Babette’s Feast is one of the most beautiful, moving films ever made. The story, the performances…and the exquisite feast prepared by Babette never cease to touch viewers emotionally. Babette’s Feast won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1988 for the country of Denmark. In England, it won the BAFTA for Best Film not in the English language as well as Best Actress and Best Screenplay.
Some may remember that when the film first screened in the U.S., restaurants in major cities around the country offered the chance to enjoy the same dinner that was presented in the movie. For a hefty price, film-goers could complete the cinematic experience by heading off to a fine dining establishment and savor turtle soup, Blinis Demidoff with caviar and sour cream, and quail in a puff pastry shell with foie gras and truffle sauce. This was followed by rum sponge cake with figs and candied cherries, cheese, and a fruit platter with pineapple, dates and white and blue grapes, accompanied by the finest champagne and Burgundy wine.
Many classic food films have more than one theme. That is certainly true of Babette’s Feast. While the movie underscores the brilliant artistry of Babette, it also has very strong religious overtones. Babette is herself Catholic — she wears a cross on a chain, and her dress has a white collar that closely resembles the Roman collar worn by Catholic priests (her iconic costume was created by the German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld). Moreover, she comes to work for the two sisters who are also deeply religious and observe the teachings of their father’s Protestant faith. Babette’s last name, Hersant, could be interpreted as “her saint” or female saint.
In an essay for Christianity and Literature, the scholar Diane Tolomeo Edwards with the University of Victoria interprets Babette as a Catholic priest, describing her as “a wise, celibate, and lonely figure” who renounces intimacy for the reward of the artist, “the opportunity to perform a great spiritual service for humanity.”
Scholar Mary Elizabeth Podles, retired art curator for the Walker Art Museum in her essay “Feasting with Lutherans,” writes that Babette, as the giver of grace through her art, is a parallel to Christ who gives himself through the Eucharist, with all that it entails of the gifts of unity and forgiveness. She is not alone: many writers have associated the feast prepared by Babette as being reminiscent of the Last Supper with the 12 dinner guests representing the 12 disciples.
In an essay for the academic journal The Oswald Review, Pamela Lane with Rollins College adds that “Babette’s meal suggests the Communion service, each course of her meal further connecting her dinner guests to each other and also the Spirit of God.”
The religious theme is so strong that the film was selected by the Vatican in the “religion” category of its list of 45 great films, and is reportedly Pope Francis’ favorite movie.
Writing for the British Film Institute, Julian Baggini states that Babette has “the ability to transform a dinner into a kind of love affair — a love affair that made no distinction between bodily appetite and spiritual appetite.”
Babette’s Feast was based on the 1958 story of the same name written by Karen Blixen who used the pen name of Isak Dinesen. Pamela Lane writes that Blixen did not claim to be a Christian, so it is interesting that Babette’s Feast is so rich in biblical symbolism. Lane notes that Blixen was raised by Unitarians and claimed to have been mostly affected by the teachings of Mohammad, the Islam prophet, but she had an enormous interest in Christian theology at the time she wrote the story.
In writing about Babette’s Feast, Dinesen scholars have concentrated their analyses on Babette’s artistic creation, on the conflict between the aesthetic (appreciation of beauty) and the ascetic (abstinence usually for religious reasons), and more recently, on the woman as artist and creator.
Esther Rashkin, Professor of French and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Utah, notes that the feast in in this film visually represents the difference between the ethical, puritanical sect of Protestantism, nurtured on what appears to be the tasteless diet of cod and ale-and-bread soup, and the aesthetic, sensuous inclinations of French Catholicism, nourished by haute cuisine and epitomized by the master chef Babette.
According to author Julian Baggini, it took the film’s director Gabriel Axel, who also wrote the screenplay, 14 years to bring the story to the screen. Baggins notes that Axel brings a sensuousness to the film that the story lacked, giving the movie version a much warmer human flavor.
The movie’s plot is as follows: Martine and Philippa, two beautiful daughters of a Lutheran dean who heads a small religious sect in the remote western coast ofJutland in 19th-century Denmark, each turn down an attractive suitor — Martine, a young officer, Lorens Loewenhielm, and Philippa, a famous French opera singer, Achille Papin — in order to remain faithful to their father and his religious ideals.
One night, in 1871, with their father now dead and the unmarried sisters carrying on his religious work in the community, Babette arrives on their doorstep with a letter of introduction from the opera singer, Achille Papin. Babette, whose husband and son were murdered in the French civil war, has fled France and begs for asylum, offering to become the sisters’ housekeeper. They hesitantly agree, and Babette becomes a valued member of the household who, for the next 14 years, cleans, washes, and cooks simple meals for the sisters, and the poor and sick of the village.
When Babette, whose only tie with France during her years in Denmark has been her purchase of a lottery ticket, wins 10,000 francs, she insists on cooking the 100th anniversary dinner the sisters are planning for their father. The sisters agree but grow concerned when they see all the exotic ingredients Babette has ordered for the feast. They ask their congregants to avoid discussing the food at the dinner.
Since the death of their pastor, the Danish congregants have become increasingly disagreeable, arguing and fighting with each other. At the dinner, however, they begin to reflect on earlier times, talking and behaving affectionately once again. The congregation’s comical intoxication by the pleasures of good food and wine promote their harmonious well-being. Only Lorens Loewenhielm — Martine’s one-time love interest, now a general — who along with his aunt have been invited to the dinner, expresses appreciation for the incredible food, noting that he had a meal like it once in Paris.
The general is an essential figure in the narrative, because he knows, as the others do not, what he is eating. The bubbly drink that one guest calls “a kind of lemonade,” he recognizes as a Veuve Cliquot 1860. More and more astounded as the meal proceeds, Loewenhielm comes to the realization that the only place that could have produced such a banquet was the renowned Café Anglais in Paris whose signature dishes included the quail in puff pastry that they are now consuming.
As a young man posted to Paris, he had been honored at a memorable dinner at that very restaurant. In the course of that dinner, his host, the General, recounted the surprising story of the extraordinary chef of this superb restaurant who, “quite exceptionally,” was a woman. The quail dish was her invention.
At the end of the sumptuous feast, Babette reveals to the sisters the secret she has kept all these years: she was once the renowned chef of this Paris restaurant. The sisters are aghast that Babette has spent all of her winnings on the dinner. Babette responds: “An artist is never poor.”
The story ends with the two sisters moved to tears by the generosity and artistry they have just witnessed. Phillipa, the sister with the singing talent, recognizes Babette as an artistic peer, and tells her, “In paradise, you will be the great artist that God meant you to be. Ah, how you will delight the angels!”
Scholarly Interpretations
As you might imagine, there are many interpretations of this film by scholars. Esther Rashkin with the University of Utah, mentioned earlier, believes that Babette, who had to flee France to avoid death and therefore never had a chance to properly mourn her murdered husband and son, prepares the feast to not only honor the sisters’ father, but to also commemorate her dead family.
The scholar Susan Hardy Aiken, professor of gender studies at the University of Arizona, takes a feminist view of Babette. She argues that the quail in the puff pastry Babette cooks represents “a woman’s own body that is offered up, in displaced form, through her Eucharistic culinary corpse.” She takes this view based on Babette’s exhaustion at the dinner’s end because she is “emptied out…in effect consumed by her own artistic production.” Moreover, Aiken sees female artistic creation as inseparable from feminine sacrifice, a sacrifice that could also be attributed to the two sisters, Martine and Philippa, who forego romantic love and families and in Philippa’s case, a singing career, to support each other and those they serve.
The Norwegian social anthropologist Elisabeth L’Orange Furst has written about food as a social, cultural and psychological phenomenon, and has studied specifically why women give gifts of food and what characterizes this transaction. She posits that generosity is a motivating force in gifts of food, citing Babette as one example. “Motivated by true generosity, giving is in one sense effortless, because you feel that you are fortunate to be able to give, and the receiver senses this and is not poisoned by the feeling of having to reciprocate.” Generosity, she says, can also come out of feeling a sense of connection with others. To see someone’s real needs and act accordingly is a true gift, she concludes.
The academic Mary Elizabeth Podles, mentioned earlier, interprets the film as a depiction of 19th century Scandinavian art. She points out that scenes from Babette’s Feast are shot with painterly effects in shades of blue, particularly in the first half of the film. We next see the sisters faded to gray as the village is even bleaker and grayer in stormy weather. Then, cast up out of the storm comes Babette with her warm chestnut hair. Throughout the rest of the film, Podles writes, warm colors associate with Babette as she gradually warms her newfound home. As the dinner itself nears, the increasing warmth of the color scheme parallels and symbolizes the diners’ correspondence to the grace poured out upon them. As they “feel their hearts strangely warmed,” she writes, the film’s colors warm.
Then, of course, there is the more literal view of Babette. Having lost both her family and her beloved homeland, and deprived of her former life as a great Parisian chef, she is grateful for a safe home with the sisters, but unfulfilled in preparing their humble meals. In effect, she is starved for her artistry. So, when she has a chance to recreate one of her magnificent dinners thanks to her lottery winnings, she does so not only to thank the sisters, but to also satisfy her own artistic needs.
The author Julian Baggini, writing for the British Film Institute, agrees with this perspective, noting that Babette flourishes only when her art flourishes, saying: “As long as she has that, she has all the riches she needs.”
Let’s now talk about the food — which looks so exotic and appealing you want to pull up a chair to the sisters’ dinner table. Here is a clip of Babette’s meal preparation.
The film’s director, Gabriel Axel, hired Jan Cocotte-Pedersen, then head of the restaurant La Cocotte in Copenhagen’s Hotel Richmond, to cook the menu for the film according to the description in the original novel.
The French actress Stephane Audran, who played Babette, complained that the chef’s team took away all the food at the end of each shoot, and the cast and crew never got to eat any of it.
The characters in the film dine on a menu whose ingredients and preparation comply with classic French cuisine. Axel’s cinematography takes great pains to present all of the food and ingredients for the feast as having been imported from France. Babette places an order with her nephew, a ship’s cook, and what arrives is a hissing tortoise, the live quail, the caviar and champagne.
Also, earlier in the film, the film director Axel demonstrates Babette’s culinary expertise in another way, in that her attention is drawn to local products which are integrated successfully into the narrative. Upon Babette’s arrival in the village, Martine and Philippa show her how to soak dried fish and bread, then how to cut the fish and produce a bread soup fortified with just a very small amount of beer, which Babette then serves the poor. Babette does not particularly like the soup so refines these foods and gives them a new emphasis in terms of taste. While the film does not reveal how she does this, it does focus on the evidently displeased face of a sick man eating a bowl of soup prepared by the sisters when Babette is not there to prepare it.
Babette is also a savvy shopper. We see her in the village smelling two onions before buying them, she haggles over the price for fresh fish and another time smells an herb before picking and cooking it. At the same time, she economizes, prompting the sisters to remark: “It’s rather astonishing: Since Babette has been here we have been spending far less money.”
Babette’s Feast shares many characteristics with other food films. First and foremost, it lovingly details the many pleasures of food — you could argue it presents food as a religious experience. It celebrates the senses. It is very pointedly French cuisine — and it is cuisine with transformative powers. Babette’s Feast conjures up a vision of spiritual well-being created by the otherworldly artistry of a chef who sacrifices all for her art and, through that art, recreates her country. This restitution of place and resurrection of time makes the most powerful case yet for the intimate drama of culinary metamorphosis.
And we have a female writer, Karen Blixen, to credit for the lovely chef Babette. Mary Elizabeth Podles observes that at the time she wrote Babette’s Feast, Blixen was in poor health, which she attributed to having been infected with syphilis by her philandering husband when she was 29. Some believe her health issues were due to being treated with mercury and arsenic (she also reportedly took laxatives most of her life to keep her weight down). At any rate, her digestive system had been destroyed and in her final years she was in intense pain and unable to eat. It is indeed an irony that Blixen dictated her story about Babette’s glorious feast as she was slowly dying of malnutrition.
Blixen was criticized by a prominent French gastronomic critic at the time the story was written in 1958 for Babette’s gender. The critic condemned both the pretentiousness of the feast and what he called “the egregious historical error of making a woman head chef in a restaurant such as the Cafe Anglais.” Clearly, his was an opinion in the minority.
As of June 2022, the film maintained a 97% approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate review website from 34 reviews. The film earned $4.4 million in 1988, which would equal roughly $15 million today. In addition to winning its Oscar and BAFTA Film Awards, Babette’s Feast also won the award for Best Danish Film of the Year.
Film scholar Julian Baggini concludes by calling Babette’s Feast “a magnificent film that is an enduring masterpiece.”
Bibliography
Baggini, Julian, “Babette’s Feast,” British Film Classics, 2020
Lane, Pamela, “An Hour of Millennium: A Representation of the Communion Ritual in Babette’s Feast”, The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English, Volume 1, Issue 1, 1999
Parkhurst Ferguson, Priscilla, “A Fable for Culinary France,” excerpted from the book Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine
Podles, Mary Elizabeth, “Babette’s Feast: Feasting with Lutherans,” The Antioch Review, Summer, 1992
Rashkin, Esther, “A Recipe for Mourning: Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast,” Style, Fall 1995
Tolomeo Edwards, Diane, “Babette’s Feast, Sacramental Grace, and the Saga of Redemption,” Christianity and Literature, Spring 1993,
Wiesel, Jorg, Babette’s Culinary Turn An Essay,” chapter from the book Culinary Turn: Aesthetic Practice of Cooking, 2017
Wilkinson, Alissa, “Babette’s Feast is a Joyous Story About a Good Meal Healing Social Divisions, Vox, Nov 26, 2016
“A Visual Feast,” Gastronomica
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