Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

It has been shown as proof positive that carefully prepared chocolate is as healthful a food as it is pleasant; that it is nourishing and easily digested... that it is above all helpful to people who must do a great deal of mental work.

The limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed, and that we have no idea what degree of bodily bliss we are capable of attaining.

Place a substantial meal before a tired man and he will eat with effort and be little better for it at first. Give him a glass of wine or brandy, and immediately he feels better: you see him come to life again before you.

Gourmandism is an act of judgment, by which we prefer things which have a pleasant taste to those which lack this quality.

In the hands of an able cook, fish can become an inexhaustible source of perpetual delight.

You first parents of the human race...who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey?

Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life.

The centuries last passed have also given the taste important extension; the discovery of sugar, and its different preparations, of alcoholic liquors, of wine, ices, vanilla, tea and coffee, have given us flavors hitherto unknown.

Gourmandise is an impassioned, rational, and habitual preference for all objects which flatter the sense of taste.

The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star.

The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied.

The number of flavors is infinite, for every soluble body has a peculiar flavor, like none other.

The sense of smell, like a faithful counsellor, foretells its character.

The truffle is not a positive aphrodisiac, but it can upon occasion make women tenderer and men more apt to love.

Alcohol carries the pleasures of the palate to their highest degree.

Another novelty is the tea-party, an extraordinary meal in that, being offered to persons that have already dined well, it supposes neither appetite nor thirst, and has no object but distraction, no basis but delicate enjoyment.

It is the duty of all papas and mammas to forbid their children to drink coffee, unless they wish to have little dried-up machines, stunted and old at the age of twenty... once saw a man in London, in Leicester Square, who had been crippled by immoderate indulgence in coffee; he was no longer in any pain, having grown accustomed to his condition, and had cut himself down to five or six cups a day.

He who receives his friends and gives no personal attention to the meal which is being prepared for them, is not worthy of having friends.

The fate of a nation depends on the way that they eat.