Tasting French Terroir: The History of an Idea

by Thomas Parker

Overview

This book explores the origins and significance of the French concept of terroir, demonstrating that the way the French eat their food and drink their wine today derives from a cultural mythology that developed between the Renaissance and the Revolution. Through close readings and an examination of little-known texts from diverse disciplines, Thomas Parker traces terroir’s evolution, providing insight into how gastronomic mores were linked to aesthetics in language, horticulture, and painting and how the French used the power of place to define the natural world, explain comportment, and frame France as a nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520277502
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/01/2015
Series:	California Studies in Food and Culture , #54
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Thomas Parker is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College. He is the author of Volition, Rhetoric, and Emotion in the Work of Pascal.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Terroir and the Culinary Roots of French Identity
1. Rabelais’s Table and the Poets of the Pleiade
2. The Plantification of People
3. Courtside Purity and the Academie Francaise’s Attack on the Earth
4. France’s Green Evolution: Terroir’s Expulsion from Versailles
5. Saint-Evremond and the Invention of Geographical Connoisseurship
6. Terroir and Nation Building: Boulainvilliers, Du Bos, and the Case of Class
7. The Normalization of Terroir: Paris and the Provinces
Conclusion: Terroir and Nation: From Geographic Identity to Psychogeography

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Innovative and revealing... This is a wide-ranging, thoroughly researched, and well-articulated work."

H-France

"Of great value to researchers . . . Highly recommended."

CHOICE connect

"Admirable... Thomas Parker has greatly increased our understanding of the intellectual origins of terroir."

Council for European Studies

"An academic, meticulously researched, attentive journey through to the very complex roots of the concept of terroir . . . If you're looking for a book that will both fascinate you and challenge all your preconceptions about terroir, France and the French, this is it."

JancisRobinson.com - Tamlyn Currin

"Readers of Tasting French Terroir will come to look at France, its landscape, and its inhabitants with different eyes. . . . It heroically stands apart from existing literature on terroir in the way it offers the first systematic key to understanding the concept itself."

Food & History

"This book can help the French to answer a question they sometimes ask about why other cultures and countries have not adopted the notion of terroir, even those who share with France the reality of terroir products."

Review of Agricultural & Environmental Studies