Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

The following comments follow a reading of
"Babette's Feast": A taste of Theater Oobleck's unique culinary tour de force
By LEAH A. ZELDES, Food Editor of In The Loop
Her article gives recipes for serving up Babette's Feast, including
•  Cailles en sarcophages
•  Blinis Demidof a l'Oobleck
•  Soupe a la tortue a la Louisianne


(Please be aware that I know that that the menu is not in the story, that I have read the story, and the one flaw in the movie is that it does not explain clearly that she can't stay in Paris because she herself pointed guns at her potential customers, and the revolution in which she was complicit ruined her clientele.)

Here goes:

Amontillado is a semi-dry variety of Sherry, a fortified Spanish wine. It is easy to find and not that expensive for a special occasion.  It is served with turtle soup, made from a real turtle (actually a tortoise), but though one of your posters has pointed out that it is available canned and may be found in New Orleans, it is a near impossibility to confabulate. I would substitute a clear consomme a la royale.

The vintage champagne (veuve cliquot whatever year they mention) can easily be substituted by a non-vintage but high quality medium-bodied champagne, but a real one, from France. It is actually problematic because one is serving a dry wine after a semi-dry apperative. I would recommend instead a Riessling sweeter than a Kabinett, but then we have the problem of the classic French wine with the next course. What would I really do? I'd drop the sherry entirely and serve brut champagne with both courses.

Blinis Demidof is not a classic French dish because it is Russian, and in those days there was intersection between the two (serving individual plates instead of family style was called "service a la russe."  They are thin pancakes with caviar (as guessed by another poster) and something resembling sour cream. I would substitute a plate of unadorned sashimi and other fish roe (not sushi) with very bland very thin pancakes such as you would get with mu shoo.

The dinner theatre people did a great job of quails in their coffins. If price is no object, boned quails can be had from sources such as D'artagnan in New Jersey. Those are indeed truffles, and while I would get them if my resources  were unlimited, if one wants to substitute store-bought mushrooms, I would use shiitakes. The sauce is undoubtedly a wine/demiglace reduction sauce; we even see the calf's head used to make it disappear. We can do well enough with purchased demiglace, again available from D'artagnan (I don't work for them), and I would include some essence of dried morel mushrooms to help substitute for the loss of truffle flavor.

The wine with this course in the movie is an impossibly expensive Burgundy even if we substituted more recent desirable vintages, which would still be impossible for the individual host to purchase. I would recommend switching to a Bordeaux style wine or a fine Cabernet from California, which would use the same grape variety. Consult the wine expert at a good shop.

I call slightly into question the salad course, which I wonder might be anachronistic, but it probably should be there. The salad would be of a variety of greens dressed with a vinaigrette, and I've never figured out why that is so different from the simple Italian dressing of good olive oil, wine vinegar, and salt. The film was right to show that this is the time to serve water (because of the sourness of the dressing and to maintain hydration).

Cheese, cake and fruit follow next in the movie, and this is my only problem with the thing. The sequence and what wine is or is not served with it may not be unrealistic for the time, but I just can't reconcile them. The fruit does not make sense because it could not have possibly been in season anywhere in Europe at the time. I don't believe Babette's resources extended to fresh shipments from the West Indies or the South Pacific. The options here are two:  If in season, serve only fresh fruit and forget the next wine (serve more water), or serve a wonderful cheese course as shown followed by a pastry type dessert both accompanied by a Sauternes or a German Beerenauslese or a fine Port (sweet wines that are not mentioned in the feast).

As for the brandy (what Eric serves with the coffee) forget it. At this point it will only taste medicinal and make them truly drunk.  A good one is also hideously expensive. Just serve the coffee.

Thanks. I've wanted to get that off my chest for a long time (I've seen the movie about 15 times). Bross

Babette's Feast: Story and Film links

Comments: Grace@karenblixen.com