Just as the written recipe can only suggest the sensory, so words inevitably fail to convey the comprehensive, all-enveloping sensuality of taste. More immediately than print and like cuisine itself, film conveys a sensory awareness that embraces the viewer as the more intellectual medium cannot. Film captures, as a photograph cannot, the interactive process that culinary art requires. Surely it is appropriate that the cinema supply the iconic culinary text of the twentieth century. Its portrayal of a French cook far from France evokes the French culinary landscape even more than the Danish countryside where it is set.

Paradoxically, this Danish film tells an exemplary tale of French cuisine. For this film depicts far more than food and foodways it shows more than the sensuality of food in our lives. Accounting for Taste is truly a remarkable contribution to gastronomical literature.'-Charlie TrotterĮxcerpt from Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French CuisineĪmong the many films that center on food at the end of the twentieth century, Babette's Feast (Babettes Gaestebud) stands out for its reach and for the subtlety of its sensuality. Priscilla Ferguson sensibly captures the essence of French cuisine by following the steps of its evolution as one of the most influential cultures in the world. French cuisine has been nurturing chefs and diners alike since its emergence. 'Today more than ever in the culinary world we have a curiosity for how cooking has developed. Representative of a new genre of serious and scholarly books on cuisine as an integral part of culture, Accounting for Taste demonstrates the importance of a field of study that was deemed 'too trivial' for academic exploration when I was a college student thirty years ago.'-Jacques Pépin 'I welcome and applaud Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's well-researched and enlightening book on a subject that is near and dear to me and countless others: French cuisine.

In a striking epilogue, Ferguson minutely analyzes the film Babette's Feast, showing how French cooking came to stand in the film for art in general.'- Booklist But she does find America's attitude toward a single meal, Thanksgiving, a revealing exception to the general rule. She contrasts the aesthetic of French dining with the raucous, undisciplined cuisine of America. In this culinary history, Ferguson traces how the cooking of the French nation survived revolutions and changes in fashion to reach the summit of good taste. 'French cuisine may or may not be the world's best, but it certainly is the most widely influential cooking style, and it is unquestionably the standard against which all other cuisines are measured. Accounting for Taste brims over with both anecdote and insight, not to mention cartoons and illustrations, and is particularly good both on the written formalising of French cooking at the beginning of the 19th century and on France's export of a sort of culinary-pastoral myth of itself.'-Ian Kelly, The Times (UK) '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 Babettes Feast via Balzac's suppers and Proust's madeleines a satisfying meal of varied courses.

Babette's Feast: A Fable for Culinary France

Simply being well