A recipe for mourning: Isak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast."

The end of the story suggests that Babette will indeed survive and may ultimately thrive. Before the dinner, she had cooked only for the sisters and prepared a soup that had the "power to stimulate and strengthen" (16) the poor and sick of the community, a "medicinal" gesture that can be construed as an initial, but inadequate attempt at self-cure. Babette's feast, on the other hand, enacts a recipe for self-cure that works. The moment she is able to say to the sisters, "I was once cook at the Cafe Anglais" (44), is the moment she finally separates the past from the present and is, in effect, "reborn in Norway." Now, finally, she will be able to reconcile herself to the ascetic world in which she has existed for twelve years. Now, at last, she should be able to share wholly in the simple pleasures and self-denial of these people, all of which she has borne stoically these past years, but has never made her own. And now, finally, she will probably learn to converse with a community whose language she "never learned to speak" (16), and her "broken Norwegian" (17) may well become fluent.

These changes do not mean that Babette will henceforth be immune to feelings of loss, longing, and sadness. On the contrary, she will now mourn normally; she will spend years, perhaps the rest of her life, slowly digesting and making a part of herself the loss she has suffered. While doing so, however, she will be able to live and find pleasure in the present and move forward in life. She no longer will spend her time "lost in the study" (18) of her recipe book and conjuring meals she could only confect in the past. When, at the very end of the story, Philippa puts her arms around Babette and feels "the cook's body like a marble monument against her own" (48), it is because Babette, through the feast, has become herself a living memorial for the dead. She has become a sarcophagus of sorts, a living tomb who carries within her the trace or inscription of a loss she can now recall and mourn at will.

2

Babette's feast serves not only to cure her own inability to mourn, but that of General Loewenhielm as well. Recognizing the Cailles en Sarcophage before him as the speciality of the Cafe Anglais in Paris, he speaks of the woman chef there, the "greatest culinary genius of the age" (38), who could turn a dinner into "a kind of love affair . . . in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety" (38). Given his initial perception of Martine as a "golden-haired angel" (6) and as a "vision of a higher and purer life" (6) who reminds him of a Huldre or "female mountain spirit" (5) of Norway, the general's conflation of the bodily and the spiritual takes on precise significance. It suggests that we read the dish before him in "spiritual" - psychic or figurative - terms; that we see the Quail in Sarcophagus, which provokes his comments, as the fleshly incarnation - for him - of his lost but never buried or mourned "love affair" with the spiritual, angelic Martine. For the general, literally swallowing the flesh of the quail is equivalent to "swallowing" figuratively and beginning to digest psychically or "spiritually" the loss of his "petite caille," of his angelic, "winged" beloved.