Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine

French cuisine is such a staple in our understanding of fine food that we forget the accidents of history that led to its creation. "Accounting for Taste" brings these accidents to the surface, illuminating the magic of French cuisine and the mystery behind its historical development. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson explains how the food of France became French cuisine. This momentous culinary journey begins with Ancien R(r)gime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Car-me, the inventor of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques P(r)pin. 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 dictumOCoAnimals fill themselves, people eat, intelligent people alone know how to eatOCoPriscilla Ferguson adds, and "Accounting for Taste" shows, how the truly intelligent also know "why" they eat the way they do. OC 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 foodOCofrom French Revolution to "BabetteOCOs Feast" via BalzacOCOs suppers and ProustOCOs madeleinesOCoa satisfying meal of varied courses.OCOOCoIan Kelly, "Times" (UK) "