terror with a more moderate government. He persuaded the authorities to lift the penalties imposed on émigrés in his case, and he took a post as secretary to the general staff of Charles-Pierre Augereau, commander of the army on the Rhine. He looked after the catering for the officers and gained a reputation as a connoisseur among his colleagues. After the campaign he was made president of the criminal court of the Ain department in 1798 and later state prosecutor in Seine-et-Oise. Once Napoleon had taken power and the Consulate was established in 1799, he became a judge at the Tribunal de Cassation, the supreme court of appeal, in Paris. He received the Legion of Honour in 1804 and was named a Chevalier de l'Empire in 1808.

In his last years he combined his judicial career with a busy social life and his writing. He never married. He continued to play the violin for his friends, by then on a Stradivarius, though he no longer performed professionally. His dinners at his house on the rue de Richelieu in Paris were famous for their excellence, and his cousin Juliette Récamier was among the guests at some of them; she is mentioned in several passages of his book. For years he had worked on Physiologie du goût, adding and polishing, until his friends persuaded him to publish it. He did so anonymously in December 1825, though his authorship soon became common knowledge. He died in Paris on 2 February 1826, aged seventy, after attending a service at the Basilica of Saint-Denis while already suffering from a cold that turned into pneumonia. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

The book is divided into aphorisms, a longer set of gastronomic meditations on subjects from taste and appetite to digestion and restaurateurs, and a final miscellany of anecdotes and memories of his exile. It was translated early: into English in the United States in 1854, into German in 1865 and into Spanish in 1869. M. F. K. Fisher's American translation of 1949 is widely admired, and Anne Drayton's 1970 version, titled The Philosopher in the Kitchen, is another important English edition. His legacy includes memorable lines, such as the claim that the discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star. Elizabeth David, writing in the twentieth century, challenged his famous remark that dessert without cheese is like a pretty woman with one eye, holding that the maxim had done harm to waistlines and digestions. His name lives on in the Brillat-Savarin cheese, named in the 1930s by the cheesemaker Henri Androuët, and in the savarin cake, which is traditionally credited to a Parisian pastry chef named Julien as a variant of the rum baba and was originally called a Brillat-Savarin. Streets in France and Belgium also bear his name.

Key contributions

Physiologie du goût (1825), one of the first major works to treat gastronomy as a reflective essay on food, cooking and the pleasures of the table.
The aphorisms that open his book, a set of maxims about eating that are still widely quoted.
His role, alongside Grimod de La Reynière, in establishing the gastronomic essay as a genre in the early nineteenth century.
The savarin, a yeast cake soaked in syrup and rum that is traditionally said to have grown out of the rum baba.
The Brillat-Savarin cheese, named in his honour in the 1930s.

Trivia

A dessert without cheese. His maxim that dessert without cheese is like a pretty woman with one eye was criticised in the twentieth century by Elizabeth David, who held that it had done harm to waistlines and digestions.

A violinist in New York. During his exile in the United States, where he earned his living teaching French and the violin, he played first violin at the John Street Theatre in New York.

Centenary banquets. To mark the centenary of his death, commemorative banquets were held in 1926 at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris and at the Savoy Hotel in London, with dishes bearing his name.