Here are some pictures of 2 food movies I watched this week. I call them food that just happen in movies because no one will ever prepare them unless you are a French aristocrat (I happen to know one) or you have loads of money. They are Babette's Feast (on DVD) which won the Oscar Best Foreign Film in 1989. And Le Grand Chef whose cute male lead has been pulling in the sales. The former is Ang Moh cuisine (French). the second is Asian(Korean). Apart from food, both have comedy and morals in them. The former is a kind of wry, dead-pan comedy the Danish do so well. The latter is slapstick.
But the best part has to be the morals. In the former, Babette, the French maid whom 2 Danish sisters hired as a maid threw all her lottery $$$win into cooking a yummy French dinner to thank the sisters for providing her with asylum (she was escaping the French civil war). When they found out she spent all her $$, they were obviously shocked. Babette replied, she used to be the head chef of some high official's club in Paris and she is an artist, an artist 's reward is creating the work.
The commercial Korean flick had the surprising ability to mourish me with another thought. When Japan occupied Korea back in dunno when (think end of Chosun dynasty), the royal chef cooked the emperor something that broke his hunger strike (protest against Japanese conquerors). Drinking it made the emperor weep buckets. Cos underlying the simple soup (which had a home-made feel) were ingredients that had patriotic significance.
How true this was, I am not entirely sure but I think I am such a sucker for food movies!!