"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"
About this Quote
Progress, in Brillat-Savarin's hands, doesn’t arrive as constitutions or cannons; it shows up on the tongue. The line is a sly pivot away from “civilization” as abstract moral uplift and toward civilization as a supply chain of pleasures. By listing sugar, alcohol, wine, ices, vanilla, tea, coffee, he stages modernity as an expanding flavor palette, an “important extension” of taste that reads like both a celebration and a quiet indictment: our notion of refinement is inseparable from what empire and commerce can deliver.
The intent is partly catalog and partly argument. He’s writing at the hinge between Enlightenment confidence and the early consumer age, when novelty itself becomes a kind of virtue. “Flavors hitherto unknown” is not just sensory; it’s epistemic. Knowing the world now means ingesting it, domesticating distance into dessert, turning colonies into comforts. The lawyerly cadence matters: the sentence accumulates evidence the way a brief does, as if gustatory delight could be proven in court.
Subtext hums with inequality. Sugar and coffee are not innocent discoveries; they’re historical products of extraction, coerced labor, and global trade. Brillat-Savarin doesn’t foreground that violence, but the omission is telling: the era’s gastronomic sophistication depends on forgetting the hands that made it possible. He’s also implicitly redefining “taste” as both sensation and social code. To have taste is to have access - to the ingredients, the leisure, the cosmopolitan repertoire. The wit is in how seamlessly he makes indulgence sound like destiny.
The intent is partly catalog and partly argument. He’s writing at the hinge between Enlightenment confidence and the early consumer age, when novelty itself becomes a kind of virtue. “Flavors hitherto unknown” is not just sensory; it’s epistemic. Knowing the world now means ingesting it, domesticating distance into dessert, turning colonies into comforts. The lawyerly cadence matters: the sentence accumulates evidence the way a brief does, as if gustatory delight could be proven in court.
Subtext hums with inequality. Sugar and coffee are not innocent discoveries; they’re historical products of extraction, coerced labor, and global trade. Brillat-Savarin doesn’t foreground that violence, but the omission is telling: the era’s gastronomic sophistication depends on forgetting the hands that made it possible. He’s also implicitly redefining “taste” as both sensation and social code. To have taste is to have access - to the ingredients, the leisure, the cosmopolitan repertoire. The wit is in how seamlessly he makes indulgence sound like destiny.
Quote Details
| Topic | Food |
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