Babette's Feast: The Complete Menu

What it is

A meal prepared by a French chef named Babette Hersant for a small community of elderly, austere Norwegian pietists on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the community's founder. The feast consists of: turtle soup, blinis Demidoff with sour cream and caviar, cailles en sarcophage (quails in a pastry coffin with foie gras and truffle sauce), a cheese course with fruit and crackers, fresh fruit, and baba au rhum with figs. It is accompanied by Amontillado sherry, Veuve Clicquot champagne (1860), and Clos de Vougeot Burgundy (1845). The meal costs exactly 10,000 francs — which is the entire prize Babette has won in the French lottery. She spends everything. She gives everything.

The source work

Babette's Feast (Babettes gæstebud), a short story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), first published in Ladies' Home Journal in 1950 and collected in Anecdotes of Destiny (1958). Adapted into a Danish-language film directed by Gabriel Axel in 1987, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film is considered by many food writers and critics to be the single greatest film ever made about food.

The community is a small sect of pietist Lutherans on the Jutland coast of Norway (the story) / Denmark (the film). The sect was founded by a minister of remarkable spiritual authority; his two daughters, Martine and Filippa, were beautiful and gifted, and each sacrificed a potential worldly life — Martine refused a dashing young officer, Filippa refused a career as an opera singer — to remain with their father and the community. The community is now old and querulous, its members at odds over minor grievances accumulated over decades. Babette, a French refugee, has been their cook and servant for fourteen years, making simple Norwegian food — boiled cod, bread-and-ale soup — on minimal means.

When Babette wins 10,000 francs in the lottery, she asks permission to prepare, just once, a French dinner for the community. The community, terrified of worldly indulgence, agrees but makes a private pact to eat the food without enjoyment — to consume it without speaking of taste or pleasure. Into this world of willful austerity, Babette introduces the greatest meal of their lives.

The complete menu and its real-world basis:

Potage à la tortue (Turtle Soup): Genuine green turtle soup, made from a sea turtle brought live to the community by ship. This is now illegal under international marine conservation law, and genuine turtle soup has not been served in serious European restaurants for decades. In its historical form, turtle soup was one of the most prestigious dishes in nineteenth-century European cuisine — served at state banquets, at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in London, at the finest restaurants in Paris. The preparation is elaborate: the turtle is killed, the meat separated, and a rich, dark, aromatic soup made with the meat, turtle fat, vegetables, and sherry. Mock turtle soup — made with calf's head, whose gelatinous texture approximates turtle — was a common substitute, famously referenced by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland.

Blinis Demidoff: Yeasted buckwheat blinis — small, thick, slightly sour pancakes made with buckwheat flour and raised with yeast rather than baking powder, giving them a delicate, complex flavor — served with crème fraîche and beluga caviar. The "Demidoff" designation refers to Count Anatoly Demidoff, a nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat famous for lavish entertaining in Paris; dishes bearing his name were associated with the highest level of aristocratic hospitality. Buckwheat blinis with caviar are the canonical Russian appetizer, embedded in the food culture of the Russian aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie.

Cailles en sarcophage: Quails in a pastry coffin — individual quails, deboned or semi-deboned, stuffed with foie gras and truffle, enclosed in a puff pastry case (the "sarcophage"), roasted, and served with a rich Périgueux sauce (truffle sauce) and a single truffle slice on top. This is a dish from the highest tradition of nineteenth-century French cuisine — complex, labor-intensive, expensive, and deeply unfashionable by the 1950s when Dinesen wrote the story. It is the kind of dish that was served at Maxim's in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, in the restaurants of Escoffier's era. The specific detail of Dinesen's description — "cailles en sarcophage" — gives the dish a slightly macabre, slightly theatrical name ("little birds in coffins") that is entirely appropriate to the feast's setting in a community that has spent its life denying the pleasures of the body.

The cheese and fruit course: A transitional course of aged cheeses — probably Norman or Burgundian varieties given Babette's background — with seasonal fruit and crackers.

Baba au rhum: A small yeast-raised cake (the baba or savarin), soaked in rum syrup and served with cream, accompanied by fresh figs. Baba au rhum is one of the great desserts of classic French patisserie, with roots in the Polish and Alsatian baking traditions — the baba was allegedly invented by the Polish King Stanisław Leszczyński in the eighteenth century and refined by French pastry chefs. The rum syrup that soaks the cake is the defining element: the cake is purposely dry so that it can absorb an enormous quantity of syrup, becoming intensely moist, fragrant, and slightly intoxicating.

The wines: The Amontillado sherry is a medium-dry, amber-colored sherry from the Andalusian production zone in Spain, aged under a film of yeast (flor) and then further oxidized — the result is a wine of remarkable complexity, with notes of walnut, caramel, dried fruit, and salt. Dinesen's use of Amontillado may be a deliberate reference to Edgar Allan Poe's famous story "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), in which Amontillado is used as the bait of a fatal temptation — an appropriate intertextual note for a feast that is, among other things, about the fine line between pleasure and danger.

The 1860 Veuve Clicquot champagne and the 1845 Clos de Vougeot Burgundy are both presented in the story as wines of legendary age and quality — the Veuve Clicquot almost certainly fictional as a specific bottle, the Clos de Vougeot representing the finest red Burgundy, a grand cru wine from the Côte de Nuits that has been made by the monks of Cîteaux and their successors since the twelfth century.

Why the author chose it

The feast is doing complex and serious theological and artistic work, and every element of the menu is selected for a reason.

The theological argument: Dinesen (Karen Blixen) was a writer deeply interested in grace — in the concept from Christian theology of an unearned gift given freely, that transforms the recipient without their deserving it. The feast is, in her reading, an expression of grace: Babette gives everything she has, with no expectation of return or recognition, and the community receives something it has been unable to give itself — reconciliation, joy, love. The specific excess of the menu is necessary to this argument. Babette does not make a good dinner. She makes the best dinner that can be made with 10,000 francs and the skills of a chef who was once the head chef of the Café Anglais in Paris. She makes a dinner for which there is no adequate response except awe.

The artistic argument: Dinesen was also making an argument about art: that a great artist serves the work, not the audience, and that the gift of great art cannot be measured by the response of the people who receive it. The community eats the feast while trying not to enjoy it. They are transformed by it regardless. The art works whether or not the audience is prepared to receive it.

The class and culture argument: The feast is also a story about a French woman of extraordinary talent who has spent fourteen years making boiled cod for people who neither know nor care what they are eating. The 10,000 francs is not merely a lottery prize; it is the payment, finally, for her labor — and she spends it back on them. The generosity is almost an act of violence. Babette, the story argues, is the greatest person in the room, and the community she has served does not and cannot know this.

The real-world recreation attempts: The feast in Babette's Feast has been recreated more than almost any other fictional meal in the culinary tradition, and with more seriousness. The specific menu is detailed enough, and culturally specific enough, to serve as an actual recipe and procurement list. Several recreations have been documented:

Restaurant recreations: Multiple restaurants in Copenhagen and Paris have staged formal recreations of Babette's feast, often coinciding with screenings of the film or with Danish National Day. These recreations have universally faced the problem of the turtle soup, which must be replaced with mock turtle or a substitute preparation, and the challenge of the aged wines, which require either authentic vintages (extremely expensive and available only at specialist auction) or modern substitutes.

The definitive recreation account: The food writer Jeffrey Steingarten (of Vogue) documented a serious attempt to recreate the feast in its entirety in his book The Man Who Ate Everything (1997), including extensive research into the specific dishes and the procurement of historical wines. His account is the most detailed food-critical engagement with the menu in print.

Home cook recreations: The feast has inspired a significant home cook tradition, particularly among serious food enthusiasts who screen the film and then attempt versions of the menu. The blinis Demidoff and the baba au rhum are the most commonly attempted elements; the cailles en sarcophage requires the most skill and is the most rarely attempted.

The argument that Babette's Feast is the greatest food film: The claim is made regularly by food critics, including the late Jonathan Gold and the writer Anthony Lane, and it is worth examining seriously. The argument is not that the film shows the most impressive or ambitious cooking — Jiro Dreams of Sushi has a stronger claim to that. The argument is that Babette's Feast most fully understands what food means: what it is for, what it does that cannot be done any other way, what it represents about the human capacity for love, generosity, and grace. The feast is the film's argument made material: that a great cook is a great artist, that art is an act of love, and that the experience of a perfectly made meal, in the right context, can do what no sermon or prayer has managed — it can dissolve the accumulated grievances of decades and restore a community to itself.

Reference notes

• Blinis (Buckwheat) — grain/patisserie entry; Russian tradition, yeasted vs. quick-leavened versions
• Caviar (Beluga and Sturgeon) — ingredient entry; Caspian tradition, overfishing and conservation status, sustainable alternatives
• Foie Gras — ingredient and technique entry; French tradition, production controversies, legal status by region
• Truffle (Périgord Black Truffle) — ingredient entry; Tuber melanosporum, French production, seasonal harvesting
• Baba au Rhum — patisserie entry; Polish/French history, savarin variation, rum syrup technique
• Burgundy (Clos de Vougeot) — wine entry; Cistercian origins, grand cru status, Pinot Noir tradition
• Amontillado Sherry — wine entry; Jerez production, flor aging, oxidative development
• Veuve Clicquot — Champagne house entry; Nicole-Barbe Clicquot, riddling technique invention
• Danish and Norwegian Cuisines — regional overview; pietist food culture, Lutheran simplicity tradition
• Turtle (Historical Culinary Use) — historical food entry; conservation note, mock turtle substitutes

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