Babette’s Feast (1987) + Seven Course French(ish) Dinner, pt. 1
Babette has a favorite movie. Book. She has a favorite story. She wants to tell you about it over supper.
This is Babette’s Book Club, where Babette talks about what she’s reading and watching lately.
Famously, the lunch special at Babette’s is always free—but tonight, to honor her most regular customers, Babette is cooking supper. She's also going to tell us about the book she's been reading.
(No, she’s not the same Babette. Just a namesake and a role model.)
Evening folks. Tonight we’re serving a seven course French dinner, paired with Babette's Feast, a story by Danish writer Karen Blixen and a 1987 film by Gabriel Axel. And this is your appetizer. Sorry, your "mouth amuser". Cheese and onion pastry tarts. I can take that, right? You're done? I mean, it's one bite.
Next up is potage, or the soup. We got a roasted red pepper and tomato bisque, served with a plop of creme fraiche in the middle. I made the croutons today out of a loaf of sourdough. Tossed 'em in melted butter and herbes de provence before toasting. They're still a little chewy in the middle, but I think I like that better.
No, we don't eat like this every time we have book club. Most of the time I’m just heating up leftovers and complaining about the county health inspector away from the tender ears of customers. This happens to be a celebration. But: we're always a little fancy here. Says so on the sign. The pleasures of the flesh are essential to life. Nigella Lawson said that, and I thought it was so pretty I stitched it up in a sampler.
Let me just get settled here so I can get into the story.
Babette’s Feast, like our supper tonight, starts with soup.
Imagine if you boiled old bread, fish, and ale together in a stockpot for an hour, till it was the color and consistency of colitis: thick, gloopy, brown, and smelly.
In Babette's Feast, this is the stuff that keeps a small Danish village alive.
The story begins with a pair of sisters. Martine and Philippa are the only children of a Lutheran minister with a small congregation. They're strict, pious, self-denying people, laying up treasures in heaven and eating loaves and fishes on earth. Well, fishbread soup, which is worse, probably.
After church each week, the congregation comes back to the pastor's house for a meal. Martine and Philippa make the fishbread soup. They eat it. The pastor eats it. Everyone who goes to his church eats it. And Martine and Philiippa distribute it to the poor around the village. Every day these people eat their fishbread soup, drink their water, and say their prayers.
Somehow, they survive like that for decades.
(Let me take your bowl. Next up is the entree. No, not the main course, that's later. Well of course you're confused, it's French. Here's your cheese souffle. It's like a quiche, with less backbone.)
Into their lives a stumbles a Swedish cavalry officer name Lorens Löwenhiem. He's young. He's been drinking and gambling and generally acting like a fool. The old folks in charge of his life decide that he needs to detox away from the temptations of a big city, so they send him to visit his elderly aunt on the coast of Jutland.
Turns out, she goes to Martine's father's church. And Martine is beautiful. Her father has been sweeping young men off his doorstep for years. He hasn't exactly forbidden the girls to get married, but he tells everyone that his ministry depends on their help. "My right and left hand", he calls them.
(They’re young women, not body parts, preacher.)
Apart from that, we don't exactly know why things don't work out between Lorens and Martine. The story doesn't go into detail, and neither does the movie. Class differences are probably to blame. Or maybe Lorens is the rich young man in the parable who couldn't bring himself to give away all that he owned, even if it meant getting into heaven. Either way, he takes his solemn and mournful leave of Martine and returns to the big city, a changed man.
A little while later, a wild French baritone appears.
His name is Monsieur Papin, and he's just trying to flee his artistic stagnation and the worn out charms of sophisticated Parisian life. One of his friends is like "if you want desolate, craggy Danish coastlines you can't do better than Jutland," so to Jutland he goes.
Unlike Lorens, M. Papin has no obligation and no intention of attending church during his sabbatical. But one Sunday morning as he’s walking past the small whitewashed Protestant church (he’s Roman Catholic), he hears a single angelic voice lifted in a hymn, audible through the walls. Soon he discovers Philippa, the pastor's younger, only slightly less beautiful daughter. He makes inquiries, tracks down the family home, and presents himself to the pastor as a free volunteer voice coach.
Philippa takes him up on the lessons. She thrives under his teaching, and soon they are lifting the rafters of the pastor's neat, modest little home with glorious song. M. Papin thinks he has discovered his new calling, to introduce Philippa to fashionable Europe and make her a star.
It's not like Philippa isn't tempted. M. Papin tells her that in heaven she will be the great artist God intended her to be. "How you will enchant the angels!" Something in her soul resonates with this. But it scares her. She asks her father to send him away. The pastor writes M. Papin a note, and that's that. He returns to Paris, she returns to her fishbread soup life, and things carry on like that for a long, long time.
(Time for a taste of something fresh, now. This is a sorbet of raspberries, rosewater, and rosé. It's supposed to be garnished with fresh mint but Buster knocked the mint plant off the shelf last week.
When I was researching all this fancy formal dinner talk, I read that sorbet doesn't count as a course. Figured I'd mention it before all you internet fellas start telling me I can't count.)
Our story picks up again decades later.
Martine and Philippa are old now. They never got married or left the village. Their father is long dead, but they still live in the house and boil up pots of fishbread soup every week. And every week, the last eight members of their father's congregation come to the house for soup and prayers and bitching. They're all old and crotchety and nobody seems to like each other anymore. The old men argue about who cheated who twenty years ago and the old women argue about who stepped out with whose husband. It isn't much fun for Martine and Philippa, but they're trucking along and keeping the faith.
Then all of a sudden, there's a knock on the door in the middle of the night during a rainstorm. They open the door, and lo and behold: it's a young-ish woman! In a hood and cape! A compelling Frenchwoman of a certain age! Fainting into their arms!
She has a letter that she hands over as soon as she gets a cup of tea in her. It's a letter of introduction, written in French. It's from M. Papin! After a lot of hooing and hawing about how he's old and no one wants to hear him sing anymore, he explains that this lady is called Babette, she's a refugee from Paris, and she's lost everything, including her husband and son, to the revolution of 1870. "Babette can cook," is his last word on the subject.
Martine and Philippa are full of sympathy for Babette, but she's too fancy for them. Or, as they put it, they don't have enough money to pay an experienced housekeeper the salary she's worth. But they offer to introduce her to their wealthier friends so she can find a paying job. Babette, who's been keeping her emotions on lockdown since she arrived, has her one and only outburst in response: she doesn't want to live among strangers! She doesn't need a salary! She just wants to live with M. Papin's friends! If she can't, there is nothing left for her but death!
And that pretty much seals the deal. Babette lives with Martine and Philippa now.
(Now here's just what you want to eat after you've had pastries, soup, souffle, and sorbet: a nice salad. It's called carrottes rappee. I know, I know, it looks like a mess of grated carrots. Trust me. Let it surprise you.)
Martine and Philippa start getting Babette settled in right away. And since she's due to take over the cooking, the first thing they teach her is how to make is fishbread soup.
(I am not gonna say the movie is better than Blixen's short story. But in the movie, you get to see Babette's face during this scene. "Soak the bread, let it cook for one hour,” Martine tells her, and Babette hesitates. You can see a hundred questions and suggestions crowding at the tip of her tongue. But she keeps her mouth shut.)
Over the next twelve years, Babette becomes an indispensable part of village life. Everyone's better off after she gets put in charge of the sisters' housekeeping budget. The money goes farther. The food is better and there's more of it. This doesn't matter so much to Martine and Philippa, who are still all about that fishbread soup life, but it matters a hell of a lot to the people in the village who rely on their charity. Babette's in charge of putting their little food baskets together. Everyone's still eating fishbread soup, but whatever Babette's doing to it makes a big difference, judging from how everyone’s faces light up when they try it for the first time.
(You dare charge Babette money for this puny fish! It would be a generosity to take it as a gift!)
Babette can do a lot with a little because she has the know-how, not to mention an innate desire to use her gifts to make things a little nicer for the people who gave her a home and a community in exile. But it's also because she has all the merchants and fishermen in the village twisted around her little finger. She goes to see the guy who keeps the tiny grocer's shop and mentions, delicately, that the bacon he sold her last week was rancid. "Oh was it now," says his face, like maybe she's tried this sort of thing before. But when she goes to pay, he takes a little off the bill. She goes to the docks to buy fish and haggles with the young fisherman. Five, he says. Three, she says. She gets it for three. The next person in line pays five.
Everyone in the village agrees that it's a very good thing that Babette came to the village to look after "the little sisters", as Martine and Philippa are known. Everyone eats better. Everyone who depends on the sisters (which is almost everyone in the village, one way or another) agrees that things are better because she lives there. The merchants and the fishermen let Babette walk all over them because they know that everything they give her goes back into the community. Babette and the little sisters are doing the good work, and everyone who helps them gets to feel good by extension.
But then, one day, disaster strikes: Babette wins the lottery and becomes rich, to the tune of ten thousand francs.
Alright, we’re going to take a break now, go digest our suppers, and meet back here in a bit. Be sure not to get lost on your way back to the table, or you’ll miss out on all the stuff that was hard to cook.
(The next issue of Babette’s Book Club comes to your inbox next week.)