Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, (1755-1826) was a French lawyer, politician and epicure who, with Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, founded the genre of gastronomic writing. This, his most famous work, has never been out of print. In a series of meditations that owe something to Montaigne's Essays, and have the discursive rhythm of an age of leisured reading and a confident pursuit of educated pleasures, Brillat-Savarin discourses on the pleasures of the table, which he considers a science. It is interesting to note that he considered sugar and white flour to be the cause of obesity.

8vo (185 X 125 mm); some minor, mostly perphepheral foxing, otherwise bright and clean; later 19th century Swedish binding of quarter green morocco over marbled boards by Swedish binder 'G.F Possman, Stokholm' (his label to verso of upper free endpaper, gilt tooling and devices to spine panels, red lettering-piece, with marbled endpapers and edges, plain-tipped board corners, rubbed at extremities, otherwise very good.