Physiologie du Gout

Paris, Les Arts et le Livre, 1926.
Second-hand hardcover

Brillat-Savarin. Physiologie du Gout: ou meditations de gastronomie. Les Arts et le Livre: Paris, 1926. 8vo (240x165mm) 2 vols half bnd red morocco, marbled bds & eps, gilt lettered, t.e gilt, 252+300pp. #239/566 (illustrated by Pierre Noury) Near Fine/-

BRILLAT-SAVARIN, Jean-Anthelme (1755-1826)

Physiologie du Goût ou Mediations de Gastronomie transcendante ouverage théorique, historique et a l'ordre du jour

Paris: Les Arts et Le Livre, 1926. Limited Edition of 566 copies. Printed by Marius Audin, Lyon; lithography by J Mourlot et fils, Paris; bound by Dubois d'Enghien-Dooms. In French.

Octavo (240x170mm) in two volumes, half bound cherry-red long-grain morocco, spine gilt decorated and ruled in six compartments, marbled boards and end-papers; top-edge gilt; original wrappers with colour vignettes bound in; [2],xlii,252,[8]pp + [2],[8],300,[4]pp. Number #239 of 520 on Lafuma vergé paper.

One hundred in text and twenty-four full page inset. striking twentieth century, black and white engraved illustrations by Pierre Noury (1894-1981). A French painter, engraver, and illustrator, Noury studied and exhibited in Paris from 1920 to 1940. He designed the costumes and sets for an opera, as well as murals, posters and book illustrations. He was also the author of a history of painting and children's books.

Published on the 100th anniversary of the first commercial edition (1826).

Brillat-Savarin was a French lawyer and politician during and after the French revolution. Renowned as an epicure and gastronome, he worked on his Physiologie du Gout, all his life, assembling it just before he died; it was privately published at his expense just two months before his death. Neither a cookery book nor a memoir, it is rather a discussion of the nature of eating in its widest sense. It starts with twenty gastronomical "aphorismes", perhaps the best known being "IV tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are"; then thirty "méditations" and finishes with twenty-seven 'variétés' in the form of anecdotes, adventures, recipes and inventions.

"For the French and outsides alike, this work early attained the status of an exemplary culinary text, perhaps the exemplary text.... the Physiology of Taste civilizes eating. Moreover, it socializes food, and it does so by recounting in story after story our social relations with food.... [it] appears to us today as something of a sociology of taste ahead of its time" (Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 31)

An instant success, Physiologie du Gout has never been out of print since.

A lovely near fine private press edition of the most renowned book on gastronomy.

Item #10085

Price: $1,500.00 AUD

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