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“Restaurants—unhappily Savarin could not know the modern derivation from res and taurus—appear to have been invented in Paris in 1770. There is a fascinating picture of the best of the author’s time, with three hundred dishes and a hundred wines; a height of eloquence over the cosmopolitan sources of a good dinner; and yet higher soaring over the Parisian missionaries of the doctrine throughout the civilized world.

“Nor does inspiration wane in the chapter on ‘Gastronomic Principles Put into Practice’—‘the treasures of nature were not created to be trodden under foot ... a good dinner is but little dearer than a bad one ... a man may show himself a distinguished connoisseur without going beyond the limits of his actual needs.’

“The last chapter, ‘Gastronomic Mythology,’ is pure creation—of Gasterea, the tenth muse, her nature, habit, aspect, and worship; and then—for like Donne, ‘when he is done, he is not done, for there is more’—comes a ‘Transition:’ ‘In writing I had a double object ... to lay down the fundamental theory of gastronomy, so that she would take her place among the sciences in that rank to which she has an incontestable right. The second, to define with precision what must be understood by the love of good living, so that for all time that social quality may be kept apart from gluttony and intemperance, with which many have absurdly confounded it.’