Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, born April 1, 1755, in Belley, France, is the lawyer, politician, and author of the celebrated work on gastronomy, Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste).
Brillat-Savarin followed the family profession of law. A deputy of the Third Estate at the Estates-General of 1789, he was forced to flee the country during the Terror and went to Switzerland and the United States. He returned to France in 1796 and became a judge of the Court of Cassation during Napoleon’s consulate. He published several works on law and political economy.
Brillat-Savarin’s work on gastronomy first appeared in 1825, with the full title Physiologie du goût; ou, méditations de gastronomie transcendante: ouvrage théorique, historique et à l’ordre du jour, 2 vol. (“The Physiology of Taste; or, Meditations on Transcendent Gastronomy: A Work Theoretical, Historical, and Programmed”). The book is less a treatise on cuisine or on culinary arts and more a witty compendium of random chitchat and precepts, of anecdotes and observations of every kind that might enhance the pleasures of the table—with only an occasional recipe being offered. The book went through several editions in the 19th century and was initially translated into English in 1854; the most-celebrated translation, by M.F.K. Fisher, was published in 1949.
Source: Britannica
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 treatise on the mouth and ingestion
Abstract
This article quotes and discusses Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s musings on the mouth and ingestion as described in his book The Physiology of Taste. The book was first published in France in December 1825, and is still widely read as a key work in Gastronomy today. The mouth is intimately related to the acts of chewing, swallowing and eating and it would be interesting to report an early 19th century epicurean’s views on the mouth.
Passages from Brillat-Savarin’s book describing the functions of the teeth and tongue and the acts of tasting, chewing, and swallowing are quoted in full. Anecdotes also include one on the horrifying punishment of having one’s tongue removed and another illustrating the poor oral health found among Europeans of that era.
His work offers a unique glimpse into how a 19th century gastronome viewed the oral cavity and its gastronomical functions. While some of his writings may appear archaic and antediluvian to the modern reader; others relating to, for example chewing and swallowing, are surprisingly accurate by contemporary standards. Nonetheless, the gastronomic savant seemed to know a lot right about modern stomatology!
Introduction
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1 April 1755–2 February 1826) [1] (Fig. 1) is synonymous with French culinary excellence as the author of a key gastronomical text, The Physiology of Taste [2] (La Physiologie du groû) (Full title: ‘The Physiology of Taste, or Meditation on Transcendent Gastronomy, a theoretical, historical and topical work, dedicated to the gastronomes of Paris by a professor, member of several literary and scholarly societies’) [1] (Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig. 4). Brillat-Savarin was born in Belley, France, an area renowned for its food and wine. He was a lawyer, first became magistrate of Belley and was later elected mayor of the same town. He eventually fled to the New World at the outbreak of the French Revolution and later returned to France in 1797, to become a judge of the Supreme Courts of Appeal, a position that he would hold for the remainder of his life [1], [3].
The gastronomic interests of his family (his parents were also lawyers) had a major influence on Brillat-Savarin at an early age and after his return to Paris, he would spend much of his time dining and entertaining his friends [3]. His dinners were reputed to be famous for their culinary excellence [4] and the reader can imagine from his descriptions, the wantonness and grandiosity of his dinners and parties as befitting someone of privileged rank in the Victorian era. For example, every year on his name-day (26 June), he would invite any young men from Bugey, his native province, who happened to be in Paris to dine at his house and treated them to Bugey wine, which was transported to Paris “specially in a barrel on the back of his old mare” [4].
Brillat-Savarin considered himself a ‘man of letters’ and busied himself in the leisurely pursuit of poetry, writing and gastronomy; the latter of which he considered a Science [5] and believed himself to be the first to conceive the idea of an Academy of Gastronomes [6]. He began compiling a book of his gastronomical ‘meditations’ and musings from which he would read extracts to a few close friends after dinner [7]. At the urging of some friends, he finally published The Physiology of Taste at his own expense in December 1825, a few months before his death [7]. The work was published anonymously but apparently “all of Paris soon knew who had written the remarkable work that everyone was talking about” [7]. His book contained his notions, observations, and anecdotes on gastronomic pleasures and related issues such as dieting, obesity and the oral cavity, as well as extraneous ones that have little to do with gastronomy (i.e. his musings on sleep, rest, and death).
Brillat-Savarin’s treatise on the mouth and its gastronomical intentions is interesting for a couple of reasons; firstly it is written from the vantage of a privileged person living in the early 19th century, and secondly from the view point of a gastronome. Despite the author’s intentions as suggested by the full title of The Physiology of Taste, the modern reader should be cautioned against taking this work at face value as a scientific or medical text. In my personal opinion, majority of the author’s views are passed off as axioms and aphorisms, without containing any references or even substantiations. Nonetheless, it makes for interesting leisurely reading for the dentist and I have quoted excerpts of his work, in full, that relates to the oral cavity that may be of interest to the readers of this journal and would subsequently discuss them.
On teeth
Man is an omnivorous animal; he possesses incisive teeth for dividing fruit, molar teeth for crushing grain, and canine teeth for tearing flesh; and it has been remarked that the closer man approaches to the primitive state, the stronger and more conspicuous are his canine teeth.
It is extremely probable that for a long time the species was frugivorous; it was confined to such a diet by necessity, for man is the clumsiest of the animals, and his means of attack are very limited as long as he is unarmed. But that instinct for improvement which is inseparable from his nature was not slow to develop; the very consciousness of his weakness led him to seek means of arming himself; he was impelled to the same end by the carnivorous instinct revealed in his canine teeth; and as soon as he was armed, he preyed on all the animals surrounding him, and made them his food…
On the tongue and the practice of oral mutilation
It is no easy matter to determine the precise nature of the organ of taste. It is more complicated than it seems at first sight.
Clearly, the tongue plays an important part in the mechanism of degustation; for, endowed as it is with a certain amount of muscular energy, it serves to crush, revolve, compress, and swallow food.
In addition, through the numerous papillae scattered over its surface, it absorbs the sapid and soluble particles of the substances with which it comes into contact; but all that is not enough to complete the sensation, which requires the cooperation of several adjacent parts, namely the cheeks, the palate, and above all the nasal fossae, to which physiologists have perhaps not paid sufficient attention.
The cheeks furnish saliva, which is equally essential to mastication, and to the formation of the alimentary bolus; they, as well as the palate, are endowed with the faculty of appreciation; I am even inclined to think that in certain cases the gums have a little in themselves; and without the odoration which takes place at the back of the mouth, the sensation of taste would be dull and incomplete.
Persons born without a tongue, or whose tongue has been cut out, are not completely deprived of the sensation of taste. Examples of the former case are to found in all the text-books; and I learned something of the latter case from a poor wretch whose tongue had been cut out by the Algerians as a punishment for having attempted to escape from their clutches, together with some of his comrades in captivity.
This man, whom I met in Amsterdam, where he earned his living as a messenger, had received a reasonable education, and that it was quite easy to carry on a conversation with him in writing.
After noting that all the front part of his tongue, as far as the string [sic], had been removed, I asked him if he still found any enjoyment in what he ate, and if the sensation of taste had survived the cruel operation he had undergone.
He replied that what caused him the greatest fatigue was the act of swallowing, which he only performed with difficulty; that he had retained the faculty of taste to a fair degree; that he could still enjoy good food as well as any man, provided the taste was not too strong; but that very acid or bitter substances caused him intolerable pain.
He further informed me that cutting out the tongue was a common punishment in the African states; that it was particularly inflicted on persons suspected of being the leaders in any conspiracy; and that there were special instruments designed for the purpose. I would have liked him to describe them to me; but he showed so painful a repugnance on the subject that I pressed him no further.
I reflected on what he had told me, and, going back to the ignorant times when the tongues of blasphemers were pierced or cut out, and to the period when such punishments were laid down by law, I felt justified in concluding that they were of African origin, and had been introduced by the returning Crusaders.
We have already seen how the sensation of taste is principally situated in the papillae of the tongue. Now, anatomy teaches that all tongues are not equally provided with these papillae, and that one tongue may possess three times as many as another. This circumstance explains how it is that of two guests seated at the same banqueting table, one displays the liveliest pleasure, while the other seems to be eating only under constraint; the reason is that the second guest has a poorly equipped tongue, and that the empire of taste also has its blind and deaf subjects.
On mastication and swallowing
Appetite, hunger, and thirst are warning signs that the body needs new strength; and pain, that universal monitor, loses no time in tormenting us if we are unwilling or unable to obey those signs.
We accordingly indulge in eating and drinking, which together constitute ingestion, an operation which begins when the food enters the mouth, and ends when it enters the esophagus.
The whole journey is only a few inches long, but a great deal takes place before it is completed.
The solid foodstuffs are divided by the teeth; the different glands with which the mouth is lined moisten them; the tongue pounds them and mixes them together, pressing them against the palate to squeeze out the juice and taste their savor [sic], and binding them into a solid mass in the middle of the mouth after which, pushing against the lower jaw, it rises in the middle so that the mass is drawn down the slope towards the back of the mouth and received by the pharynx, which contracts in its turn, forcing it into the oesphagus, which by a peristaltic movement conveys it into the stomach.
When one mouthful has been dealt with like this, a second follows in the same fashion; the drinks swallowed in the intervals take the same road, the process of deglutition continuing until the same instinct which had initiated ingestion warns that it is time to finish. The first injunction, however, is seldom obeyed; for it is one of the privileges of man to drink when he is not thirsty, and the present-day cook knows how to make us eat when we are not hungry.
Before each morsel of food can reach the stomach, it has to avoid two dangers and the way it does this is a remarkable tour de force.
The first is the danger of being pushed back to the rear of the nostrils; but fortunately the lowering of the veil of the palate and the construction of the pharynx prevent this from happening.
The second is the danger of falling into the trachea or windpipe, across which all our food must pass; and this is a far more serious risk, for as soon as any foreign body enters the trachea, a convulsive cough begins which continues until the substance is expelled.
However, by means of an admirable mechanism, the glottis contracts during the act of swallowing; it is also shielded by the epiglottis, which covers it, and we instinctively hold our breath during deglutition, so that is may be said that generally speaking, despite this strange conformation, food reaches the stomach without much difficulty; and there the empire of the will comes to end, and digestion, properly so called, begins.
Source: Science Direct
Sila Blume 
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