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Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 258 pp. $25.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-226-24323-0.
"The culinary text reconfigures an individual activity as a collective enterprise" (p. 17), writes Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson early on in Accounting for Taste, which is less a book about French culinary practice than it is a book about its codification and representation. The object of her analysis, then, is not cooking as a material process, but the symbolic construction of its lore as the source of the mythology that conjoins food and France ("Cooking gives us food for thought; cuisine offers thoughts for food" [p. 21]). For it is through the symbolic, she argues, that French cuisine is constituted and, ultimately, so is France itself, since cuisine provides the cultural script by which France has come to be represented as a distinctive collectivity.
In a book that oscillates between literature and sociology in both its form and content, the author shows how the roots of French culinary culture were laid in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century gastronomic literature. From the writings of Antonin Carême, the immodest pastry chef known for his elaborate, almost architectural creations that demonstrated...