Natural scenery did not appeal to Savarin; to him Switzerland meant the restaurant of the Lion d’Argent, at Lausanne, where “for only 15 batz we passed in review three complete courses;” the table d’hote of the Rue de Rosny; and the little village of Moudon, where the cheese fondue was so good.  Circumstances, however, soon necessitated his departure for the United States, which he always gratefully remembered as having afforded him “an asylum, employment, and tranquillity.”  For three years he supported himself in New York, giving French lessons and at night playing in a theatre orchestra.  “I was so comfortable there,” he writes, “that in the moment of emotion which preceded departure, all that I asked of Heaven (a prayer which it has granted) was never to know greater sorrow in the Old World than I had known in the New.”  Returning to France in 1796, Savarin settled in Paris, and after holding several offices under the Directory, became a Judge in the Cour de Cassation, the French court of last resort, where he remained until his death in 1826.

Although an able and conscientious magistrate, Savarin was better adapted to play the kindly friend and cordial host than the stern and impartial judge.  He was a convivial soul, a lover of good cheer and free-handed hospitality; and to-day, while almost forgotten as a jurist, his name has become immortalized as the representative of gastronomic excellence.  His ’Physiologic du Gout’—­“that olla podrida which defies analysis,” as Balzac calls it—­belongs, like Walton’s ‘Compleat Angler’, or White’s ‘Selborne’, among those unique gems of literature, too rare in any age, which owe their subtle and imperishable charm primarily to the author’s own delightful personality.  Savarin spent many years of loving care in polishing his manuscript, often carrying it to court with him, where it was one day mislaid, but—­luckily for future generations of epicures—­was afterward recovered.  The book is a charming badinage, a bizarre ragout of gastronomic precepts and spicy anecdote, doubly piquant for its prevailing tone of mock seriousness and intentional grandiloquence.

In emulation of the poet Lamartine, Savarin divided his subject into ‘Meditations’, of which the seventh is consecrated to the ’Theory of Frying’, and the twenty-first to ‘Corpulence’.  In the familiar aphorism, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”, he strikes his key-note; man’s true superiority lies in his palate!  “The pleasure of eating we have in common with the animals; the pleasure of the table is peculiar to the human species.”  Gastronomy he proclaims the chief of all sciences:  “It rules life in its entirety; for the tears of the new-born infant summon the breast of its nurse, and the dying man still receives with some pleasure the final potion, which, alas, he is not destined to digest.”  Occasionally he affects an epic strain, invoking Gasteria, “the tenth muse, who presides over the pleasures of taste.”