Not a history of French cuisine, 'Accounting for Taste' focuses instead on the people, places and institutions that have made this cuisine what it is today: a privileged vehicle for national identity, a model of cultural ascendancy, and a pivotal site where practice and performance intersect.

With sources as various as the novels of Balzac and Proust, interviews with contemporary chefs such as David Bouley and Charlie Trotter, and the film Babette's Feast, Ferguson maps the cultural field that structures culinary affairs in France and then exports its crucial ingredients. What's more, well beyond food, the intricate connections between cuisine and country, between local practice and national identity, illuminate the concept of culture itself. To Brillat-Savarin's famous dictum - "Animals fill themselves, people eat, intelligent people alone know how to eat" - Priscilla Ferguson adds, and Accounting for Taste shows, how the truly intelligent also know why they eat the way they do.