author: Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin ASIN or ISBN-10: 0140446141 binding: Paperback list price: £12.99 GBP amazon price: £22.98 GBP

You can't properly call yourself a gourmand (or even a minor foodie) until you've digested Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's delectable 1825 treatise, The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Brilliantly and lovingly translated in 1949 by M. F. K. Fisher (herself the doyenne of 20th-century food writing), the book offers the Professor's meditations not just on matters of cooking and eating, but extends to sleep, dreams, exhaustion and even death (which he defines as the "complete interruption of sensual relations").