M.F.K. Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin’s masterpiece, originally published in 1825, is a true marriage of minds and sensibilities, a classic against which all subsequent gastronomical writing must be measured. Published in 1825 after some three decades of consuming research, The Physiology of Taste is the most famous book ever written about food.

Witty and elegant, it is a classic in the grandest sense. Brillat-Savarin set out to write about food and cookery, but his interests and enthusiasms ranged so widely over matters of the human spirit that they could hardly be contained, and his work—here in its greatest translation—sits on the shelf of masterpieces of world literature. Its treasures include: observations on feasting and fasting and on the advantages of gourmandism, including its influence on marital happiness discourses on obesity and its cure and on the calamity of thinness, particularly in women, with prescriptions for fattening them up Brillat-Savarin’s twenty famous aphorisms, including, ”Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.” A work spiced with style and wisdom, The Physiology of Taste remains among the most comprehensive, stimulating, and enjoyable works ever published on the subject of the senses and their pleasures. Epicureans by vocation and avocation will want this book for their reference shelves.