On “Cabbages and Kings”: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Post-Colonial French Society and Cuisine
Author(s)
Bahloul, Joelle
Abstract
In response to the efforts of the North African immigrants to integrate French culinary categories into their traditional cuisines, French gastronomy has fostered a relatively similar process of integration with defined symbolic boundaries. As an ethnographic example, in most large French cities today one can find a panoply of different, and especially North African, immigrant cuisines. It is as if no city in France can claim gastronomic status in the French urban landscape without at least one resto-couscous. Yet in the restaurants classified as offering typical French cuisine, one does not yet (or very rarely) find menus combining blanquette de veau or croque-monsieur with lamb tajines. So the process of integrating the immigrants’ cuisines has, here too, maintained strict symbolic boundaries and categories. The geographical distribution of ethnic restaurants in Paris is a significant ethnographic representation of a similar process. Although they are found in almost every neighborhood, couscous restaurants dominate the food industry in neighborhoods where immigrant populations are large, or in the Latin Quarter. The latter locale displays restaurants from a variety of international origins: Greek and Middle Eastern, North African, Vietnamese and Chinese, Southeast Asian, as well as French provincial restaurants. This multicultural climate in the Latin Quarter, historically identified as an academic and intellectual progressive locale, is not without cultural significance. Because it is strongly oriented towards serving tourists, the area constitutes an official display of the French politics of identity and otherness, at least in the domain of the food industry.
