À Table ! (Second Edition)

Intended for intermediate or advanced students of French, À Table ! The Food Culture of France is a content-based cultural text centered around the cuisine of France and various French-speaking cultures. Organized like a French menu, each chapter includes prose, poetry, film references, and recipes, together with vocabulary, grammar points, and exercises. This second edition of À Table ! features a redesigned full-color interior to reflect the richness and color of French food culture and history. The author has also added questions for reading comprehension and has expanded and rearranged select readings to give the text a more coherent organization. A chronological arrangement of chapters, along with a variety of food-related sources, encourages a comprehensive yet flexible approach to learning French language and its cultural contexts. North American rights only.

Instructor Resources:

A PDF-only instructor's manual with sample syllabi, exercises and more is available to qualified instructors who have adopted À Table ! (Second Edition) as a required course text. The PDF instructor's manual may be requested here by completing the instructor materials request form. An expanded and enhanced instructor's manual is now available (as of June 2026). In addition to providing more guidance and materials for teachers, the revised IM contains two complete resources and study guides for both the French and English editions of Peter Mayle's Aventures dans la France gourmande avec ma fourchette, mon couteau et mon tire-bouchon (Seuil, 2003) / French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew (Knopf, 2001), and Calixthe Beyala's Comment cuisiner son mari à l'africaine (Albin Michel, 2000).

Reviews:

"À Table ! makes a brilliant companion for intermediate-to-advanced courses or a perfect primary textbook for a content-focused study of French culinary culture. Astutely fashioned after a French menu with its nine chapters chronologically embodying individual facets of a multi-course meal from apéritif to digestif, À table ! incorporates excerpts of prose, poetry, and film that address the culture of eating in France. The author also blends recipes and instructions for dégustations with vocabulary and grammar explanations/activities that foster creative and pragmatic interactions. . . . This second edition comes replete with a full-color transformation of the layout, which displays a more user-friendly text. . . . Brown's guides with basic chapter-by-chapter comprehension questions are readymade to ease instructors' workloads while guiding students through a more extensive literary experience in French. Overall, this new edition accomplishes much. It helps students develop vocabulary, sharpen analytical skills, and broaden knowledge of contemporary Francophone culinary culture through exposure to different styles of journalistic writing, recipes, and literature. It is a solid tool for reinforcing grammar and writing through short compositions and contextualized grammar exercises offered in the 'Une cuillerée de réflexion' and 'Un zeste d’activité' sections."
      —Sarah Glasco, Elon University, in the French Review

"Using the topic of cuisine to expand a student’s knowledge of the French language and culture, À Table ! presents skillfully chosen intermediate-to-advanced learning materials. A teacher will want to try this content-based instruction in the classroom, while a student will be eager to try the recipes at home."
      —Masha Mikolchak, St. Cloud State University

"À Table ! offers a winning recipe for a special topics class that can be completely self-contained or easily supplemented for more advanced students. . . . Becky Brown's approach corresponds beautifully to the curricular needs of French programs in the twenty-first century."
      —Deborah Houk Schocket, Bowling Green State University

"This new edition of A Table ! provides more resources for the instructor and the student: content has been expanded, and there are improved comprehension and discussion questions, more interesting visuals, and enhancements to the organization and presentation of the material. I look forward to using the second edition in my courses."
      —Joanne McKeown, Moravian College

Praise for the first edition

À Table ! provides a lively, intriguing, well-designed, and pedagogically sound set of learning materials that bring taste back into the curriculum and put content-based learning on the table."
      —Kathryn Murphy-Judy, Virginia Commonwealth University, in The Modern Language Journal

About the Author:

Becky Brown is Professor of Linguistics at Purdue University. In addition to sociolinguistics, French, and World Languages pedagogy, her most recent focus is on innovative methodologies in learning language and culture through a country’s foodways. She has shared her enthusiasm with students of French for over thirty years and has received many teaching awards and honors.