The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental Gastronomy — John Shaqi
The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental GastronomyBrillat-Savarin
Philosophy
The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental Gastronomy
Brillat-Savarin
Gastronomy
In relation to solid and savorous bodies, it is necessary in the
first place for the teeth to divide them, that the saliva and
other tasting fluids to imbibe them, and that the tongue press
them against the palate, so as to express a juice, which, when
sufficiently saturated by the degastory tendrils, deliver to the
substance the passport it requires for admission into the stomach.
This system, which will yet receive other developments, replies
without effort to the principal questions which may present
themselves.
If we demand what is understood by sapid bodies, we reply that it
is every thing that has flavor, which is soluble, and fit to be
absorbed by the organ of taste.
If asked how a sapid body acts, we reply that it acts when it is
reduced to such a state of dissolution that it enters the cavities
made to receive it.
In a word, nothing is sapid but what is already or nearly
dissolved.
FLAVORS.
The number of flavors is infinite, for every soluble body has a
peculiar flavor, like none other.
Flavors are also modified by their simple, double, or multiple
aggregation. It is impossible to make any description, either of
the most pleasant or of the most unpleasant, of the raspberry or
of colocynth. All who have tried to do so have failed.
This result should not amaze us, for being gifted with an infinite
variety of simple flavors, which mixture modifies to such a number
and to such a quantity, a new language would he needed to express
their effects, and mountains of folios to describe them. Numerical
character alone could label them.
Now, as yet, no flavor has ever been appreciated with rigorous
exactness, we have been forced to be satisfied with a limited
number of expressions such as SWEET, SUGARY, ACID, BITTER, and
similar ones, which, when ultimately analyzed, are expressed by
the two following AGREEABLE and DISAGREEABLE, which suffice to
make us understood, and indicate the flavor of the sapid
substances referred to.
Those who come after us will know more, for doubtless chemistry
will reveal the causes or primitive elements of flavors.
INFLUENCE OF SMELLING ON THE TASTE.
The order I marked out for myself has insensibly led me to the
moment to render to smell the rights which belong to it, and to
recognise the important services it renders to taste and the
application of flavors. Among the authors I have met with, I
recognise none as having done full justice to it.
For my own part, I am not only persuaded that without the
interposition of the organs of smell, there would be no complete
degustation, and that the taste and the sense of smell form but
one sense, of which the mouth is the laboratory and the nose the
chimney; or to speak more exactly, that one tastes tactile
substances, and the other exhalations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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