Tasting French Terroir

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. "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…