The recipe here is for cholent, a make-ahead one-pot meal that thousands of Jewish cooks assemble on Fridays, to cook overnight and into Saturday, so that they will not flout Sabbath rules against working on Shabbat. I play with his aphorism to think again about eating and us, to find out more about who we are.

In Brillat-Savarin’s thinking, what we eat marks us as a certain sort of person. He makes a claim about the substance of a person, over and above saying that just digesting minerals, carbohydrates and the like constructs a corpus. His meaning is surrounded by - and best interpreted in the context of - the other writing in “Physiology of Taste,” sentiments such as “Animals feed themselves men eat but only wise men know the art of eating” and “The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star.”īrillat-Savarin means to say that eating well-prepared, good-quality food (mindfully, with other companionable souls, at the table) makes for a good person, even in a moral sense. It’s not “qui tu es” it’s “que tu es.” Translated, “that which ” you are, not “who” (or even “how”) you are. Je te dirai ce que tu es.” Note the big difference that merely one vowel makes. The aphorism’s original French helps: “Dis-moi ce que tu manges. Their idea was, “If you eat healthy food, you will be healthy and fit.”īut that’s just part of what Brillat-Savarin had in mind.

I shall tell you what you are.”Įnglish speakers have boiled down the aphorism even further to state “You are what you eat,” as it turns out, the title of various Canadian and British television shows, documentaries and articles about healthy eating and dieting. His most famous aphorism from the book is “Tell me what you eat. The French lawyer and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published his reflections on eating and drinking, “The Physiology of Taste,” just two months before he died in 1826. Wednesday, June 7th 2023 Home Page Close Menu

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