Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was a brilliant French foodie before it was cool to be a foodie - in the days after the French Revolution! His  is my all-time favorite cold-weather comfy-chair and brandy food book.

Brillat-Savarin was a proponent of low-carb dieting 200 years before it was popular in this country. He didn't call it that, of course, but in his chapter on dieting he reminds us that the best way to fatten an animal for slaughter is with grain, and then he reminds us to avoid "feculent and farinaceous foods".

Brillat-Savarin also coined a number of famous aphorisms that survive to this day, the most famous of which may be his oft-paraphrased "Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are."