Accounting for Taste
The Triumph of French Cuisine
This momentous culinary journey begins with Ancien Régime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Carême, the "inventor" of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques Pépin. Not a history of French cuisine, Accounting for Taste focuses 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.
To Brillat-Savarin's famous dictum—"Animals fill themselves, people eat, intelligent people alone know how to eat"—Priscilla Ferguson adds, and Accounting for Taste shows, how the truly intelligent also know why they eat the way they do.
“Parkhurst Ferguson has her nose in the right place, and an infectious lust for her subject that makes this trawl through the history and cultural significance of French food—from French Revolution to Babette’s Feast via Balzac’s suppers and Proust’s madeleines—a satisfying meal of varied courses.”—Ian Kelly, Times (UK)
"Appearing in a most timely fashion, given the recent characterization of France by former allies as a nation of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," Ferguson's book is a most satisfying piece of scholarship on the gastronomical leadership of the French. . . . Drawing on a variety of sources (seventeenth-century cookbooks, nineteenth-century literature, modern food films, interviews with contemporary chefs), Ferguson examines in barthesian fashion the role of language and the growing print culture in making cuisine into such an important cultural marker. . . . That food could play so pivotal a role in the national arena should come as no surprise, given the basic metaphoric and political functions food has historically exercised on language and culture. Food becomes the intersection of physiology, agriculture, economics, sociology, linguistics, politics, and religion. . . . Ferguson's book on food shows a taste for cultural studies at its best."--Linda M. Rouillard, French Review
“Ferguson draws from a number of important primary works to present a history of cooks, cuisine, and culinary pursuits in France. She looks at the position of food, cuisine, and chefs in the fabric of society through the eyes of these works. Furthermore, the role of food, cuisine and chefs in France is contrasted with their roles in other cultures; Ferguson offers numerous comparisons with the U.S. A subtheme of the books is the struggle of women to become food professionals in a male-dominated field and to have the food work of women recognized as important.”—Choice
"A significant contribution to the history of French food, and a useful place to start thinking about its excellence."
“What is remarkable [about Accounting for Taste] is that along the way Ferguson . . . takes care of weighty sociological concerns: food work as art, craft or women’s work; the rhetorical difference between cooking and 'chefing;' and the complementary duality of tradition and modernity, authenticity and innovation, comfort and excitement, city and country. What is really impressive is that she covers so much theoretical ground without getting bogged down. . . . This is a clearly written, beautifully argued and nicely illustrated text that fruitfully engages with the knottiest questions in food studies.”—Social Forces
Prologue: Eating Orders
1. Culinary Configurations
I. Culinary Identities
II. French Cuisines
2. Inventing French Cuisine
I. Between the Old Regime and the New
II. Food Talk
4. Food Nostalgia
I. In Search of Cuisine Lost
II. Country Cooking
III. Cooking and Chefing
5. Consuming Passions
I. Conspicuous Cuisines
II. Identifying Cuisines
III. Tasting France
Epilogue: Babette’s Feast: A Fable for Culinary France
Appendix A Bibliography—Cookery Works by Date of Original Publication
Appendix B Sample of Cookbooks—Bibliographie de la France, 1811-98
Appendix C Research Notes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
History: European History
Sociology: Sociology of Arts--Leisure, Sports
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
