Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine (review)

Parkhurst Ferguson's study proposes a 'genealogy and geography of culinary culture', using sociological, historical and literary analyses 'to track French identity from its beginning in the seventeenth century through its elaboration over the nineteenth and into the twentieth'. This ambitious historical and methodological sweep leads to a long definition of terms and objectives. Asserting that the stories the French tell about cuisine attest to its emblematic status, Parkhurst Ferguson then traces the development of French cuisine to the nineteenth century, identifying this as the time when it became textual product, providing a cohesive sense of national identity based on values of excellence and superiority. Dipping into cookbooks, menus, essays, journalism, poems and novels, she maps out a culinary constellation of the nineteenth century, describing the contribution of deliciously colourful figures to the consitution of French cuisine as a vehicle for collective identity. She repositions the illustrious chef Carême as a culinary modern who provided a grammar and a lexicon for the haute cuisine of the Ancien Régime, allowing the sense of 'Frenchness' it symbolized to spread from Paris to province and thence worldwide. The focus then shifts from the individual to the broad culture of the nineteenth century, and from producer to consumer, identifying a new social practice — gastronomy — and role of the text in reconfiguring food as sensual object and symbolic value. Brillat-Savarin, author of La Physiologie du goût, is described as turning gastronomy into a subject of philosophical and social interest, and journalist Grimod de la Reynière, as a pedagogue spreading the new culinary discourse of identity. Literary references predictably include Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. Parkhurst Ferguson also elucidates how Proust's culinary nostalgia in A la recherche du temps perdu encapsulates a nineteenth-century 'ideal of nation in culturally specific terms'. In Rouff's contrasting 1924 novel, La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant-Gourmet, she similarly identifies an assertion of superiority that harks back to the ideal of stable cultural specificity articulated by nineteenth-century culinary discourses. Indeed, analyses of texts from or evoking the nineteenth century are the study's strength, and the account of the subsequent development of the narrative of French cuisine is less comprehensive. The impact of globalization and internationalization is briefly mentioned, but not recent debate on la malbouffe. Parkhurst Ferguson's assertion that local sourcing and fresh preparation are the contemporary guarantors, albeit vulnerable, of French cuisine is paradoxically overshadowed by descriptions focusing on conspicuous consumption in North America. Analysis of the success of the Japanese 'Iron Chef' on the Food Network and field work predominantly featuring US-based chefs may put readers unfamiliar with American food culture at a comparative disadvantage. Thus, with its concluding analysis of Danish director Gabriel Axel's film, Babette's Feast, the study ends at some distance from its point of departure. None the less, Parkhurst Ferguson's analysis of the links between text, gastronomy and nation in nineteenth-century France whets the appetite for further investigation of the cultural currency of French cuisine, its textualization and its contribution to narratives of French identity.