From Charlemagne s brie to the Tatin sisters inverted tart, culinary legends and their uses

Whether the subject is the star items in the French food pantheon-camembert, the baguette, the tarte Tatin-or specialties of more local renown- petits pates from Pezenas, Montargis pralines -, a wealth of stories surrounds the origins of innumerable recipes and products. These stories are generally dubious and, more often than not, completely and indisputably false. Many of them were invented in the nineteenth century, while others appeared much more recently. None offer much resistance to the research and refutations of historians. Our proposal here is to analyse this vast corpus of narratives, to identify the recurrent motifs that structure them and to interpret the functions they fulfil. Why are they given such enthusiastic credence? What purpose do they serve? Among the various roles played by these legends, we are particularly interested by the hypothesis which suggests that they are at one and the same time the expression of a process of collective appropriation and a tool that serves this appropriation, in other words, the symptom and the instrument for defining food and cooking as heritage.