21st century
A01=Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
academic
ancien regime
Author_Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson
careme
Category=WBN
change
chef
contemporary
cookbook
country
cultural
culture
daniel boulud
dishes
eating
eq_bestseller
eq_food-drink
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
europe
european
famous
food
foodways
france
gastronomy
historical
history
identity
jacques pepin
modern
national
research
scholarly
sensory
sociology
taste
well known
western world
Product details
- ISBN 9780226243238
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jul 2004
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 Regime cookbooks and ends with twenty-first-century cooking programs. It takes us from Careme, the "inventor" of modern French cuisine in the early nineteenth century, to top chefs today, such as Daniel Boulud and Jacques Pepin. Not a history of French cuisine, Accounting for Taste focuses instead 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 dictum - "Animals fill themselves, people eat, intelligent people alone know how to eat" - Priscilla Ferguson adds, and Accounting for Taste shows, how the truly intelligent also know why they eat the way they do.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is professor of sociology at Columbia University. Her previous books include Paris as Revolution and Literary France.
