Beauty in ‘Babette’s Feast’

Gabriel Axel’s superbly crafted 1987 film adaptation of “Babette’s Feast” won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Food is one its central themes, but, like the short story it’s based on — credited to Isak Dinesen, the pen name of the Danish writer Karen Blixen — it’s about so much more than that.

Set in Berlevaag, Norway, in the 1870s, the story is about the dean of a small Lutheran sect and his two beautiful daughters, Martine (after Martin Luther) and Phillipa. Though they are not without warmth, theirs is a puritanical existence in which “members [renounce] the pleasures of this world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion, and the true reality was the New Jerusalem to which they were longing.”

About the Author

Madeleine Kearns

Madeleine Kearns is a former staff writer at National Review.

Gabriel Axel’s superbly crafted 1987 film adaptation of “Babette’s Feast” won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Food is one its central themes, but, like the short story it’s based on — credited to Isak Dinesen, the pen name of the Danish writer Karen Blixen — it’s about so much more than that.

Set in Berlevaag, Norway, in the 1870s, the story is about the dean of a small Lutheran sect and his two beautiful daughters, Martine (after Martin Luther) and Phillipa. Though they are not without warmth, theirs is a puritanical existence in which “members [renounce] the pleasures of this world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion, and the true reality was the New Jerusalem to which they were longing.”