A recipe for mourning: Isak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast."

Style, Fall, 1995 by Esther Rashkin

The film's depiction of Babette's careful, one could say respectful, preparation of the dinner, which is only briefly recounted in the written narrative, properly emphasizes the ceremonial, mournful nature of this undertaking. It accurately illustrates the idea that Babette's artistry in the kitchen is dedicated not only to the preparation of a meal, but also to the preparation of the dead for burial. In cooking the dinner, in other words, Babette performs the triple role of a great chef, a gifted mortician, and a knowing doctor. She prepares the dead bodies of her loved ones or cailles for entombment so that they may be literally consumed (by others) and thereby introjected (by her) and so that a cure for her "psychic indigestion" can be effected.(8) At the same time, she writes or inscribes the prescription for this cure in the very dish she creates as her remedy.

For the sarcophagi she prepares convey the message that the dead are not just to be buried, but must be consumed for her remedy to work. This message is conveyed by the word sarcophagus, which is Greek for "flesh eating" and is the name of the "stone reputed among the Greeks to have the property of consuming the flesh of dead bodies deposited in it, and consequently used for coffins" (OED). Babette's dish of Cailles en Sarcophage is thus itself a narrative of sorts. It is a text that cryptically tells of the need to bury the dead in such a way that they can be psychically devoured and digested and hence transformed into a tomb or memorial to their own disappearance: into a monument - which is what a sarcophagus, with its embellishing sculptures or inscriptions, is - that marks their absence and that not only permits, but also invites the memorialization or recollection of their presence in and through language. The live turtle Babette has shipped from France and makes into soup, and that looks "like some greenish-black stone" (25), can be read as yet another gastronomic vehicle through which she writes and fills the prescription for her own cure. This animal, which can be said to live in or carry with it its own "tomb" or "sarcophagus," leaves behind, once the body within has been devoured, a kind of monument to its own memory. The turtle soup thus combines with the Cailles en Sarcophage and the Veuve Clicquot champagne to tell the tale of how healthy digestion of a loss is to proceed and of how memory of the loss may be constructed and rendered palatable.(9)

We can now understand why Babette appears at the end of the dinner "as white and as deadly exhausted as on the night when she first appeared and had fainted on [the sisters'] doorstep" (44). Through her entombment of the dead and her psychic ingestion of them (via the congregation), this culinary magician has performed a temporal shift. She has traveled (mentally) back in time to the moment, twelve years earlier, when she first suffered her loss and was unable to mourn. Having recreated through the feast her former existence and having brought together, buried, and monumentalized her husband, her son, and "her" aristocracy, she is at last able to transcend the blockage to mourning, to convert her suffering into words, and to speak about the life she lived and lost in France. Thus, when the sisters learn that Babette has spent all ten thousand francs of her lottery winnings on the dinner and Philippa says softly, "Dear Babette . . ., you ought not to have given away all you had for our sake" (46), Babette responds with a deep glance of "pity, even scorn" (46), and retorts, "For your sake? . . . No. For my own" (46). Babette's sumptuous re-creation of a dinner for twelve at the Cafe Anglais does not have as its principal goal allowing her to practice her art one last time or to reaffirm her identity as an artist in a gesture of nostalgic self-sacrifice or self-annihilation. This re-creation is the means by which she finally buries "France" and begins her new life in Norway. It is not an act of selflessness, but of self-rescue and self-preservation. It is an act of survival.