"Tell me what you eat", wrote Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French gastronome, in 1825, "and I will tell you who you are." In his day, that was easy. If you were "up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys etc, and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch", like Horace Walpole at his country seat in Norfolk, to whom this passsage refers, you were a member of the squirearchy who liked their food plain; the real toffs preferred something more elaborate.
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