Why French food wins

ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE: THE TRIUMPH OF FRENCH CUISINE

By Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson

University of Chicago Press, $25., tk

REVIEWED BY CLAIRE HOPLEY

One of the universally acknowledged truths is that French cuisine is the best and that French chefs are the most rigorously trained and most exacting. Even today, when the culinary standards of America and many European countries have risen far higher than the modest levels of a couple of decades ago, French cooking and French cooks retain their cachet.

But how did they achieve their reputation in the first place? Conventional answers focus on the geographic good fortune that makes French agriculture both varied and productive, and on the historical heritage of a monarchy and an aristocracy that established high standards of dining as far back as the Middle Ages. Now Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson moves beyond such formulations. Her aptly titled “Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine” explains “that identification of cuisine, country, and excellence” that underpins the culinary reputation of France is the result of French culinary assertiveness, especially in the 19th century.

The author focuses on cookbooks and menus as well as on poems, novels, essays and even films to trace France’s culinary reputation. Thus, the texts that established French cooking as the ne plus ultra of gastronomy are of greater interest than the climate and terrain that produces the lush dairy fare of Normandy and the brilliant fruits and vegetables of Provence, the fine wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux and the truffles and foie gras of Perigord.

This is not as odd a way of explicating the hegemony of French food as it may first appear because, as the author notes, “Cuisine cannot exist without food, nor can it survive without words… . Thus for any cuisine to reach beyond the originating group, its culinary practices need to be fixed. The written text and the image put cuisine into general circulation by turning culinary practices into cultural phenomenon.”

This perception is fundamental to her book, as is her definition of the word cuisine. At its core, it means simply “kitchen” in French, the place where food is prepared. But in both French and English it has colonized a wider and more abstract field of meaning, conceptualizing the intellectual and social aspects of cooking and eating as well as the practical matter of getting food onto the table. In the author’s definition cuisine is “The code that brings food into the social orders. As dining socializes eating, so cuisine formalizes cooking and it does so by reworking the fundamentally private act of consumption.”

This goes to the heart of the problem of establishing cooking as an art. To appreciate food, we have to eat it. But eating destroys the artistry of the cook who created the dish. In the days of the monarchy, when cuisine really meant court cuisine, food was evanescent. But by the 19th century, restaurants had made eating a public matter, so critics of food — diners who eat, writers who comment, cooks who record and define culinary practice —- played crucial roles in conceptualizingFrench cuisine. Indeed, in a sense crucial to Ms. Ferguson’s thesis, they can be said to have created it.

Paens to the joys of French food go back many centuries. The author quotes

Francois Massiolot extolling the virtues of European and especially French cooking in 1691 “Only there is justice done to at the same time to the marvelous gifts provided by the bounty of other climates; and only there and especially in France, can one take pride in our excelling over all other nations in these matters.” [p. 37]. Ms. Ferguson’s main interest,

however, is in nineteenth-century writers: on Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin whose “Physiology of Taste” civilized eating by focusing on our social relations with food, and Alexandre Balthazar Grimod de la Reyniere, whose books initiated the growing middle class into the gastronomy of the ancien regime. Most notably in Ms. Ferguson’s view, Marie Antoine Careme achieved magisterial status not only as a chef, but as an educator who revolutionized the culinary world by systematizing its recipes and rationalizing kitchen practice. “Mine will be the honor and merit of having been the first to treat our great cuisine in the grand manner and having borrowed nothing from anyone,” he wrote, and Ms. Ferguson agrees that more than anyone else, Careme established cooking as an art.

It’s worth asking why such culinary entrepreneurs did not exist elsewhere in contemporary Europe. The author believes that 19th-century France needed to insist on both its post-revolutionary republican values and its unity as a single country, rather than a collection of provinces many of which even had their own languages. Food and cooking lent itself to this project in national assertiveness, and the author traces how culinary literature increasingly ushered provincial cooking under the umbrella of Frenchness. Other artists lent their hands, as she shows in her analysis of the food in Marcel Proust’s “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” and, more recently, the 1987 film Babette’s Feast.

But the author never asks why other countries did not have similar projects. Why did 19th-century Italy or Germany, both of which needed desperately to establish themselves as single entities rather separate states, not embark on the culinary self-aggrandizement practiced in France? And why did Britain, a country of overweening ambition and achievement in almost every other area of 19th-century life, not make similar claims for their food? The answer is not that it was no good. On the contrary, 19th-century visitors to Britain invariably admired the food, especially the roasts and desserts.

Just as the author never compares French culinary history with that of its European neighbors, she never compares the French reputation for food with its reputation in other arts. But for centuries France has been admired for its clothes, its architecture, its furniture, its tapestries, and its porcelain as well as its food. Notably, the hallmark of all of them is elegance and an emphasis on quality. Clearly, something in French culture is at work, and it is something wider than the culinary arts and that predates the 19th century where the author’s gaze is focused.

The first chapter of “Accounting for Taste” in which the author lays out her

working thesis and definitions is essential reading. This is a great pity because it is a slough of pomposity: no noun without its adjective, no verb without a partner, no missed opportunity to work in an abstraction.

Get the gist of this sometimes impenetrable mass of verbiage, then move

on. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson soon gets into more solid territory and writes both cogently and persuasively, illuminating French culinary and cultural history, and offering insightful readings, especially on the Careme, Proust, and “Babette’s Feast.”

Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.