À Table ! The Gourmet Culture of France is a French culture text intended for the intermediate or advanced student. Ideally, students will have had two years of French grammar instruction covering the typical 4-skills curriculum—speaking, writing, reading, listening. As such, the emphasis in this manual is French society, language, history, custom and attitude, while only certain contextualized grammar revision is presented in supplementary form.

Like any other specific domain, the world of gastronomy is replete with a unique jargon that is challenging in any language. In a semester-long course, however, this lengthy time span allows for revisiting, recapitulating, and recycling of culinary vocabulary, expressions and notions. In fact, since all of the material centers on this one theme, the student necessarily draws on the jargon of the field repeatedly throughout the course. This pedagogical design is often touted as one of the strong points of content-based instruction (CBI).

While the student benefits from this purported sound pedagogy, the instructor, however, is met with a daunting task—mastery of the content of food culture. Instructor’s competency in the content area, admittedly, is a serious concern of the CBI approach. Consequently, this book has been written with this concern in mind, such that each chapter and each section is self-contained. That is, all the necessary information is presented in each part of the text in order for the instructor to conduct meaningful discussions and activities, as well as subsequent writing assignments. Additionally, many useful resources appear throughout the book for further investigation, if desired. Furthermore, the appendix contains supplementary materials and helpful guides for both the instructor and student.

The chapters are organized for the most part chronologically. Decisions regarding chapter content and topic order were guided first and foremost by pedagogical soundness rather than necessarily by topical coherence. This occasional disjunction is, in fact, incidental for a CBI course whose goal is language mastery through content, as opposed to courses in culinary schools in which this particular content would be key. Thus, each chapter contains essays of information in different formats—prose and poetry, specific grammar points, a dégustation exercise, and a simple, but culturally important, recipe for the student to try at home. Given its componential design, the instructor may use any part of any chapter and may opt out of others. The text has also been designed with institutions in mind that incorporate Writing Across the Curriculum.