The Writer Who Made Food Fun
· The Atlantic
Before M. F. K. Fisher picked up her pen, most American food writing had a whiff of Victorian fustiness about it—the pinch of the corset. After Fisher, the genre was set free. With an unerring ear for pitch and tone and a mastery of the short-form essay, Fisher inspired multiple generations of writers who might have otherwise never bothered to think rigorously about how and what we eat, and how food can be a source of physical pleasure. Ruth Reichl, Betty Fussell, the Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love—all are Fisher’s children. Picador has recently reissued five classic Fisher collections. To reread them is to grasp not only how much joy she infused into food writing but also how much pain she quietly sublimated into her work. Many gastronomists have followed her example; if only more memoirists did too.
Fisher herself didn’t have the benefit of clear antecedents. In the decades before her first essay collection, Serve It Forth, was published in 1937, cookbooks enumerated ways for mothers to keep a household running smoothly—the lineaments of what became known as home economics, with the matriarch as a fastidious field general. These books were “stodgy, matter-of-fact, covered very practically with washable cloth or gravy-coloured paper,” Fisher wrote in the introduction to Serve It Forth.
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One such volume, Lizzie Black Kander’s The Settlement Cook Book, published in 1901, functioned as a primer for a pre-convenience era, when chapters on how to start a wood fire or build a “window cold box” were essential for families without gas-powered stoves or refrigeration. Kander’s writing was as dry as a plate of mashed yeast: “Always heat the dishes in which warm food is served. Never fill the glasses and cups more than three-quarters full. When passing a plate, hold it so that the thumb will not rest on the upper surface.”
Mostly, there were recipes. Books about food were books about preparing food, mainly for the delectation of wage-earning husbands (The Settlement Cook Book’s original subtitle was The Way to a Man’s Heart). Fisher unmoored food writing from this grimly proscriptive and male-centered mode. She wrote not merely to instruct but also to delight, and she was adept at aphorisms. “An evening killed is murder of a kind, criminal like any disease, and like disease a thorough-going crime,” she writes in her 1937 essay “Meals for Me,” which is included in Serve It Forth. “If Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk.” We’re a long way from Lizzie Black Kander.
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For Fisher, the act of eating isn’t merely nutritive; it’s as deeply satisfying as good sex, and should be attended to with the same intensity and focus. “Too few of us, perhaps, feel that the breaking of bread, the sharing of salt, the common dipping into one bowl, mean more than satisfaction of a need,” she writes in “Meals for Me.” “We make such primal things as casual as tunes heard over a radio, forgetting the mystery and strength in both.”
It’s now settled fact that food can be a versatile signifier, and that a meal can decode an entire culture and its folkways, but Fisher may have been the first American writer to think this way. She approached the subject not as an anthropologist but as a voluptuary who looked up from her plate. To call her a food writer is like calling Animal Farm a book about livestock. When she writes, in the newly reissued collection How to Cook a Wolf, about sating hunger during wartime, she is really writing about keeping the wolf of despair at bay with well-met companionship: “Since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.” Good living, of which food is a crucial element, was a social phenomenon for Fisher. This attitude might feel somewhat anachronistic—and therefore only more appealing—today, when so many people tend to eat alone.
Fisher created what might be considered a fresh form: an elegant hybrid of personal essay, history, food travelogue, and memoir. How she accomplished this has everything to do with how she lived her early years, which were untethered from the domestic apron. The eldest daughter of a newspaper owner and a “shy, proud, asocial, snobbish” homemaker, she was reared in a California household that cultivated a beige palette at the family table. But she had passionate memories of more exciting meals away from home, and at 21, she went to France.
In her 1943 masterpiece, The Gastronomical Me, also freshly reissued, Fisher writes of her life between world wars, when she gourmandized in Paris, Dijon, and Switzerland with her first husband, Alfred Fisher, and later with husband No. 2, Dillwyn Parrish, savoring roast pigeon and pâté de foie gras on brioche with the fervor of a proselyte. She had these adventures at a time when most Americans were stuck with meat loaf and Jell-O molds, 20 years before Julia Child’s PBS show The French Chef launched an ongoing infatuation with European cuisine.
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“Most of our orgies were voluntary,” Fisher writes of her first European sojourn, “but even so I doubt if more jaded livers than ours could have stood the thousand bilious blows we dealt them.” Her roving eye catches the sensory glimmer of all she ingests with Balzacian precision, whether it’s the snails, “green and spitting in their little delicate coffins,” or the wine, which “came out of a spigot into a thick tumbler or slipped from a cradled cobwebbed bottle into the bottoms of glasses that rang thinly in the faintest stir of air.”
The Gastronomical Me is not just a movable feast but a memoir of Fisher’s young adulthood, and amid the present beauty is a lot of past ugliness. The Fishers left Europe in 1932 and wound up in California, where their marriage cooled and M.F.K. fell in love with Parrish, a writer and artist. The Gastronomical Me elides the particulars of this episode and picks up again in 1935, at which point Parrish simply enters the narrative (with the mysterious pseudonym of “Chexbres”), accompanying Fisher on a return trip to France. “I was full of resolutions never to be caught in the whirlpool of being a ‘faculty wife,’” she writes by way (or in lieu) of an explanation. “A few more years, and I’d have been wearing brown-satin afternoon dresses and wearily eating marshmallow salads at committee luncheons.”
In describing her road to freedom so cleverly and casually, Fisher offers an alternative to the “pain to gain” approach prevalent among the memoirists who came along decades later. Her remorseless libertinism seems to have fallen out of fashion among contemporary memoirists, many of whom describe themselves emerging from some hellish cauldron of tragedy or betrayal into a gleaming rebirth. Fisher certainly knew trauma: In 1941, two years before the publication of The Gastronomical Me, Parrish, who was gravely ill, took his own life. Yet Fisher the memoirist never plays the battered soul in search of spiritual nourishment and fried artichokes. Food is not a change agent for her, the centerpiece of some tidy, redemptive performance. It’s almost as if Fisher found parts of her private life a little too unpleasant to include in the early books, when she was intoxicated by the taste of the new and eager to share that joy with her readers.
After Parrish’s death, the intrepid sensualist slowly found her center again. “I saw things like rocks and mouse-prints clearly at last,” she writes in The Gastronomical Me. “I heard almost too much. I ate, with a rapt voluptuous concentration which had little to do with bodily hunger, but seemed to nourish some other part of me.” At the urging of her sister Anne, she decamped to Mexico. In Mazatlán, in a “sea-filled” hotel room, “I slept like a cat all night, dreaming good dreams in my well-being.”
In the decades after the war, Fisher’s life quieted to a less dramatic pitch. She raised two daughters, married the publisher Donald Friede, and moved to Sonoma County, where she cooked, traveled, and wrote, prolifically and brilliantly, about her life and what she ate until she died in 1992, at 83. But Fisher’s prose burned brightest during those eventful years of the late 1930s and early ’40s, when her pain and pleasure were both at their peak, and when her desire, ambition, and curiosity elevated food writing to the status of literature.