Isak Dinesen's novella Babette's Feast tells the story of how a small, quarrelsome Lutheran community in Norway comes to be transformed by the arrival of a stranger, the French cook Babette. In her deceptively simple tale, Dinesen adopts explicitly Eucharistic language and imagery to convey the connection between eating and faith, exploring via rich use of metaphor the way in which we come to be inhabited and nourished by the other. In this paper, I follow Dinesen's sacramental perspective by offering the Catholic notion of transubstantiation as a model for furthering psychoanalytic theorizing about the presence of the other within. Following an outline of Dinesen's story, I draw on work by Freud, Abraham and Torok, and Kristeva to explore differing notions of unconscious identification, incorporation and the metaphorical basis of subjectivity. I develop these ideas through a discussion of the central celebratory dinner given by Babette and conclude by considering some of the implications of the story for psychoanalytic practice.