A Writer’s Life Readings Week 5: “Babette’s Feast” by Isak Dinesen

Curated and read by Beena Kamlani.

18th May, 2020

Hello everyone. Welcome back! Last week, we visited the thriving rooftops of Manhattan, and Penelope Lively’s family home with its beautiful gardens. This week, I’m turning to food, cooks, and kitchens. In this, the ninth week of lockdown, it seems food is on everyone’s minds. We’re all missing our homely celebrations: the joy of being with friends, of sharing conversations and confidences, and camaraderie. I miss that the most during this time of quarantine—cooking for friends. As glasses are raised to friendship and to pleasure, the gift of a good dinner brings back its rewards, for bonds have deepened around the table, conversations have transported us, and we look again at the world in a kindlier light. M.F.K. Fisher, America’s greatest food writer, wrote, “I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of this world.”

In Babette’s Feast, two pious sisters living in a remote Norwegian outpost have taken in a refugee from Paris, who cooks for them and quickly adapts to their simple ways. Twelve years pass. Then Babette receives a letter from Paris giving her the astonishing news that she has won a lottery for ten thousand francs. As the sisters consider preparations for their father’s hundredth anniversary dinner, Babette asks them if she can cook a French meal for them and their guests. The sisters reluctantly agree. They cannot know that they have given their assent to the most Lucullan experience of their lives, for their simple Babette had once been Paris’s most celebrated chef. As specially ordered provisions from Paris are brought into the kitchen from an overloaded wheelbarrow, the sisters’ watch in horror as Babette’s wizardry begins to take over their home.

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“By this time Babette, like the bottled demon of the fairy tale, had swelled and grown to such dimensions that her mistresses felt small before her. They now saw the French dinner coming upon them, a thing of incalculable nature and range. But they had never in their life broken a promise; they gave themselves into their cook’s hands.

            All the same when Martine saw a barrowload of bottles wheeled into the kitchen, she stood still. She touched the bottles and lifted up one. ‘What is there in this bottle, Babette?’ she asked in a low voice. ‘Not wine?’

            ‘Wine, Madame!’ Babette answered. ‘No, Madame. It is a Clos Vougeot 1846!’ After a moment she added: ‘From Philippe, in Rue Montorgueil!’ Martine had never suspected that wines could have names to them, and was put to silence.

            Late in the evening she opened the door to a ring, and was once more faced with the wheelbarrow, this time with a red-haired sailor-boy behind it, as if the old man had by this time been worn out. The youth grinned at her as he lifted a big, indefinable object from the barrow. In the light of the lamp it looked like some greenish-black stone, but when set down on the kitchen floor it suddenly shot out a snake-like head and moved it slightly from side to side. Martine had seen pictures of tortoises, and had even as a child owned a pet tortoise, but this thing was monstrous in size and terrible to behold. She backed out of the kitchen without a word.

            She dared not tell her sister what she had seen. She passed an almost sleepless night; she thought of her father and felt that on his very birthday she and her sister were lending his house to a witches’ Sabbath. When at last she fell asleep she had a terrible dream, in which she saw Babette poisoning the old Brothers and Sisters, Philippa and herself.”

The second passage occurs later, after the sublime dinner, after Babette has told the sisters’ her lottery winnings were all spent on the meal, and that she will not be returning to Paris:

Philippa’s heart was melting in her bosom. It seemed that an unforgettable evening was to be finished off with an unforgettable proof of human loyalty and self-sacrifice. “Dear Babette,” she said softly. “You ought not to have given away all you had for our sake.”

            Babette gave her mistress a deep glance, a strange glance. Was there not pity, even scorn, at the bottom of it? “For your sake?” she replied. “No. For my own.”

            She rose from the chopping block and stood up before the two sisters.

            “I am a great artist!” she said.

            She waited a moment and then repeated, “I am a great artist, Mesdames.”

            Again for a long time there was deep silence in the kitchen.

            Then Martine said: “So you will be poor now all your life, Babette?”

            “Poor?” said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. “No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.”

            While the elder sister had nothing more to say, in Philippa’s heart deep, forgotten chords vibrated.

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Here’s to artist-cooks everywhere!

Thanks very much for listening. Until next week. 

These passages were taken from the story “Babette’s Feast” in Anecdotes of Destiny, by Isak Dinesen, published by Penguin Classics in 2001.