It’s now thought that if Marie Antoinette made her most famously un-p.c. statement at all, she said, “Let them eat brioche!” and not, as legend has it, ‘cake.’ (Rousseau offered the disambiguation.) Let me eat brioche! The eggy puffed cake traces roots back to ancient Rome, as so many entries in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite [...]
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Though the ancient Greeks ate asparagus, which grows wild in the Mediterranean, and the Romans did, too, in the East the vegetable picked up a sexy reputation as an aphrodisiac, one served in Tales of the Arabian Nights. (Asparagus’s success story is similar to that of the truffle, or saffron, both of which are included [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=533
I can’t wait to put my hands on a copy of this reprint of Honoré de Balzac’s Treatise on Elegant Living , just out from Wakefield Press and translated into English for the first time. It’s a guide for the 19th century’s dandy on living the poised life, just like the legendary Beau Brummell, who is [...]
http://www.encyclopediaoftheexquisite.com/?p=123
Diderot worked for twenty-six years as the editor of the monumental French Encyclopédie, producing 17 volumes of text and 11 of illustrations published between 1751 and 1772. It summed up the world’s knowledge, but its writers also challenged the beliefs of the church and, less directly, the sovereignty of the King. The books were so controversial [...]
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