The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental GastronomyBrillat-Savarin
Philosophy
The Physiology of Taste; Or, Transcendental Gastronomy
Brillat-Savarin
Gastronomy
I have tried this and all the methods which have been suggested
from day to day, and prefer that known as a la Dubelloy, which
consists in pouring boiling water on coffee placed in a porcelain
or silver vessel pierced with a number of very minute holes. This
first decoction should be taken and brought to the boiling point,
then passed through the strainer again, and a coffee will be
obtained clear and strong as possible.
I have also tried to make coffee in a high pressure boiling
apparatus; all I obtained however was a fluid intensely bitter,
and strong enough to take the skin from the throat of a Cossack.
EFFECTS OF COFFEE.
Doctors have differed in relation to the sanitary properties of
coffee. We will omit all this, and devote ourselves to the more
important point, its influence on the organs of thought.
There is no doubt but that coffee greatly excites the cerebral
faculties. Any man who drinks it for the first time is almost sure
to pass a sleepless night.
Sometimes the effect is softened or modified by custom, but there
are many persons on whom it always produces this effect, and who
consequently cannot use coffee.
I have said that the effect was modified by use, a circumstance
which does not prevent its having effect in another manner. I have
observed persons whom coffee did not prevent from sleeping at
night, need it to keep them awake during the day, and never failed
to slumber when they had taken it for dinner. There are others who
are torpid all day when they have not taken their cup in the
morning.
Voltaire and Buffon used a great deal of coffee. Perchance the
latter was indebted to it for the admirable clearness we observe
in his works, and the second for the harmonious enthusiasm of his
style. It is evident that many pages of the treatise on man, the
dog, the tiger, lion and horse, were written under a strange
cerebral excitement.
The loss of sleep caused by coffee is not painful, for the
perceptions are very clear, and one has no disposition to sleep.
One is always excited and unhappy when wakefulness comes from any
other cause. This, however, does prevent such an excitement, when
carried too far, from being very injurious.
Formerly only persons of mature age took coffee. Now every one
takes it, and perhaps it is the taste which forces onward the
immense crowd that besiege all the avenues of the Olympus, and of
the temple of memory.
The Cordwainer, author of the tragedy of Zenobia, which all Paris
heard read a few years ago, drank much coffee; for that reason he
excelled the cabinetmaker of Nevers, who was but a drunkard.
Coffee is a more powerful fluid than people generally think. A man
in good health may drink two bottles of wine a day for a long
time, and sustain his strength. If he drank that quantity of
coffee he would become imbecile and die of consumption. I saw at
Leicester square, in London, a man whom coffee had made a cripple.
He had ceased to suffer, and then drank but six cups a day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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