I took many good courses on creative nonfiction at the
college level. I read some of the most
interesting things in those courses because there was a less of a “canon” than
in fiction or poetry. I decided that if
I ever teach creative nonfiction, one text I will use is MFK Fisher’s The Art of Eating. This colossal book, first published in
1954, is a collection of Fisher’s books from the 1937 Serve It Forth to An Alphabet
for Gourmets. From reading these
books, I have become a devoted fan and would happily read anything Fisher
wrote. Like the best gastronomic
writers, she writes sensually and with precision and humor, and like the best
memoirist, she masters understatement and the unique link between the sensual
and the emotional. I loved every minute
of The Art of Eating and can’t
recommend it highly enough. If you find yourself pressed for time, however, and
can somehow find An Alphabet for Gourmets
separate to the other four books, I would recommend starting with that
book, simply because it is the apotheosis of Fisher’s style and repeats some of
the anecdotes, scenes, and wisdom from her previous books.
I love Fisher for many reasons. As a confirmed gourmand and aspiring gourmet,
her philosophy if not her technique is within my grasp and, moreover, her
strictures regarding the settings for eating well—regarded by some, no doubt,
as snobbish—strike resounding chords. I
love eating and always have. I wax
sentimental and sensual about good food and consider the fact I lost a lot of
weight proof of the deepest of my darkest bout of depression. However, I do not consider myself a good cook
and while I used to be a good baker, I have sort of lost the knack. So it’s nice to know that Fisher thought, “cooking
in itself is, for most women, a question less of vocation than of
necessity. . . . they cook doggedly,
desperately, more often than not with a cumulative if uninspired skill.” She acknowledges some cooks need “the radio”
or a “phonograph” to keep them company, but “Most of all I need to be let alone. I need peace.”
One could argue Fisher is hopelessly old-fashioned and stuck
in a bygone era of American culinary experience. She did, after all, predate Julia Child and
all television chefs; her childhood in the early years of the 20th
century give her a very different background in terms of “staple American diet”
than we know today. Furthermore, much in
her books could be considered quaint—especially How to Cook a Wolf. Her discussion of the horrors of an early
evening meal—“there is a fairly good play, a passable movie, a game of
bridge—surely some way to kill a few
hours”—predates the invention of TV. Her
description of a dream kitchen anticipates modern conveniences we now take for
granted: “dream-like rooms where glass
walls and metal sinks compete with electric dishwashers and mixers of cake for
the fascinated reader’s favour.” Despite
the multitude of good, solid, common sense advice in How to Cook a Wolf, and her 1950s addendums to 1940s writing,
Fisher can’t really be considered “Jamie Oliver-esque.” She came from a moneyed class and spends a
great part of each book discussing dining on ocean liners, an antiquated and
snobbish (it seems to me) custom (she reserves bile for a plane flight she took
in the 1950s to Mexico). Her activities
in Dijon, Strasbourg, and in various restaurants across the US seem to have all
the gaiety of the 1920s. Her second book
is Consider the Oyster, for
Chrissakes. (Having never eaten oysters and not being in a rush to do so, I
admit I read rather quickly through this book, though it was quite
interesting.)
Yet her call for variety must have been fairly radical in a
time when “it is likely more neurasthenics and downright homicidal maniacs have
been formed by roast-on-Sunday, fish-on-Friday, than by any other social
custom.” Personally, though I have ever
been in awe of the English Sunday lunch, I find it daunting and a bit
desperate. The “vegetable snobbism” she
speaks of has never really reared its ugly head at me, though I admit to being
unfamiliar with some vegetables I now eat much more often. “My mother, who was raised in a country too
crowded with Swedish immigrants, shudders at turnips, which they seem to have
lived on. And yet, there she ate, week
in and week out, corn meal mush and molasses[1], a dish
synonymous to many Americans with poor trash of the pariah-ridden South.”
How to Cook a Wolf was
written to help the women of America cope with wartime shortages, based
sometimes on the British model, sometimes coming from other sources. “You can make scrambled eggs ‘go a lot
further’ by putting bread crumbs in them when they are a little more than half
done.” Anyone who has ever tried to live
on Pot Noodle, breakfast cereal, or bread and tea (I confess to the latter)
will appreciate the story of a mother who got herself and 5 children through
the Great Depression through economy. “I
have occasionally thought of her and her system, and have wanted, in a faintly
masochistic mood, to see what five years rather than five months of farinaceous
vegetables and cheap spaghettis[2] and
breads would do the teeth and innards of her brood.” There is even a good chapter on what to feed
your pet when money/fuel/food is scarce.
(“There is one eccentric and wealthy old lady in Cornwall, the kind who
is often the victim in mystery stories, who was stoned in 1940 because she had
refused to kill her cat and her terrier.
Moreover, she had turned her cellars and her air-raid shelter into a
haven for every pet she could rescue from the panicky village. That seemed terrible to the people, to feed
and protect brute-beasts while little children were bombed and might be hungry
too. The old lady was most unpopular, in
1940. But in 1941 she was not.”) However, I took a lot of useful recipes from
this book. Though the suggestion raised an eyebrow from
Jamie, I love the idea of a supper consisting of just baked apples and hot
buttered toast!
I like Fisher because she is perverse and funny. “How [it] soup was discovered is best left
unpondered except by radio script-writers (!) and people who try to interest
children in the Stone Age[3].” “I have tried to be callous about slugs. I have tried to picture the beauty of their
primeval movements before a fast camera, and I have forced myself to read in
the Encylopedia Britannica the
harmless ingredients of their oozy bodies.
Nothing helps. I have a horror,
deep in my marrow, of everything about them.
Slugs are awful, slugs are things from the edges of insanity, and I am
afraid of slugs and all their attributes.
“But I
like snails. Most people like
snails.”
She announces in the introduction to her first book, Serve It Forth, that she will include no
recipes, and by the middle, she has cheerfully broken her cardinal rule, in one
of the most amazing chapters in the entire tome, waxing incredibly lyrical
about Dijonnaise gingerbread. It’s a
subject she returns to later, but the sensual experience of reading these pages
is almost as good as smelling or tasting the gingerbread (I surmise). “At art school, where tiny Yencesse tried to
convince the hungriest students that medal-making was a great career, and fed
them secretly whether they agreed or not, altar smoke crept through from the
cathedral on one side, and from the other the smell of pain d’épic baking in a little factory. It was a smell as thick as a flannel
curtain.” In the character of
English-born Bavarian governess Miss Lyse, we are privy to an elegy on
tea-drinking, and one of the most amazing creative nonfiction parts of the
book.
In the extensive introductory material, Fisher’s fourth
book, The Gastronomical Me, is called
oblique. At first I had no idea why
anyone would think that. The first half
is incredibly rich in memoir material of sharp, delightful detail and emotion. “The first thing I remember tasting and then
wanting to taste again is the grayish-pink fuzz my grandmother skimmed from a
spitting kettle of strawberry jam. I
suppose I was about four.” This scene,
from a storm of canning going on in Mary Frances’ grandmother’s kitchen in
1912, is the first that indicates a background not unlike the one of the girls
in Meet Me in St Louis. 1918 brings a bonding experience with her
father over hot peach pie told in incredible, corporeal detail. “There was a quart Mason jar, the
old-fashioned bluish kind like Mexican glass, full of cream. It was still cold, probably because we all
knew the stream it had lain in, Old Mary’s stream.” There’s a fantastic, almost unbelievable tale
about a frustrated cook who becomes a murderer.
However, it’s her first oyster, in 1924, when she’s a
teenager at Miss Huntingdon’s School for Girls, that is the pièce de résistance of The Art of Eating. Beautiful, clear-eyed physical detail is
remember alongside the story of teenage awkwardness and the strange social gap
between the girls, their families, and the staff. It’s a haunting, almost
cinematic tale that will change your life.
Perhaps one reason I love Fisher and feel like I know her almost as well
as if I’d met her is because she’s an all-American girl who nevertheless went
abroad once (to France, no less) and caught the bug, traveling back and forth
between Europe and America for the rest of her life. “I had never travelled more than a
twelve-mile trip home from school for vacations; I lived in the country outside
a very small California town; I had almost no friends there, because I had been
away a long time and grown very shy and rather snobbish; I was as sexless as a
ninety-year old nun. . . . And there I
was suddenly, big moody, full of undirected energies of a thousand kinds.” When she goes away to college with her
cousin, delightful, heady excess is the name of the game: “we could have four waffles and unlimited
coffee or a five-course meal for forty cents.
Then we would go to the theatre and eat candy; there were still small
companies playing Smilin’ Through and
Seventh Heaven then, or traveling
magicians. And after the show we’d have
another waffle, or two or three cups of hot chocolate. . . . I shudder
wholeheartedly and without either affection or regret at what we ate, nine
tenths of the time we were there, and remember several things with great
pleasure: Mr Cleary, of course; the
dishes of pickled peaches like translucent stained glass, at the Inn when we
were taken there for Sunday dinner; best of all, probably, the suppers Nan and
Rachel and I would eat in their room.
“Now I
think we ate them the way puppies chew
grasstops. They probably saved our lives.
“We
would buy ginger ale, rolls, cream cheese, anchovy paste, bottled ‘French’
dressing, and at least six heads of the most beautiful expensive lettuce we
could find in that little town where only snobs ate anything but cabbage,
turnips, and parsnips for the winter months.
“We
would lock the door, and mix the cheese and anchovy together and open the
ginger ale. Then we ould toast ourselves
solemnly in our toothbrush mugs, loosen the belts on our woollen bathrobes, and
tear into that crisp cool delightful lettuce like three starved rabbits.
“Now
and then one or another of us would get up, go t oa window and open it, bare
her little breasts to the cold sweep of air, and intone dramatically,
‘Pneu-mo-o-o-onia!” Then we would all
burst into completely helpless giggles, until the we had laughed enough to hold
a little more lettuce. Yes, that was the
best part of the year.”
During the early 1930s, Fisher meets her first husband, Al,
crosses the Atlantic for the first time, they settle in Dijon, and she has the
culinary adventures now a dime-a-dozen in A
Year in Provence-type rip-offs.
There are some fantastical episodes in this section, including some on
the unnamed coast of a South American country which take on dream-like
qualities. Al veers in and out of the
book, eventually disappearing (we don’t know for a long time whether it’s
divorce or death, as her second husband, Chexbres/Dilwynn dies of cancer). This is certainly Fisher at her most oblique,
in regards to men, where she reveals some surprising, sometimes downright
shocking thoughts, yet keeps us all at arms’ length in a haze. There are occasional glimpses into a
Hollywood studio (!) and/or radio (!) writing career, her third husband, and
her daughters. Fisher seems like she may
have been a difficult mother to have.
She isn’t afraid of saying that she’d rather dine alone than
with dinner guests who make the meal a hell (I’ve endured far too many of these
myself to disagree). “Sharing our meals
should be a joyful and trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfilment of our
social obligations.” Instead of giving
you endless models of mixers, spoons, gadgets, and must-have items, she admits,
“there is not one [kitchen] I would willingly accept unchanged.” “I was beginning to believe, timidly I admit,
that no matter how much I respected my friends’ gastronomic prejudices, I had
at least an equal right to indulge my own in my own kitchen.” She is far kinder to gluttons than anyone
writing about cuisine has been for the last 30 years—for example, in the story
of Biddy, who spends a holiday in Los Angeles eating breakfast for four hours
in Spring Street, drinking coffee, eating Viennese tarts, sweet pickles, etc. There are a number of crazed characters like
this in The Gastronomical Me and An Alphabet for Gourmets. One of the strangest incidents is
Fisher’s trip to Mexico where her brother David is caught up in a strange
ménage-à-trois with a transvestite.
An Alphabet for
Gourmets is the most assured of the works, less personal but also full of
kindness, sharing, practical advice, recipes—in short, a condensed and
judiciously edited combination of the four works that preceded it. One of the highlights is Aunt Gwen’s fried
egg sandwiches, under H for Happy. Aunt
Gwen was not her aunt but an English neighbor who used to go behind Mary
Frances and her sister Anne’s grandmother’s back to make them fried egg
sandwiches which were put in dress pockets and eaten on a ridge above their
Californian homes while they sang rousing hymns. “Group happiness is another thing.” K is for Kosher is a very interesting look at
a Gentile’s view of Jewish cooking and the practical reasons behind Moses’
dietary laws. L is for Literature is a
joy because it makes the link between writing and eating and cooking, and
Fisher confesses to reading novels about food as well as hundreds of menus and
cookbooks. Although not a good cook, as
mentioned, I enjoy reading menus and cookbooks (but I am not really a TV
cookery person. I can only imagine it’s
because I enjoy the act of reading more than the TV consumption route). She also explores eating as catharsis, as in
the case of an everyday man who’d just gone to his wife’s funeral and afterward
stopped at every diner along the highway
and eaten everything he could possibly want.
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