The Physiology of Taste Book

I began the book wary of Fisher's very heavy hand - she is an obtrusive editor, needing to insert herself and her personal recollections often. (Nearly every brief section of the book ends with her footnotes, which are called "The Translator's Glosses.") So when Brillat-Savarin mentions black pudding, she adds in an early gloss: "In Paris spicy boudin used to be served on Christmas Eve...in the larger cafes of Burgundy...the prostitutes would snatch at it, daintily of course but with avidity, as if it could give them some magic strength." Now that is someone who would rather be writing her own book than adding footnotes to someone else's. And after Brillat-Savarin describes a turkey hunt in Connecticut she needs to tell her own turkey story, not leaving out details not only sartorial and osteological but also Sinological: "The only living human being I have known who could speak casually of hunting, cleaning, and then roasting a wild turkey, and all that in the state of Arkansas, told me that in general the birds are stuffed lightly with cold cornbread and plenty of butter. In general, this woman said to me, histing [sic] blue denim pants over her flat hip-bones and looking Chinese-like over her straight lower lids, in general wild turkeys isn't thought highly of and people who cook them at all slice off the two breast-meat pieces and fry them in good hog fat...and they sure enough taste damn near as good as steak, she said."

In a gloss on digestion: "An endocrinologist once told me that the best procedure when business must be combined with eating is to watch your victim's ear lobes and feed him rare beef. When his lobes turn ruddy, make your proposition ....and quickly!" C'mon. Even she doesn't believe that.

Brillat-Savarin was a lawyer, politician, and judge. But Fisher feels that "If he were alive today, he might well be an anesthesiologist."

But ironically enough, Brillat-Savarin's own writing got so tedious at times that I began not to mind Fisher's glosses, the same way that audience coughing ceases to bother you after seven minutes of Bolero.