The New York Times called her a “kitchen Olympian.” W.H. Auden called her, “the best prose writer in America.” Sixty years ago, she created a genre and has since become the doyen—an icon—of the world which she created. Before M.F.K. Fisher (and, alas, still for those non-believers blind in both vision and palate) the obligations of table were just that: dull, rushed affairs that were there to be gotten through, where foods were served forth without much thought given to taste, balance, relation, or nourishment, whether of the body or the soul. Eating was merely a utilitarian act. M.F.K. Fisher saw things from a different perspective: “too few of us perhaps feel that the breaking of bread, the sharing of salt, the common dipping into one bowl, mean more than the satisfaction of a need. We make such primal things as casual as tunes heard over a radio, forgetting the mystery and strength in both. Sharing meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations.”
Mrs. Fisher died this past June at age 83, but she has left with us through her writings her mercurial, feisty, laughing spirit, as well as her exhortations, by turns gentle and impatient, to savor the sensuous pleasures of the table; to be conscious that when we eat, we are participating in an act steeped in ritual, tradition, superstition, and meaning. It is a time, in short, for reflection, ceremony, and perhaps most of all, for delight.
She began in Albion, Michigan, born of stolid, Protestant, Mid-western stock. Her father, a newspaper man, moved his family to the small Quaker town of Whittier, California where he purchased and ran the “Whittier Gazette.” She, an Episcopalian, was never invited into the homes of her Quaker playmates: “an outsider looking in.” Later, she would leave that “inner ghetto” as she called it, and begin to live in the world: Dijon, Strasbourg, Burgundy, Bavaria, Geneva, and Paris. She wrote of these places and the people she had known there, the meals she had eaten, the hungers she had satisfied.
That Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher wrote about food is true although only superficially. Indeed, her books are usually stacked (somewhat uncomfortably, I’ve always thought) in the Cooking or (even more cramped retail category) Cookbooks sections of the corner Barnes and Noble. Far better, I think, to shelve her slim paper treasures under Life, Love, Sex, or—best of all—Hunger. In her own words: “People ask me: why do you write about food and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it, and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied—and it is all one.” She wrote of all those things—small, quiet, and great; joyous, melancholy, and transcendent—that are available to and for us, those things that touch and, if we’re lucky enough to recognize these blessings, transform our daily lives. Cookbooks indeed.
She found the satisfactions of her hungers in foods and places that were, more often than not, simple and honest, and she wrote of them in words at once subtle and voluptuous and always utterly transporting. A woman, upon hearing that the young Fishers would soon be living in Dijon: ” ‘Oh, Dijon!’ She put her hands up to her eyes and wept, and then cried out fiercely: The smell of it! The smell of Dijon gingerbread! When you are there smell it for me!’
“So we did.
“We smelled Dijon mustard, especially at the corner where Grey Poupon flaunts little pots of it. We smelled Dijon cassis in the autumn, and stained our mouths with its metallic purple. But all year and everywhere we smelled the Dijon gingerbread. Into the theater sometimes would swim a little cloud of it, or quickly through a cafe grey with smoke. In churches it went for one triumphant minute far above the incense.”
A bit more exotic and probably more nourishing (for the body, anyway) is a recipe borne out of Mrs. Fisher’s days as a young bride enduring a bitterly cold February in Strasbourg. It is a strange “receipt,” an example of what she called “secret eatings,” preparations made all the more satisfying because of their private natures. It is a treat, quite simply, of tangerine sections that have been peeled, left upon a radiator where they grow “plumper, hot and full.” They are then carried to the window and placed for a few minutes outside to chill upon the packed snow.
Inside, the room is big, with windows and clean, white, billowy curtains. And it is warm, almost sultry. In this room, during that bleak mid-winter, “we basked like lizards.” The maid pads about the room, fluffing up pillows. She mutters of seduction and of French bicyclists “who ride more than wheels.” From the windows of the cozy room, one watches the soldiers march through the snow, returning from their Rhine watch. Finally: “the sections of tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a chinese bowl, that crackles so tinnily, so ultimately under your teeth, or the rush of cold pulp just after it, or the perfume. I cannot tell.”
Yet Mrs. Fisher was no mere sensualist. Indeed, she would have looked with great distaste at the somewhat precious appreciation of the small delights (the smaller the better) that are self-consciously arranged in the sensualist’s life. Nor did she seek the pomposity of the twee sensualist’s more worldly cousin, the “pedagogic connoisseur.” She disdained the solemn and studied appreciation that fills to overflowing local food and wine societies. She lived, rather, in a decidedly larger and more complete world, where caution was cast out and fortune welcomed in for the unexpected pleasures it brought. “Hidebound habits should occasionally be attacked,” she insisted. “A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: He has no need for it being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom. He not only knows from everything admirable he has read that he will not like Irish Whiskey with pineapple chilled in honey and vermouth or a vintage Chambertin with poached lake perch; but every taste bud on both his actual and spiritual palate wilts in revulsion at such thoughts. He does not serve these or similar combinations not because he has been told, but because he knows.”
For her, then, it was the spirit in which one cooked and ate a meal which made the difference: honestly and lustfully to cure real hunger—or pompously, preciously, where the preparation and studied appreciation of the meal becomes the end in itself. Mrs. Fisher invariably, delightedly, allied herself with the side of Honesty, Nourishment, and Desire.
In her 83 years, M.F.K. Fisher published 16 books (including a brilliant translation of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste), hundreds of New Yorker articles, lived in three countries, weathered three marriages, and raised two daughters. She was also considered by many to be somewhat of a beauty. Man Ray photographed her, and his portraits grace the cover of at least one of her books. In her later years she settled at Bouverie Ranch in Glen Ellen, California, and her house there became the object of countless pilgrimages by writers and food enthusiasts. There she continued to cook and write until ill health and, later, Parkinson’s disease allowed her to cook less and less. Thankfully, she was able to continue writing. Through whispered dictation, her voice nearly robbed by her disease, she published 6 books in the remaining 9 years of her life. Indeed in these last years she said that her heart and mind had never been clearer. (This writer recommends the uninitiated begin with Mrs. Fisher’s earliest works: Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, and An Alphabet for Gourmets; all have been lovingly re-released by the Northpoint Press.)
In a 1990 New York Times interview she stated, “I’m not hungry anymore,” sad words from a woman who spent most of her life vitally savoring the nourishing delights of table, the fruits of the world’s vineyards, gardens, and groves. She taught us how to enjoy with quiet satisfaction and daily thanks the gifts that have been given to us for our nourishment. With a nod to Seneca, she taught us, after all, how to savor life itself: “Then, with good friends and good food on the board, and good wine in the pitcher, we may well ask, When shall we live if not now?”