🍷🍿 Babette's Feast

Two elderly sisters lead a small, strict congregation in a village on the Danish coast in the nineteenth century. A French refugee arrives at their door and cooks for them for fourteen years, boiled fish and bread soup, without complaint. Then she comes into some money and asks one favour: to cook a real French dinner, once.

The pre-Christmas film, on the disc Agnes Castellan lends us every December and asks after in January. Mum's rule is that you watch it hungry. Jonas cooked, so we were not.

This year it landed differently, because that morning I had done the sum on the back of an envelope and stuck it on the fridge: what the sabbatical fund actually buys. Then I sat down to a film in which a woman spends everything she has on one dinner, for twelve people who have agreed in advance not to enjoy it, and it is not presented as a mistake.

What I noticed on the fifth viewing:

• The guests keep their vow not to mention the food, and the food wins anyway. Old quarrels are settled over the second glass with nobody saying sorry.
• Only one person at the table knows what he is eating. Everyone else is changed by it without the vocabulary.
• Her answer, when the sisters realise what it cost, is the whole film. She does not count herself any poorer, because for one evening she was allowed to do her best work. I have never managed to hear it without looking at the ceiling.

It is a film about 🪁 Cooking as generosity, and about spending a saved thing on purpose. I took it personally and went to look at the envelope again.

Tradition: Sunday before Christmas, every year since 2021

• The fourteen years, done in a few minutes: split cod, bread soup, and the household accounts quietly improving.
• The procession from the boat: a live turtle, quails in a cage, cases of wine. The sisters' faces.
• The general's first spoonful. He is the only guest who knows what he is eating, and he looks round the table for somebody to tell.
• The quails in their pastry cases, which he last ate in a famous restaurant in Paris, cooked by a woman. He does not put the two things together and we do.
• The kitchen, seen from the doorway: she works with one boy to carry, and drinks a glass of the good wine standing up.
• Outside afterwards: the old congregation hand in hand round the well, singing under the stars.
• The last conversation, about what the dinner cost.