A Gathering in a Forest: The Unsettling Environment and Culinary Ethics of Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe

A meal is often a gathering: a group of people coming together to share food. A meal is always a “gathering” in the sense that Bruno Latour uses the word to describe a way of understanding any one “thing” as the result of a choreography of various participants, both animate and inanimate, material and discursive (233). Innumerable participants (cooks, eaters, agriculturalists, ingredients, methods, cookware, utensils, dishes, the table, the room, even the weather) come together to produce the thing (a meal) as a gathering. These entanglements reveal themselves in the wake of events that occasion “the merging of matters of fact into highly complex, historically situated, richly diverse matters of concern” (237). Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel (La Cheffe: Roman d’une cuisinière, 2016; translated 2019) makes food a matter of critical concern. The novel traces the titular cook’s career from kitchen maid to Michelin-starred chef, and the logic of the meal as a gathering drives the narrative: the central episode—unfolding over more than a quarter of the novel—describes, from conception to consumption, the first meal the Cheffe’s prepares for her employers, the Clapeaus, at their summer home in the Landes Forest of Gascony in Southwest France. The Landes pines contribute to the unsettling site of the meal, murmuring, casting shadows and judgements, and embodying the narrative’s attention to the agency of nonhuman materiality in the culinary experience.