Tasting French Terroir: The History of an Idea Volume 54 - Paperback

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by Thomas Parker (Author)

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.

Front Jacket

With impressive erudition and an original marshaling of texts, Tasting French Terroir traces French national identity in the ever-intriguing, ever-evolving bond between cuisine and country.--Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, and author of Word of Mouth: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food

"Tasting French Terroir makes an important contribution to myriad fields, including culinary history, French literature and philosophy, and political science. Demonstrating ingenuity with its sources and chronological scope, this book will be a wonderful resource for a wide range of scholars."--Jennifer J. Davis, author of Defining Culinary Authority: The Transformation of Cooking in France, 1650-1830

"Thomas Parker elucidates and elaborates our understanding of terroir with his unique history of this polysemous word. In Tasting French Terroir, Parker does not rely solely on classic French texts engaging with food and wine (say Brillat-Savarin and Curnonsky) to make sense of terroir's meaning and import. His examinations of authors as varied as Rabelais, Montaigne, DeSerres and Rousseau provide new revelations about the long celebration of France's natural bounty--what the French consider to be a great and generous geography. Parker leaves no stone unturned in his fascinating quest and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of French identity, the shifting tastes of the French, and the many meanings of terroir."--Amy Trubek, author of The Taste of Place: A Cultural History into Terroir and Faculty Director of the Food Systems Graduate Program at UVM

"Tasting French Terroir is about the untranslatable. It takes us on a sweeping journey inside a word, a concept, an experience that often appears inaccessible or veiled to those outside of French language and culture. Using a remarkable array of sources, Parker guides us inside French history and culture to demonstrate how food and wine came to be seen as the material manifestation of terroir. This is a book that will be savored by food lovers everywhere."--Kolleen M. Guy, author of When Champagne Became French and Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio

Author Biography

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.

Number of Pages: 248

Dimensions: 0.5 x 8.9 x 5.9 IN

Publication Date: May 01, 2015