Gourmandise and other “minor transgressions”. Sin in Philippe Delerm’s culinary vocabulary

Philippe Delerm’s prose extols the joy that comes from contemplating everyday life. Experienced intensely, it is a source of pleasure and happiness. The pleasures of food are a theme particularly exploited in this writer’s novels. The approach taken in this article is onomasiological in nature. Its aim is to analyse the lexical units that fall within the conceptual field of the term sin, while referring to different types of food and the sensations associated with its consumption. The occurrences have been systematized according to the list of the seven deadly sins established by Evagrius Ponticus.

The French-German cookbook by Johann Rottenhöfer (1858 and 1867) and its Hungarian copy (1881 and 1883)

The aim of this article is to present Johann Rottenhöfer’s French-German cookbook, his French inspirations and his ideas of political gastronomy from the court of King Maximilian II of Bavaria. Next, a cookbook in Hungarian from 1881 is presented : it is almost identical to Rottenhöfer’s, but published under the name of József C. Dobos, then republished in 1883 under the name of Károly Duby.

Food became a symbol of societal and national identity throughout the Renaissance, when perceptions of the world shifted from divine to anthropocentric. There were more descriptions of food in Renaissance texts; the authors provided a thorough account of the composition of dishes, as well as traditions and customs of the time. Food, like humanism, has the same aims in Rabelais’ works: human progress through the nutrition system. Two Ukrainian translations of Rabelais’ “Gargantua et Pantagruel” are examined in the article, and the significance and content of food-related episodes are interpreted in various ways.

The theme of wine in the novel Moderato cantabile by Marguerite Duras in the light of textual interpretative semantics

The objective of the article is to analyze the theme of wine conveyed in the novel Moderato cantabile by Marguerite Duras. It is a question of accounting for the way in which the theme, fundamental in the text analyzed and perceptible on the paradigmatic level (in its tabular reading), is constructed on the syntagmatic level (in the linear reading) through the establishment of a network of relevant semantic isotopies.

Italo Calvino and Jacques Probst: food as a textual propulsor (structural deployment and diffuse deployment of a literary theme)

This article analizes the theme (motif) of food in Un navire chargé de..., a folk tale rewritten by Italo Calvino and Lise, l’île by Jacques Probst. The Italian tale and the Suiss monologue actually represent two different ways of using food elements in the construction of a text. The first uses the thematic elements in a punctual way, in the crucial moments of the action which correspond to the strong points of the fable; this strategy is called structural deployment of the thematic cluster. The second text, exploiting the absence of food, involves food elements over its entire extent and at different levels of its structure, what we call diffuse deployment (of the thematic cluster).

The culinary specialties of Lyon – from the local gastronomic cultureme to the national gastronomic cultureme

The article deals with the question of Lyon specialties as French “gastronomic culturemes”, as well as with the presentation and definition of Lyonnais dishes offered in typical restaurants, known as “Bouchons Lyonnais”. Each culinary specialty name carries a story and expresses a tradition: local, regional or national. We are going to ponder about the context in which Lyon culturemes with a culinary connotation appeared, about the evolution of the terms in use, and finally, about their presence, throughout history, in the French cultural landscape.