Two weeks ago, I re-watched 'Babette's Feast', because I wanted my linguist-farmer fiancé to see it. I contended that the story remains somehow foundational to my identity as a feminist writer and a home cook. It is a work of art I keep returning to, akin to what the Pakistani feminist author, Sarah Ahmed refers to as a companion text.

The 1987 Danish film, directed by Gabriel Axel, is based on the eponymous short story by Karen Blixen. Two Protestant sisters, daughters of the founder of a religious sect, come to inherit a French maid, Babette, who arrives at their doorstep in Jutland, the Cimbrian Peninsula, a refugee from the counter-revolutionary bloodshed in Paris in 1871. She has been recommended to them by Papin, one of the sisters' rejected flames.