Mosher on Ferguson (2004)

This interdisciplinary, theoretical study of the origin and development of the culinary arts in France seeks to define how cuisine is a cultural construct that functions as an agent of socialization. Both a social phenomenon and a cultural practice, cuisine represents a principal component of France's national heritage and collective identity. As the title suggests, this work explains why and how French cuisine has, and continues to be, held in such high regard both within and beyond the borders of France.

While Ferguson traces the beginning of French culinary trends to the early seventeenth century, her book is not a history of French cuisine. Rather, she describes her unique scholarly approach to French cuisine as a "geography" of culinary culture. Among this study's many strengths is the clarity with which the author defines the concepts, as well as the intertwining relationships of food, cooking, gastronomy, cuisine, cooks, chefs and diners. Divided into five chapters, this work identifies literary texts and practices and the development of print culture in France as significant factors that led to the emergence and high status of French cuisine and culinary traditions as they are known today. In addition to the analysis of several written texts derived from cookbooks, menus, poems, essays and novels, more than twenty cuisine-inspired illustrations accompany the chapters to exemplify the rhetoric used in French culinary images produced within and beyond the Hexagon.

Chapter One, "Culinary Configurations," identifies food as a both an economic and cultural product that is dependent on consumers. In this way, food can be compared to the performing arts, since both offer the diner/spectator an ephemeral cultural experience. Much like a published text, food becomes cuisine only when it is introduced into the public sphere, thus becoming a cultural and culinary performance. The second chapter, "Inventing French Cuisine," examines the career of one of France's first entrepreneurial chefs, Marie-Antoine Carême (1783-1833). In collaboration with the rise of print media in nineteenth-century France, Carême understood that cuisine needed to be made accessible to the larger bourgeois public. As a result of his numerous culinary publications, he is described as the inventor of modern French cuisine.

Chapter Three, "Reading in a Culinary Culture," discusses the role of the writers and readers of gastronomic texts. As readers became diners the rise of gastronomy is linked to culinary discourse. At the same time, both chefs and diners were united in public space with the emergence of the French restaurant. The fourth chapter, "Food Nostalgia," focuses on the culinary themes found in canonical literary works such as Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Through his discussion of culinary memories, Proust weaves a cultural nostalgia into his texts. The fifth and final chapter, "Consuming Passions," examines the nature of French cuisine within the context of globalization, fast food and the advent of culinary television programs such as The Naked Chef. Internationally-renowned chefs such as Paul Bocuse and Julia Child perform their culinary art for global audiences who, as spectators, and with the help of programming such as The Food Network, view cuisine as a competitive sport.

The epilogue, "Babette's Feast: A Fable for Culinary France," discusses Gabriel Axel's celebrated 1987 film in order to show how cuisine is represented within the artistic space of the cinema at the end of the twentieth century. Just as the previous chapters demonstrated how written texts have functioned as a means of honing the French culinary arts since the early modern period, the camera and the screen continue the tradition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I highly recommend this book to professors and graduate students whose research focuses on cuisine, the culinary arts, (French) Cultural Studies, French national identity and/or the representation of cuisine in literature and film.