Consuming Culture: The Arts of the French Table (review)

A decade ago discussions of food, eating and dining captured our interest by their very existence. The excitement generated by this uncommon perspective on familiar territory justified a great range and variety of approaches. By now, however, there is so much work on how food functions in both literature and culture that we begin to pose more properly disciplinary questions. If the nascent enterprise of "food studies" is not yet a full-fledged discipline, it has nevertheless progressed beyond delight in the subject. Consuming Culture belongs to the earlier phase of enthusiastic exploration. As good as some of the articles in this book are, it is by no means clear what they are doing together. The title notwithstanding, only one chapter, Anne Freadman's "Eating Culture," considers the relationship of food to patterns of consumption and culture from any sort of theoretical perspective. Nor does the subtitle tells us much about the work as a whole, since most of the articles do not concern the arts of the French table as the term is usually construed to designate the practices of dining. Finally, although all of the articles concern France and French literature, the "Frenchness" of the practices and representations under discussion is assumed rather than investigated. An introduction would have been welcome to draw a larger lesson from articles that range from the Renaissance to the late 20th century, from novels and poetry to philosophic discourse to journalism, cookbooks and budgetary data.

Dix-neuviémistes will be pleased to see that ten of the fifteen articles concern "our" century. But the 19th century is a many splendored thing – too much so to anchor this (or any other) anthology. The first section looks at the beginnings of gastronomy as an elite social practice at the beginning of the 19th century. With his customary insight and textual intelligence Allen Weiss offers a surprising reconsideration of the great chef Marie-Antoine Carême from the unexpected perspective of one of his more obsessive disciples, Jules Gouffé. With an expertise and an assurance born of long frequentation of culinary and gastronomic texts, Jean-Claude Bonnet illuminates the connections between properly culinary texts (cook books) and the food writing pioneered by A.B.L. Grimod de la Reynière.

Michael Garval also focuses on Grimod. In contrast to the genial J-A Brillat-Savarin, whose Physiologie du goût has never been out of print in France since its publication in 1826, the peremptory, splenetic Grimod has had to wait for rehabilitation: Bonnet's edition of selected works in 1978, Rebecca Spang's The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard University Press, 2000), and an earlier article by Garval himself (to which should be added two important articles by Julia Abramson, "Grimod's Debt to Mercier and the Emergence of Gastronomic Writing Reconsidered," EMF: Studies in Early Modern France, 2001, and "Legitimacy and Nationalism in the Almanach des Gourmands, 1803-12," Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2003). Here Garval reads the frontispieces to the Almanach des Gourmands as a model for the eroticism in food writing. On occasion he overreaches: the cat's tail that he sees pointing so significantly to the Gourmand's crotch in Le Lever d'un gourmand, turns out, on closer inspection, to be an artfully folded napkin instead of a feline phallus substitute. But Garval's sharp comments make even this fan of Brillat-Savarin want to take another look at Grimod's vision of a gastronomic quasi-utopia. In a well documented examination of the very different gastronomic utopia of Charles Fourier Thomas Bouchet conveys the quirky fascination of the philosopher's "gastrosophic imagination."

A number of the articles are too brief to do justice to the topic. Most obviously, Gabrielle Cadier-Rey's four-page discussion of Frédéric LePlay's compilations of workers' budgets in the 19th century cannot even suggest what this ground-breaking work on working...