The Gastronomical Me

by M.F.K. Fisher

If one imagines M.F.K. Fisher's life as a large colorful painting, it is here, in The Gastronomical Me, that one sees the first lines and sketches upon which that life was based. In what is the most intimate of her five volumes of her "Art of Eating" series, the reader witnesses the beginnings of a writer who, with food as her metaphor, writes of the myriad hungers and satisfactions of the heart.

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Memoir, Food Writing, Cooking, Biography, Essays

Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was a prolific and well-respected writer, writing more than 20 books during her lifetime and also publishing two volumes of journals and correspondence shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books deal primarily with food, considering it from many aspects: preparation, natural history, culture, and philosophy. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored the art of living as a secondary theme in her writing. Her style and pacing are noted elements of her short stories and essays.

Reviews

[Gretchen Rubin]

A fascinating way to approach a memoir. Now I want to read everything that M.F.K. Fisher ever wrote. Next stop: How to Cook a Wolf. How can I resist that title?

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The baker had a fight with the chef soon after we left port, and the barber took over all the pastry making..."

Mary Frances had the perfect recipe for blending food writing and autobiography. Inimitable, and such a product of her era. Of all her books, this is the one most suitable for non-foodies. The Sensual Me might have been a better title. Food and drink (LOTS of drink) do get a lot of coverage, but that's only a slice of the book, not the whole pie. Along with the gastronomical, she offers up impressions visual, tactical, aural, and visceral.

The chapters are loosely connected snapshots of her life, roughly chronological but with large blocks of time unaccounted for.
She begins in 1912 at age four, with her first memory of an irresistible taste -- the foam on top of a kettle of strawberry jam. On through boarding school and her first live oyster, followed by a college gluttony phase, and then Dijon, France as a newlywed. Those early years in France brought the discovery that food was something to be relished and treated with reverence, and it set the course for her life as a gourmand and food writer. [A big chunk of this part of the book was lifted wholesale and plopped into a much later memoir, Long Ago in France, which I read a few months ago. Skip that one. This one's better.]

After they leave Dijon things get a little hazy, and I suspect some deliberate vagueness. Mary Frances started a new relationship while in the process of divorcing her husband. She never explains exactly how things developed between herself and Chexbres, the new man. They seem to have led a near-idyllic life in Switzerland until the coming war forced them to flee in the 1930s. She nursed him through a lingering illness until he died, and was on her own at the close of the book.

She ends the book in the early 1940s with a maddeningly cryptic story of a trip to Mexico featuring a mariachi musician called Juanito. She was only in her mid-thirties when this book was published in 1943, and I got the feeling from the way it ended that she might have been planning to pick up where she left off at some time far in the future.

I've tried to read some of M.F.K.'s other books which are devoted strictly to food. For me, they can't measure up to this one. Her gift for observation and her dry and often mordant wit are best suited to these first-person reminiscences.

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Gastronomical Me was a delightful and very intimate memoir by M.F.K. Fisher. In the Foreward, Ms. Fisher addresses the questions frequently directed, and often somewhat accusingly, as to why she writes about food and eating and drinking. In her own words, the author has a beautiful answer that is reflected throughout this lovely book:

"There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity.

There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?"

This is a book that encompasses Mary Frances Kennedy's first memories of food as she recalls delightful picnic meals with her mother and grandmother as well as the preservation of foods in the race against the summer heat and process of rot as jams and preserves were canned with some red cherries for pies. This was the early twentieth century in southern California as M.F.K. Fisher perfected her appreciation and skills of food preparation and her time in a boarding school where she experienced her first oyster. Upon graduation, she attended a small college in the winter of 1927-28 that she refers to as a period of conscious gourmandise, or perhaps gluttony. From the years 1929 to 1931, the stock market crashed and Mary Frances Kennedy got married for the first time and traveled to a foreign land across an ocean, all affecting her deeply.

"Paris was everything that I had dreamed, the late September when we first went there. It should always be seen, the first time, with the eyes of childhood or of love."

Several years were spent at the University in Dijon where her love and appreciation of food and different cultures only intensified as there was unrest in Europe with Hitler's rise to power but she also learned the importance of ritual and foods and wines as evidenced in her observation:

"We toasted many things, and at first the guests and some of the old judge and officers busied themselves being important. But gradually, over the measued progress of the courses and the impressive changing beauty of the wines, snobberies and even politics dwindled in our hearts, and the wit and the laughing awareness that is France made us all alive."

This beautiful book continues on through World War II and M.F.K. Fisher's return to America for a visit only to return to Europe when she and her second husband bought a home in Switzerland, named for centuries Le Paquis, "the pasture," where they remained from 1936 to 1939. It had special meaning because it was almost the only piece of land between the Lausanne and Vevey that did not have grapes on it. During these years, the author relates her memories of three special restuarants and their regional dishes and cuisine in Switzerland: one on the lake near Lausanne, another in the high hills of Berne, and the last on the road to Lucerne in German-speaking country.

This was a very personal book that I savored. The Gastronomical Me is definitely my favorite of Ms. Fisher's books where one appreciates how she was so pivotal in her writing about food and her importance on the food scene, whether that be in Provence or in Napa. Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher began her writing at a time when the appreciation of food and wine was lacking at best. It is a book that I want to read again.

[Siri · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this. Had been intrigued by MFK Fisher and was looking forward to finally reading her. But I don't understand what all the fuss is about. While there were parts that I enjoyed, in her descriptions of food and relations with others, most of it I didn't like. And I really didn't like her. In a word, snobby. I realize it was written 70 years ago, but she was really full of herself. And the gaps in storytelling are rather disconcerting. One minute she's madly in love with husband Al, and the next, in referring to a woman they boarded with, she says they both got divorces in the same year. Won't be reading her further.

[Andrea Conarro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how I stumbled upon MFK Fisher, but now that I have, I don't know how I missed her. She is a premier food writer, and a must-read for anyone who loves foodie-type books. This one is about her early food years.

[Mir]

I didn't finish this, even the writing is quite good and Fisher has a fascinating personality. There was something mean-spirited about it that left a nasty taste in my mouth, no pun intended. Part of it was probably simple realism -- lots of unpleasant things happen to human beings, especially women in history, and a keen observe reports them. But Fisher seems to feel a sort of revulsion-sans-empathy for those she encounters; one I suspect she hid quite well, as people seem to have been quite nice to her (well, we all like pretty, clever people, don't we?).

Based on the first half, I think this would be an interesting read for someone interested in early 20th century social history and travel. It's not so dominated by food that you need to care about the culinary elements (nor, conversely, is there enough about cuisine that I'd recommend it if you're considering it mostly for that subject).

[Vanessa Moreno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rellegit per a un club. Que bona que ets, bandida!

[else fine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the way food writing should be done. In her careful, spare, elegant way, Fisher uses food to write about everything else that means anything in life: love, war, death, and second chances. One of the most beautiful works of modern English.

[Hal Schrieve · Rating 5 out of 5]

MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me–queerness, class, violence, sensuality, and lyricism


MFK Fisher is one of a few complicated midcentury American women writers whose grip on me is functionally bottomless despite my distaste for her bourgeois class allegiance and politics. I was given The Art of Eating, a compendium of her works, by an older trans man I was dating in college. In a real way, she taught me to take dignified and unapologetic pleasure in food–and in cooking for others– after a youth of eating disorders brought on by body dysphoria, anxiety, and diffuse political guilt. Like another of my complex idols, Anaïs Nin, Fisher was brought up at the dawn of the twentieth century, died in its third quarter, and approached the sensual, the mysterious, and the taboo with a compulsive, incisive and occasionally hyperbolic documentary hyper-lexia which bucked the expectations of her class, her gender and her time. She was also what I can safely call a liberal racist, was apparently unengaged in any of the liberatory struggles going on around her either in Europe or America at any point in her life, and believed wholeheartedly in a kind of gustatory snobbery, in a self-aware but resigned way that’s alternately cathartic and chilling to read. It’s sort of impossible to discuss her without quoting her, so I will do a little of that throughout this piece; otherwise you just can’t get a sense of her style, which is so comforting and compulsively readable that I return to it whenever I am sick. I am sick now, with a cold I probably picked up doing library service on Rikers. Despite Auden’s assertion that she was the best prose writer in the United States, Fisher is pretty under-read among my generation, and on the few times that elderly patrons would request her work at NYPL during my tenure there, I would have to confess to them that we had but few copies, even of her bestselling WWII making-the-best-of-rationing-scarcity work, How To Cook A Wolf.

Her youth was almost contemporary with the youth of mixed-race comics artist George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat– a Southern California town, a life spent from her teens working for newspapers adjacent to astonishing vistas being rapidly transformed–but simultaneously a later edition of Agatha Christie, a world where improbable violence happened while girls went away to finishing school. Fisher tells us in The Gastronomical Me that the first chef to introduce her and her sister to true depth of flavor or savor was a woman named Ora, hired by her Puritanical grandmother who approved of only white sauces. Ora makes lovely pies, with dear little flowers in the crust. She conveys spice to a dish. If you are skimming this chapter, you might almost miss the ending:

“The next day, though, we found that Ora, instead of leaving her mother after a quiet pleasant Sunday in which the two elderly women had gone to church and then rested, had cut her into several neat pieces with her French knife. Then she ripped a tent thoroughly into ribbons. I don’t know how the tent came in…maybe she and her mother were resting in it. Anyway it was a good thing to rip. Then she cut her own throat, expertly… I don’t know about Father and Mother, but Anna and I were depressed. The way of dying was of only passing interest to us at our ages, but our inevitable return to ordinary sensible plain food was something to regret. We were helpless then, but we both learned from mad Ora, and we know what to do about it, because of her.” (p 363).

Cooking is murder; cooking is passions you aren’t allowed to have. Eating is complicity in murder. This passage rhymes with one far later in the book, also involving complicity and a slashed throat: Mary Frances and her second husband, who is dying, are traveling to Milan during the fascist period, and there is a refugee imprisoned on their train, along with some German tourists.

“Three men walked quickly through the car. Two were big, not in uniform but with black shirts under their hot mussy coats, and stubble on their faces. The man between them was thinner, and younger, and although they went single file and close together, we saw he was handcuffed to each of them. Before that summer, such a thing would have shocked us, so that our faces would be paler and our eyes wider, but now we only looked up at the old waiter. He nodded, and his own eyes got very hot and dried all the tears. “Political prisoner he said…then the chef with the highest bonnet saw us, and beamed and raised his glass, and the others turned around from their leafy table and saluted us too, and the door slammed behind the three dark men…We drank the rest of the Asti, and as people began to come in to lunch, we made the signal to the suddenly active boy that we would be back later. Just then there were shouts and thuds, and the sound of shattering glass. A kind of silence fell all about us, in spite of the steady rattle of the train. The old waiter ran down the car…finally the old waiter ran back into the car. His face was furious, and he clutched at his shoulder. The travelers stared at him, still chewing. He stopped for a minute by our table. His voice was very low. “He tried to jump through the window,” he said, and we knew he was talking about the refugee. “The bastards! They tore my coat!”...the vermouth was bitterer than any we had ever tasted, almost like a Swiss gentian-drink, but it tasted good after the insipid wine.” (p. 532)

When they arrive in Milan, they learn that the prisoner cut his throat intentionally on the glass of the window.

I like Fisher because she so clearly relishes the proximity of the violence, confusion and darkness of her own world; if she makes no attempt to reckon with it philosophically or treat its injustices as problems to be solved, she at least exactingly points to it, to make sure that you, too, see what’s going on. She went back and forth across the Atlantic during the years of the late 1930s, first divorcing one husband and then seeking medical care for another. She witnessed many Jewish refugees fleeing, and spoke to them, and befriended them. She witnessed a young cousin date a Nazi who spoke with humor of soldiers shooting swimming refugees along the coast of Italy. Simultaneously, she didn’t do anything. She was absorbed in her own life and troubles; she was not implicated. She floated on into midcentury, the deep well of her personal sadness unrelated to the mass exterminations reshaping Europe. But she is aware of that depth; another, more insipid writer might not have bothered to comment.

Fisher became a food writer because she personally was invested in food. She is one of the best-ever at writing about the experience of it, usually through the lens of her own life– though she herself said that the personal essay was self-indulgent. However, the popularity of her nonfiction was also part of a turn in publishing initiated by Julia Child and her determined girlboss editor Judith Jones–a response to the canned food and limited palate of American dining which attempted to remind readers and cooks of the pleasures and freedoms of the table–especially the European table, but also about the capacity for pleasure and consumption available to even the most modest American consumer. This freedom was partially about democracy and abundance of food in the imperial core, and partly class aspiration: Fisher, like Child, had the privilege of traveling to France with her husband and learning about cooking from the ancient culinary lineages there, despite all their financial instability during the Depression (in her historical writing, much more full of gas than her personal writing, she credits France with more than its fair share of world culinary innovation while misunderstanding most other countries). Her chops with talking about terrines of pâté in Dijon, remote restaurants in the French countryside, and perfect wines on trains in Italy were unassailable–while at the same time, her middle-class brusqueness, directness, humor and occasional coarseness or downright vulgarity spoke to a more democratic American skepticism for innuendo, euphemism or stuffiness. The pleasure of reading Fisher is the pleasure of reading about a woman pleasuring herself, a la Nin, combined with the incisive social commentary of an observant journalist and the occasional off-color characterizations or riffing of a David Rakoff or David Sedaris.

The proximity of queerness in MFK Fisher’s writing is just not debatable. Some examples are clearer than others. Every time gay people come up, she points them out to you, to make sure you also know they are there. One such is Ms Cheever, the housekeeper at the finishing school she goes to in SoCal in about 1920. There are at least ten or eleven times that I’ve insisted that people around me (in my house, or, more embarrassingly, outside it) listen to me read to them from the essay The First Oyster. This story concerns the first time that little Mary Frances ate a Blue Point –which was at a holiday Christmas party at her school.

“The oyster seemed larger. I knew that I must down it, and was equally sure I could not. Then, as Olmstead put her thin hand on my shoulder blades, I swallowed once, and felt light and attractive and daring, to know what I had done. We danced stiffly around the room, and as soon as a few other pairs of timid girls came into the cleared space by the tree…I floated on, figuratively at least, in Olmstead’s arms. The dance ended…Inez murmured in my ear, “dance with me next, will you, Baby-face? There’s a couple of things boys can do I can’t, but I can dance with you a damn sight better than that bitch Olmstead.” (p.375)

Fisher strongly and repeatedly emphasizes that homosexual crushes are the norm, and explains in clear terms that lovely big-nosed senior girl Olmstead and despicable junior Inez are courting her. At the same time, adult homosexuality is remote, more serious, and possibly frightening– while the college-educated girls’ school teachers might “write passionate notes” to a similarly-educated gym teacher, degree-less Ms Cheever’s existence mainly appears to Fisher to be characterized by a painful and class-based loneliness. Her care and zeal is put into the food that the school serves the students; when Fisher flees presumptuous Inez on the dance floor looking for more oysters, she discovers in the kitchen Ms Cheever and the school nurse.

“Her mouth, puckered from years of dyspepsia and disapproval, was loose and tender suddenly, and she sniffed with vulgar abandon. She stood with one arm laid gently over the scarlet shoulders of the fat old nurse, who was dressed fantastically in the ancient costume of Saint Nicholas. It became her well, for her formless body was as generous as his, and her ninny-simple face, pink-cheeked and sweet, was kind like his and neither male nor female…Mrs. Cheever did not see me either. For the first time I did not feel unattractive in her presence, merely completely unnecessary. She put out one hand, and for a fearful moment I thought perhaps she was going to kiss me: her face was so tender. Then I saw she was putting oysters carefully on a big platter that sat before the nurse, and that as she watched the old biddy eat them, tears kept running bloodlessly down her soft ravaged cheeks……as she watched the old woman eat steadily, voluptuously, of the fat cold molluscs, she looked so tender that I turned anxiously toward the sureness and stability of such small passions that lay in the dining room.” (p 377)

In her other memoir, Long Ago In France: The Years in Dijon, some of Fisher’s diaries are excerpted to paint a picture of her French existence. During this time, she details a visit to an alcoholic lesbian that she knew from her college years. The woman is in constant conflict with her girlfriend and housekeeper, is remarkably vain and lonely, and taken up with the care of terrible little dogs. This kind of unsympathetic portrait is typical, but so frequent and varied– an emotionally volatile gay milliner “giggles” and brags that he loves to lie naked with his cat on his tummy, a gay airline steward “twitches his tail” down the aisle. In another bizarre episode in Gastronomical Me, we meet a German man who seems sexually disinterested in his girlfriend, a “big, pallid” Czech woman who lives in the same boarding-house as the Fishers in Dijon circa 1930. German dude likes to talk to men– and says he believes in a “Uranic” society. “At least, I think Uranic was the word he used,” Fisher hedges. One night, the teen French son of the landlord comes and bangs on Mary Frances’ door in distress; he can hear a weird noise coming from the Czech girl’s room. When MFK enters, she discovers that the rat-faced German has been discarding his grapeskins and cake crumbs on his girlfriend’s naked belly; she has responded by having a panic attack he doesn’t seem to know how to deal with, and he leaves after MFK shows up. MFK in turn responds by closing the windowshades, covering the girl in a coat, and then running for Eau de Cologne, which she rubs all over the other woman’s naked body without, it seems, receiving any verbal communication at all. She communicates in her essay that she is thus moved to soothe/cleanse her of the nasty touch of her inexpertly sadist gay boyfriend. At last the woman ceases to moan and tremble, and MFK leaves her be– and the lady moves out the next week. What is so interesting in this scene–you really have to read it to understand–is how MFK manages to make it all sound like something that happened to her, eliding her own emotional responses besides concern for the girl–but not examining why she makes so little attempt to connect with her verbally before or after, or to explore why she wanted to touch her. MFK is more comfortable explaining that she divorced her first husband because he did not pleasure her sexually, and explaining that she fell in love with her second, only to lose him too soon; she is even more comfortable describing her relationship to food, which, while active, also positions her safely as a consumer, recipient, camera, acted-upon, at least as far as society is concerned. Indeed, unlike Child, Fisher was only ever a private chef; while she details recipes in some detail, she avoids making that her primary strategy for communicating. She wants to tell people how it feels to eat.

The most consensual, erotic same-sex scene which directly implicates Mary Frances herself is one where an insistent, domineering waitress force-feeds her several more courses than she ordered while she visits a country restaurant presided over by a famous chef, Monsieur Paul. The girl is described as passionate, heavy-breathing and annoying, but she manages to bend a lady to her will.

“I tasted the last sweet nugget of trout, the one nearest the blued tail, and poked somnolently at the minute white billiard balls that had been eyes. Fate could not harm me, I remembered winily, for I had indeed dined today, and dined well. Now for a leaf of crisp salad, and I’d be on my way. The girl slid into the room. She asked me again, in a respectful but gossipy manner, how I had liked this that and the other…”and now,” she announced, after I had eaten one green sprig and pronounced it excellent, “now Madame is going to taste Monsieur Paul’s special terrine…” and heedless of my low moans of the walk still before me, of my appreciation and my unhappily human and limited capacity, she cut a thick heady slice from the terrine of meat and stood over me while I ate it, telling me with almost hysterical pleasure of the wild ducks, the spices, the wines that went into it. Even surfeit could not make me deny that it was a rare dish..I was beginning, though, to feel almost frightened, realizing myself an accidental victim of these stranded gourmets. I began to feel they were using me for a safety valve, much as a thwarted woman relieves herself with tantrums or a fit of weeping…” (480).

Bi.org insists that Fisher and her school friend Eda Lord were lovers, per historian Rachel Hope Cleves.

Back to the older trans man who gave me a copy of her compendium, The Art Of Eating, to enjoy over summer vacation from my freshman year of college. The book was accompanied by Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, as well as White Oleander, Confessions of a Mask, the entire run of Dykes to Watch Out For, and Love and Rockets. He, like Fisher, was from California, but unlike her, had grown up an indigenous queer kid in foster care. He was loving, generous, troubled, and sexy. I think one of the things he wanted me to find in The Gastronomical Me was Juanito. I don’t communicate with this man right now– we had a run-in a few years ago that made me realize it is sometimes hard to be friends with a monogamously straight-married ex who has intentionally left behind all queer urban community because it has betrayed him. However, I would like to know, should we manage that friendship again, what he thinks of Fisher’s racialized and simultaneously intensely interested and human portrait of the mariachi band singer her brother is compelled by. When she arrives to visit Mexico, her brother David, who has been living there a while, hears a mariachi band coming up the way; later, he makes them all stay at dinner at a restaurant until his favored band comes back. It is led by teenage Juanito.

“He had a pale dirty skin and hair that was rusty black, like a half-breed’s, and there was a dry old look about him, as if he slept in the dust. His hair was almost shaved off, under the Jalisco hat, and his face was young and very weary. His hands on the guitar and his sandaled feet were like claws. He stood waiting in the light, and then began to sing one song alone, without his men, a raw wild yelling song like Flamenco music, but with the mariachi-beat to it. I was hearing it all, and watching him, and I was remembering one day when I was maybe sixteen. I was illed with eagerness, then, partly romantic and partly hereditary, to know more about my father’s newspaper office. He humored me, but only a little: I was a woman, and he wanted to save all that for David. One day, though, he took me through the Back Room, and I watched the linotypists and then went over to the job-presses…at summer that night we were talking about the little presses, and Father said, “There’s one chap there…I should have pointed him out to you. He does the finest work in the shop. He made a little trouble a few years ago…tried his hand at agitating. All right now. But he spends all his spare time illuminating..he’s the real thing. Churches and big companies wanting rolls of honor…that sort of thing…he uses real gold leaf.”

[Ammie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is, in theory, a book about food. But a lot of it's not actually about food. There's a lot of talk about A) alcohol, B) Random events in the author's life, and C) traveling on boats. But for all that, I liked most of it fairly well. MFK Fisher wrote about food in the 30's and 40's (at least in this particular book) shamelessly. Apparently, initial readers thought her essays must have been written by a man because the style was so forthcoming. Her writing is, for me, very reminiscent of comfort food, actually. She writes about good wine, good liquor, good cheese, particularly good meals, waiters, and the atmospheres in which she experienced all of these things in a very personal but not intimidating way. I haven't tasted the vast majority of what she writes about, but she made me feel okay with that and like I could still just sit back and imagine the tastes and textures. (I actually looked this book u because I once read an essay by Fisher about the joys of mashed potatoes and ketchup that was one of the most vivid, sensuous things I've ever read.) That said, in between all the food is a lot of weird stuff: homicidal cooks, weird facts about her physical reactions to sea travel, anecdotes about her landladies and husbands and World War II and naked exchange students and all manner of other things. Some of it's interesting and pairs well with the food, but some of it is just jarring. Ah well.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

M.F.K. Fisher tells the story of her life through the foods she experienced. Fisher begins with her forays into college life and her first marriage, and then tells of her gradual development as a food writer that was highly influenced by her move to France.

Fisher almost skips over key details in her life including her divorce and the decline and eventual suicide of her second husband, so I had to do a bit of research to fill in the gaps.

No matter what Fisher is writing about---whether it's her life or stories about people she meets or places she lives or the food she eats---her writing is mesmerizing.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate to say it, but I didn’t really enjoy this much. I think the main reason for that is that are many relational dynamics happening under the surface with Fisher’s family and in her marriage, but there is never any explanation. Fisher is suddenly married to Al and is in Dijon…but why? It’s only much later that we find out Al was a doctoral student. And it’s never really clear if MFK was also a student or just a member of university community because of Al. Then Al is suddenly out of the picture, and MFK is off with a guy named Chexbres. That was confusing because his name sounds French but she eventually tells us that he’s American. And they have a house in Switzerland. But why? And they never seem to be working and yet they eat and drink rather luxuriously. I don’t know…I’m getting better at reading between the lines but there was a lot here that felt unnecessarily obscure. And the relational dynamics made me feel uncomfortable.

There were parts I quite liked. Her prose is excellent. I especially enjoyed her early life with food, her sea voyages and how she learned how to be a good traveler, and some of the descriptions of cooking/eating, especially in France. It was also fascinating to read about France in the years leading up to WWII. Again, there was almost nothing said outright, which is interesting in and of itself. There is only one direct description of a political prisoner on a train in Italy and it is sobering.

I am glad I read this and am not put off reading more MFK Fisher in the future. But I think I’ll stick with more of the pure food writing if that is possible.

Oh, I found it helpful to read Wikipedia’s summary of Fisher’s life. I really wish I had done that at the beginning.

[Sonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this. Thanks to Connie for her Goodreads review, because I would never have picked it up otherwise. Ridiculously good writing about growing up, love, the Second World War, loss, travel, and food, etc. and nice loose approach to memoir. Agree with Connie that some of the early chapters are particularly lovely. On being alone with his daughters for a car trip without their mother, her father "saw us for the first time as two little brown humans who were fun." There's an incredible chapter about oysters and the all-girls' boarding school Christmas dance which I've read about three times. And a charming description of lettuce, cream cheese and anchovy, and ginger ale orgies that she, her cousin, and her cousin's roommate indulged in at their faraway Illinois college in 1927-1928:

"We would lock the door, and mix the cheese and anchovy together and open the ginger ale. Then we would toast ourselves solemnly in our toothbrush mugs, loosen the belts on our woolen 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 to a 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 we had laughed enough to hold a little more lettuce." It occurs to me that this is not so different from some of my own college experiences.

[April Ives · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me begin by saying that I gained at least five pounds over the course of reading this book! I also consumed a few extra bottles of wine and the only thing missing was the extraordinary food that is not usually available on the income of college students. Although I had to settle for cheese and crackers with my wine, MFK Fisher’s collection of essay seated me next to her on this trip back in time.
Fisher’s writing style is charming and quite picturesque. She describes her surroundings with ease and the flow keeps pace with her vibrancy.
There were some dishes that I was unfamiliar with. Not being a student of French cuisine, I desperately wanted to run out and purchase a French dictionary, but then I remembered to use the internet. Voila! That will help me remember not to assume my readers understand. The other dishes had my mouth watering and my soul craving that fabulous experience of real food, on real plates, surrounded by real people.
I contracted indigestion several times simply by marveling at the amount of food this woman could consume in one sitting. “More than once pure bravado was all that kept us from tumbling right into the nearest ditch in a digestive coma.” (page 93)
The characters are so developed that it was easy to make friends with them, or laugh at them, or in the case of Ora, wonder at them.
There was one word which I felt was overdone and only for the fact that it was an odd one to be used so frequently, which will remind me not to overuse my favorite word in my writing. Going forward whenever I see or hear the word “somnolently” I shall think of dear Mrs. Fisher and her mostly delightful remembrances of times not so distantly past. I have placed several of her other works on my reading list, but I won’t read them until I shed these five pounds.

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first foray into food lit. Seriously - I hate reading/talking/listening about food. I just like eating food. But then this turned out to not really be a "foodie" (I also hate that word) thing, and so I was actually liking it. But then, sigh. It's really disjointed. Like, basically it seems like you're reading a bunch of blog entries. Which is great for blogs, less so for books. I wanted editorial cohesiveness so badly, and I got none, but she does have some great passages and interesting ideas, and you get to figure out how she really came into being a confident adult self by tasting new foods, cultures, and people. As for Juanito? Um - yeah. I've got nothing.

[marcel · Rating 4 out of 5]

com dir-t'ho sòcia, crec que així:

"les nostres tres necessitats, d'aliment, de seguretat, i d'amor estan tan barrejades, lligades i entrellaçades que no podem pensar directament en una sense pensar en les altres. Quan escric de la gana, en realitat parlo de l'amor i de la fam d'amor..., i després de la calidesa, la plenitud i la dolça realitat de la gana satisfeta..., i tot plegat és una sola cosa"🫡💌

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other 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.

I've only recently begun to read MFK Fisher - definitely one of the doyennes of American food writing - and I can certainly understand why she has passionate devotees. Her writing is vivid, distinctive and definitely flavourful. It has, always, a strong point of view. It doesn't focus so much on recipe and technique as much as does it sensation, atmosphere and memory.

This book is a memoir of her development as a woman and a food writer. It is episodic, a series of vignettes punctuated by journeys. Although she begins by describing some early memories from her California childhood, and a brief stint at a Midwestern university, most of these vignettes take place in Europe or or the various ships she takes as she crisscrosses the Atlantic. She lived in France with her first husband Al and Switzerland with her second husband Dilwyn/Tim (she refers to him as "Chexbres" in the narrative). Most of these journeys are set during the 1930s and occasionally the turbulent politics of that decade intrude. Bizarrely, she and her second husband travel to Switzerland in 1940 - and although Switzerland, and their own personal tragedy, are buffers of a surreal sort, one is still very aware of the fact that Europe is at war. One of the most affecting chapters, for me, is a journey she takes from Europe to the United States on a 'staidly luxurious Dutch liner'. She is travelling to the US in order to break the news to her family that she is divorcing her first husband; most of the other people on board the ship are 'fleeing' Jews. At times this book is just so surreal and so charged with tragedy. It ends, bizarrely, with a family trip to Mexico in 1941 and lots of beer and a cross-dressing (possibly transvestite) mariachi singer. There is a lot of drinking, and sometimes the drinking eclipses the eating. One is often reminded how smoking and heavy drinking were so much more the norm in that era than they are now. Fisher is the kind of person who prides herself on her 'masculine' appetites, and she occasionally points out her superiority by demonstrating her knowledge of wines and her ability to surprise by ordering a particularly fine cognac

Fisher has a particular gift for recreating the people she met on her journeys and waiters and landladies play a large role in her memories. Nobility (in the sense of largeness of character) and various forms of absurdity and grotesqueness seem to accompany her everywhere, in the people she meets and the (sometimes very strange) scenes she describes. It's impossible to know when her memories edge into fiction, and I suspect more often than not; but that doesn't really spoil the story-telling.

I'd like to read this rich book again someday. I need a little rest first, though.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5 Stars)

This is a book for anyone who enjoys food – not the fancy, pretentious kind of food the word ‘gastronomical’ might suggest, but honest, simple, good quality fare, typically fashioned from flavoursome ingredients. It is, in essence, a blend of memoir, food writing and travel journal, all woven together in Fisher’s wonderfully engaging style.

Backlisted listeners among you may have encountered Fisher through How to Cook a Wolf (1942), her wartime guide to keeping appetites sated when decent ingredients are in short supply. In The Gastronomical Me, Fisher looks back on some of the most symbolic meals and food-related experiences of her first three decades – the quality of the dishes consumed, the people who shared them and the memories they evoked. She writes lovingly of her early life, the most notable culinary occasions, irrespective of their simplicity, and the way our feelings towards certain foods are often entwined with memories of people, places and key moments in time. There is a sense of meals being part of the fabric of a person’s life here, inextricably linked to love, friendship and family – encompassing both happy times and sad.

To read the rest of my review, please visit:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2022...

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

To create a truly excellent dish quality ingredients must be used, certainly, but more important are the skilled hand, the discerning palate, and the acquired wisdom of a good cook. M.F.K. Fisher was just such a cook, not only in her various kitchens, but as she stirred and seasoned the events in her life, and most of all perhaps when she served her literary concoctions to the widest range of guests she had ever encountered, the reading public. It is in this spirit that she wrote The Gastronomical Me.
In a book that begins with her childhood and goes on to span 29 years of her life, Fisher writes about her appetites both culinary and spiritual. The cook in the kitchen is analogous to the individual in the wide world, buffeted by steam, awash in strange smells, burnt by haste. And when the cook’s work is done the guest at the table carries the analogy, as partaker of the sweetness and bitterness of life. So her tranquil childhood passes in a series of vignettes that include the summer ritual of canning, a roadside dinner with her little sister and father, a casserole disaster, a review of a few household cooks, and finally a cross country train ride (as seen from the dining car of course) and ends with a flourish in a New York city restaurant. There she orders, for the first time, under the tutelage of an uncle, a more adventurous dinner than ever before. Of course this is just the appetizer, her marriage to Al is washed down with strong Burgundy, followed by her growing familiarity with rich French cooking, and the simple suppers she cooked in a series of her first tiny kitchens. The main course is Swiss, grand dinners at home with Chexbres, visiting friends and parents and siblings, fresh produce from the garden, more good wine, some traveling and truite au bleu, all exquisitely seasoned with nostalgia because of course, no feast can last forever and the war is coming and Chexbres will fall ill, lose his leg, and soon be dead. Destruction then, is the bitter digestif which is followed by a plane to Mexico to visit her brother and sister in Jalisco. The final chapter is almost penitent, a response, perhaps, to gluttony.
In her best moments Fisher transposes the yearnings of the heart over the hungers of the stomach. In her Foreward she writes: “I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.” The implication is that all that is nourishing and sustaining is ultimately perishable, that pleasure is ephemeral, and should therefore be savored and shared like a good meal.
Throughout The Gastronomical Me we revisit two tableaux: Fisher at a table with her intimates, and Fisher dining alone. “…I taught myself to enjoy being alone” she assures us, though we might well wonder how this happened, since the development of her character is often obscured by the descriptions rising like delicious aromas from the dishes lovingly placed before us. The conceit of the book is that the development of her palate signifies the development of character. The metaphor is appealing but the former is not interchangeable with the latter, and Fisher, knowing this, distracts the reader from more profound revelations by throwing a dinner party just when she seems the closest to a personal revelation or when the affairs of the world threaten to encroach on the garden, the wine cellar, or the restaurant. We catch a glimpse of fascists with a prisoner on the train, but wasn’t the lunch delicious, and how kind of the waiters to warn us about the freshly spilled blood on the platform. It is not as if Fisher is burying these things within the narrative, the blood is there, but it is sometimes dismaying that, being left to watch all this from the windows of the dining car as it gathers speed leaving the station we are still expected to profess an interest in the food and the charming company. There are great moments when Fisher herself shines through, and we see that she is more than just the hostess at the banquet of her life, that she has a profound sense of the location of that banquet and the circumstances outside of her own charmed circle, as when she writes in the last chapter:
“…I knew all there was for me to know about Jaunito. And what I knew made me sorry that any of us had ever gone to that village, and ashamed that we were so big, so pale, so incautiously alive.”
The remorse she finally feels, upon recognizing that traveling around and tasting new foods does not a moral person make necessarily is hard won, and the construction of the book lends credence to her realization. Before WWII Americans with the privilege to do so could, we imagine, travel Europe sampling the local cuisine while remaining blissfully ignorant of any sense of responsibility or moral injustice. After the international loss of innocence that marked the middle of the 20th century that blissful ignorance would have been harder to maintain, and travel in Latin American would have certainly proved challenging to anyone hoping to linger in that charmed state. In this way the personal tragedy of Chexbres’ death is situated in the book in such a way that it almost serves as a stand in for the destruction and desolation that was happening in Europe at that time on a much grander scale. The development of her palate, then is made to signify development of character since the conceit of the book is that the latter is a metaphor for the former. though we might wonder how this was accomplished since her character does not seem to develop as much as her palate does.

and that therefore a well-prepared course of happiness should be savored and shared because otherwise it will spoil.


circumstantial. The development of her discerning palate then, the cultivation of skilled hands, the acquisition of a cook’s wisdom

[Taz Kelleher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a joy to read. A love letter to food, love and life . I can’t wait to read every single thing MKF has written.

‘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?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is to say that, like most other 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’ 🧡

[ೄ Amets ⚢ · Rating 4 out of 5]

una lectura deliciosa (mai millor dit). té parts molt boniques i amb les descripcions que fa de la teca et transporta als llocs on para, gairebé en pots sentir la flaire... això sí, ha començat molt bé però de cara al final ha fotut una bona davallada i m'ha costat Déu i ajuda acabar-lo... i una atra cosa que m'ha costat de pair és l'aire de superioritat moral i racial que té l'obra en conjunt, m'ha impedit que en gaudís del tot

[Camèlia Rodríguez Balagué · Rating 5 out of 5]

Res em podria agradar més que una bona autobiografia narrada des de la cuina i el menjar 🤍

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the bookmark in my copy of The Art of Eating is any indication, I last read this book around 1985. I had not forgotten Fisher and her writing, but I had jumbled The Gastronomical Me together with the other four books in The Art of Eating. This time round, I am reading this memoir because my book group is discussing it.

Fisher must have been a fascinating friend. She seems to love life, food and friendship. She has a real way with words - her description of eating oysters made me think about my first experience with those slippy animals. I am very happy to be reacquainted with Fisher, her family, Al and Chexberes. Given all the food books that have been written since Fisher started, I think her essays hold up very well.

It has been almost 30 years since I last read this book. This time, given what has happened in memoir writing over the years, I wondered how much of this book is true. Which has led me to The Poet of the Appetites, a biography of Fisher. I hope this won't spoil my love of Fisher's food writing.

If you have read Tender at the Bone, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or The Omnivore's Dilemma, you might want to read this memoir. I believe none of those books could have been written without Fisher blazing the food trail in the middle of the 20th century.

[Mara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun reading while fasting.

So what I didn't expect is that she would be so funny, but in that way that people look at me surprised after knowing me for a while, and say, with a slight question in their voices, "You're funny?" And it's not funny for funny's sake, it's part of her enviable self-assurance and the ability to focus on a good meal when the world is going to pieces and her sureness of how things should be ("I discovered, there on the staidly luxurious Dutch liner, that I could be very firm with pursers and stewards and such, I could have a table assigned to me in any part of the dining room I wanted and, best of all, I could have that table to myself. I needed no longer be put with officers or predatory passengers, just because I was under ninety and predominately female." and, oh, also "The room was wonderful, austere and airy the way I like a bedroom to be.") I love being allowed to draw my own conclusions as a reader, so that while horror and brutality seem to lurk in the background of every sumptuous meal, that adds to the meaning and preciousness of the food rather than detracting from it.

[Susan Tekulve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This unusual and lovely book by legendary food writer, MFK Fisher, was a revelation to me. She recounts the story of her life--her childhood spent in the shadow of a Victorian-era grandmother; her first marriage to an academic; her travels through France during and after the war, and her second marriage-- through the sense of taste. Through her voluptuous descriptions of food, she creates atmospheric descriptions of the places where she ate, and moving portraits of the people with whom she shared these meals. The prose is exquisite, and Fisher' s approach to life is adventurous, stoic, and ahead of her time. This is the best kind of food writing--the kind that addresses our deeper human hunger for love, independence, art, and beauty.

[Paola Rodríguez · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried really hard to like this book... but I just got bored and confused :(
The foreword is amazing, I couldn't agree more with her, but I just didn't feel she actually linked food, security and love through this book, eventhough she writes about these three needs. I'm pretty sure she had an interesting life but I just couldn't get her.
I have to admit there are GREAT descriptions of food and they feel like fresh air, but there were not enough of them.
This was not the exiting and interesting book I was expecting :(, maybe I'll come back to it further in my life, maybe not.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was pretty delightful. I liked some of the essays more than others (in some she is really enigmatic and slightly strange) but for the one where she has the crazy interactions with the waitress in France it's worth reading the whole collection. She's also really eloquent about the power of eating alone. I'd never read Fisher before but I could see myself coming back for more.

[Annie · Rating 2 out of 5]

An odd book. There seemed to be a lot that was interesting going on in the background, rather than the foreground of this memoir.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanted to love it, but honestly, it dragged a little.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could not get into this book. It's a sweet memoir but not very engaging. If you want to know about struggling Americans living in Europe in the 1930s this is the book for you.