A word from M.F.K Fisher
"Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat."
M.F.K. Fisher
Today I started on a follow-up on yesterday's Robert Carrier article, pondered on a first recipe post and then decided I would be really lazy and go for a lucky dip - a real lucky dip as my husband pointed me to the chosen book. I sort of know where books are, even with my eyes closed so when I do it alone it's not really a true lucky dip. The book he chose was one of those from the Time-Life series Foods of the World and the particular one he chose was The Cooking of Provincial France.
I thought it had been written by Richard Olney who has already had an A Word From ... post, but no the author was MFK Fisher. The name was vaguely familiar, but not really and so I looked her up - I saw that she was a lady from the picture in the book. And one of the first things I found was the quote at the top of the page which rather piqued my interest, and so I changed my mind and decided to do an A Word From ... post. It's a while since I have.
She's most well-known for food memoirs rather than recipes and in fact I think she just wrote the text in my Time-life book. Julia Child did the recipes. And she says that it is really the only book she did for money.
“I did that one for the money; it was the first time I ever had an expense account. When Time Life asked me to contribute to their series I told them very bluntly that I didn’t need to go to Provence. I could have done it all at home, but I had French friends who were sort of dying on the vine, and I didn’t have any money to get over there. It worked out beautifully. For me.”
Here is my copy of the book - you can just see a ring from the bottom of some bottle or jar, that must have been accidentally placed on its cover. I could wipe it off because the cover is heavily plasticised, but somehow I don't want to. An interesting choice of dish for the cover too - a soufflé because in her introduction, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher distinguished between the haute cuisine of 5 star restaurants, which tend to serve such dishes and the simple peasant food of the provinces. But now that I think about it maybe it's really quite clever as it shows the link between that most basic food - an egg - and the most complicated food - a soufflé.
But really the book is about Provincial food and all the classics are there. I used it a lot in my young days. This and Elizabeth David's book on Provincial France were where I learnt to reproduce the food that I had eaten all those years ago in France.
"Given the intrinsic wish to continue as long as possible, in this chancy world, the rituals of eating in order to live, we can all follow with rare enjoyment the patterns of people who for centuries have managed to subsist on what their nearest hills and brooks and meadows provide for them. They have survived because they use their wits as well as their teeth, and so can we." MFK Fisher
She continues in this vein throughout the book. Her prose is wonderful, but is somehow dated - this book was published in 1969. If I had more time I would look at it more closely to see if I can discover why that is. It's like Robert Carrier's book - of its time. And it really is interesting to see how language has changed over the years. A topic for another post perhaps.
MFK Fisher died in 1992 in California. She was American but lived in France and Switzerland for long periods. She was married three times - her second marriage, to the love of her life, ending tragically when her husband committed suicide because of illness. She wrote many books and is generally credited with being the inventor of the food memoir and most likely of blogs like this one.
"Where once the focus of food literature was the preparation of the food, the etiquette of eating, or high-falutin philosophical debates about the nature of good taste, it is now overwhelmingly focussed on the self. One of her most famous works, The Gastronomical Me, takes Fisher’s “me” as its subject, with “gastronomical” merely the qualifier. Her disciples, whether they know it or not, have this written into their culinary DNA. When we write about eating, we write about emotion, identity, family, home—questions of time and place and self. When we talk about food, we are talking about ourselves. And in some small way at least, for better or worse, we are talking about M.F.K. Fisher." Ruby Tandoh
” She was the first to write about food as a way of understanding the world, and with The Gastronomical Me she virtually invented the food memoir. And long before food and food studies became fashionable she was insisting that we would all be better if we studied our own hungers. It is a lesson we’re still learning." Ruth Reichl
"Fisher’s is a kind of food writing in which the presence of food necessarily implies the presence of an eater, and where the story of that eater—their hunger, mouth, tongue, tastes, and body—is placed at the centre of the story." Ruby Tandoh
So in a sense she was very modern. For are we not the 'me' generation? These days we are inundated with foodie blogs, foodie magazines and foodie programs. I saw that she deplored a little, this focus on food, saying that in the process we were ignoring the side issues - poor pay for workers, overeating issues, food production, climate change, etc. etc. But I do hope that I talk about all these things, just a little bit.
"To Mary Frances food was a metaphor for living," Ruth Reichl
Better writers than I have written about the lady, and so I shall just end with a couple of recipes - one is sort of a joke - and some words from the lady herself. Some are poetic, some are wise, some are funny, some are phlegmatic, but all are interesting. I must try and find a few more of her books.
First the recipes:
"a recipe for sludge (take all the vegetable and meat scraps you have; boil; add "whole-grain cereal"; serve to someone you dislike)." MFK Fisher
Sounds a little like something you might find in a healthy kind of cookbook.
This one, though is a genuine simple recipe. A bit Elizabeth David really.
VEVEY MARKET MUSHROOMS (OR ANY)
1 quart fresh mushrooms 3 to 4 tablespoons sweet butter 1½ cups rich cream Salt, pepper ¼ cup fresh lemon juice or ½ cup dry white wine 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, if wished Thick slices of toasted and buttered French bread
Brush mushrooms, or rinse and dry quickly, and cut in halves or large pieces. Heat butter in skillet, add mushrooms, and move them about briskly. When they have made their juices and then reabsorbed them, add the cream and seasoning and stir until bubbling. Quickly add the lemon juice or wine (and the Worcestershire if wished), and pour at once over the toast. This is a fast job, well worth the attention it needs.
And here are some random 'Words from ..."
"Sardines in cans have a special quality which one either pines for or despises." MFK Fisher
"there can be no warm, rich home life anywhere else if it does not exist at table, and in the same way there can be no enduring family happiness, no real marriage, if a man and woman cannot open themselves generously and without suspicion one to the other over a shared bowl of soup as well as a shared caress." MFK fisher
“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.” ― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
On cookbooks:
“we are told… not only how but what to eat, and when, and where. The pictures are colourful. The prose, often written by famous people, is deliberately persuasive, if often supercilious in a way that makes us out as… gastronomical oafs badly in need of guidance toward the satisfaction of appetites we are unaware of.” MFK Fisher
“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight... [Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.” ― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
“...it was one of the best meals we ever ate. Perhaps that is because it was the first conscious one, for me at least; but the fact that we remember it with such queer clarity must mean that it had other reasons for being important. I suppose that happens at least once to every human. I hope so.
“First we eat, then we do everything else.” MFK Fisher
