Accounting for taste : the triumph of French cuisine /
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson.
- xiii, 258 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-252) and index.
Prologue : Eating orders -- Culinary configurations -- Inventing French cuisine -- Readings in a culinary culture -- Food nostalgia -- Consuming passions -- Epilogue : Babette's feast : a fable for culinary France -- Bibliography : Cookery works by date of original publication -- Sample of cookbooks : Bibliographie de la France, 1811-98. Ch. 1. Ch. 2. Ch. 3. Ch. 4. Ch. 5. App A. App B.
"This culinary journey begins with Ancien Regime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Careme, the "inventor" of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques Pepin. Not a history of French cuisine, Accounting for Taste focuses instead on the people, places, and institutions that have made this cuisine what it is today: a privileged vehicle for national identity, a model of cultural ascendancy, and a pivotal site where practice and performance intersect. With sources as various as the novels of Balzac and Proust, interviews with contemporary chefs such as David Bouley and Charlie Trotter, and the film Babette's Feast, Ferguson maps the cultural field that structures culinary affairs in France and then exports its crucial ingredients. What's more, well beyond food, the intricate connections between cuisine and country, between local practice and national identity, illuminate the concept of culture itself."--BOOK JACKET.