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    The Art of Eating
    The Art of Eating
    The Art of Eating
    Ebook1,099 pages16 hours

    The Art of Eating

    By M.F.K. Fisher, Clifton Fadiman, Joan Reardon and James A. Beard

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    About this ebook

    “Should be required reading for every cook. It defines in a sensual and beautiful way the vital relationship between food and culture.”—Alice Waters
     
    This comprehensive volume of essays on culinary and other pleasures of life comes from the legendary and widely traveled writer “whose artful personal essays about food created a genre” (The New York Times) and who writes “practically, often profoundly, and always beautifully” (San Francisco Chronicle). Spanning from the autobiographical to the historical, it compiles her works Serve It Forth; Consider the Oyster; How to Cook a Wolf; The Gastronomical Me; and An Alphabet for Gourmets.
     
    “How wonderful to have here in my hands the essence of M.F.K. Fisher, whose wit and fulsome opinions on food and those who produce it, comment upon it, and consume it are as apt today as they were several decades ago, when she composed them. Why did she choose food and hunger she was asked, and she replied, ‘When I write about hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth, and the love of it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied.’ This is the stuff we need to hear, and to hear again and again.”—Julia Child

    “Mary Frances [Fisher] has the extraordinary ability to make the ordinary seem rich and wonderful. Her dignity comes from her absolute insistence on appreciating life as it comes to her.”—Ruth Reichl
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 6, 2014
    ISBN9780544177437
    The Art of Eating
    Author

    M.F.K. Fisher

    Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908–1992) was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. At the age of twenty-one she moved from America to France, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time, and it inspired a prolific writing career centred on a new way of thinking about food and travel. She was a regular contributor to the New Yorker, Gourmet and Vogue, and is the author of twenty-seven books of food, memoir and travel, many of which have become classics. These include Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me.

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    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This is one of my favorite books. It contains several of MFK Fisher's classic (and IMO, best) books about food, from How to Cook a Wolf to An Alphabet for Gourmets. Even now, 25 years after discovering her, I can still dip into any one of these books and get lost for a while in MFK Fisher's delightful world of food and travel and occasionally, making do. Just one word of advice: Don't make the War Cake from How to Cook a Wolf. Seriously.
    • 5/5
      This is a collection of essays, all reprints, by Fisher. Her prose is wonderfully paced and just makes me excited about the handling, preparation, and enjoyment of good food. There's really no recipes as such in here; the essays reflect what "foodie" culture was like long before foodies were identified as such. (For example, one pieces explores rationing in WWII and what it does to home cooking.)
    • 5/5
      You don't get to call yourself a foodie until you've read M.F.K. Fisher. She was the best American writer on food that I know of. She was one of the best writers I know of in any genre. This is probably the easiest way to get caught up. Five of her books in one hefty volume. I love every moment of these books.
    • 5/5
      This is the first book that got me to think about eating, tasting and enjoying. I never knew there could be writing like this about such things. I want everyone I care about to read this work. And then, let's go for dinner and talk about it.
    • 3/5
      Autobiography and food. What could be tastier?

    Book preview

    The Art of Eating - M.F.K. Fisher

    [Image]

    Five Gastronomical Works

    By M. F. K. FISHER

    Serve It Forth

    Consider The Oyster

    How To Cook A Wolf

    The Gastronomical Me

    An Alphabet For Gourmets

    Contents

    The Art of Eating: In Celebration

    Thoughts about M. F. K. Fisher and Her Work

    One More Time

    Appreciation

    Introduction

    Serve It Forth

    To Begin

    When a Man Is Small

    Greek Honey and the Hon-Zo

    3000 B.C.–100 A.D.

    Egypt, the Orient, and Greece

    The Curious Nose

    Let the Sky Rain Potatoes

    Borderland

    Garum

    100 A.D.–400 A.D.

    Rome

    Fifty Million Snails

    Meals for Me

    Dark Ages and the Men of God

    1000 A.D.–1400 A.D.

    Europe

    I Arise Resigned

    In Sinistra Parte, Johannus Baptista

    1100 A.D.–1450 A.D.

    England

    Pity the Blind in Palate

    A Pigges Pettie Toes

    Elizabethan England

    The Standing and the Waiting

    Catherines Lonesome Cooks

    1533 A.D.–1810 A.D.

    France

    Two Birds Without a Branch

    The Pale Yellow Glove

    The Brothers

    Set-piece for a Fishing Party

    1810 A.D.–1900 A.D.

    France

    On Dining Alone

    Sing of Dinner in a Dish

    Shell-shock and Richard the Third

    1900 A.D.––

    Europe and America

    The Social Status of a Vegetable

    César

    To End

    Consider The Oyster

    Love and Death Among the Molluscs

    A Supper to Sleep On

    R is for Oyster

    The Well-dressed Oyster

    Take 300 Clean Oysters

    A Lusty Bit of Nourishment

    Pearls Are Not Good to Eat

    Those Were Happy Days

    Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup

    Love Was the Pearl

    My Country, ’Tis of Thee

    As Luscious as Locusts

    How To Cook A Wolf

    How to Be Sage Without Hemlock

    How to Catch the Wolf

    How to Distribute Your Virtue

    How to Boil Water

    How to Greet the Spring

    How Not to Boil an Egg

    How to Keep Alive

    How to Rise Up Like New Bread

    How to Be Cheerful Though Starving

    How to Carve the Wolf

    How to Make a Pigeon Cry

    How to Pray for Peace

    How to Be Content with a Vegetable Love

    How to Make a Great Show

    How to Have a Sleek Pelt

    How to Comfort Sorrow

    How to Be a Wise Man

    How to Lure the Wolf

    How to Drink to the Wolf

    How Not to Be an Earthworm

    How to Practice True Economy

    Conclusion

    The Gastronomical Me

    Foreword

    The Measure of My Powers

    A Thing Shared

    The Measure of My Powers

    The Measure of My Powers

    The First Oyster

    The Measure of My Powers

    The Measure of My Powers

    Sea Change

    The Measure of My Powers

    To Feed Such Hunger

    The Measure of My Powers

    Noble and Enough

    The Measure of My Powers

    The Measure of My Powers

    Sea Change

    Sea Change

    Sea Change

    Define This Word

    The Measure of My Powers

    Once I Dreamed

    I Remember Three Restaurants

    Sea Change

    The Lemming to the Sea

    The Flaw

    The Measure of My Powers

    Feminine Ending

    An Alphabet For Gourmets

    Foreword

    A is for dining Alone

    B is for Bachelors

    C is for Cautious

    D is for Dining out

    E is for Exquisite

    F is for Family

    G is for Gluttony

    H is for Happy

    I is for Innocence

    J is for Juvenile dining

    K is for Kosher

    L is for Literature

    M is for Monastic

    N is for Nautical

    O is for Ostentation

    P is for Peas

    Q is for Quantity

    R is for Romantic

    S is for Sad

    T is for Turbot

    U is for Universal

    V is for Venality

    W is for Wanton

    X is for Xanthippe

    Y is for Yak

    Z is for Zakuski

    From A to Z: The Perfect Dinner

    Index of Recipes

    About the Author

    Notes

    Copyright © 1937, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1948, 1949, 1954, 1990, 2004 by M. F. K. Fisher. All rights reserved.

    Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

    A compilation of the works of M. F. K. Fisher first published in book form separately under the titles: Serve It Forth; Consider the Oyster; How to Cook a Wolf; The Gastronomical Me; and An Alphabet for Gourmets.

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

    www.hmhco.com

    Trademarks: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing logo are trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and/or its affiliates. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

    Fisher, M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 1908–

    The art of eating / by M. F. K. Fisher ; with an introduction by Clifton Fadiman, an appreciation by James Beard, and a biographical essay by Joan Reardon.—50th anniversary ed.

    p. cm.

    Includes index.

    ISBN-10: 0-7645-4261-3 (paperback)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-7645-4261-9 (paperback)

    1. Gastronomy. I. Title.

    TX633.F515 2004

    641'.01'3—dc22

    2003026124

    eISBN 978-0-544-17743-7

    v8.0219

    The Art of Eating: In Celebration

    DURING HER LIFETIME M. F. K. Fisher was no stranger to introductions. She wrote them for well-known authors and for community cookbooks and for friends and fans—or she dashed one off because the subject of the book interested her. During her fallow periods she welcomed requests to introduce books on tea, on wine, on Japanese cooking, and on road food simply to keep her name in the mainstream of gastronomical publishing. Fisher also introduced her own books with clarifying forewords although she seldom warmed to introductions to her work penned by others. In a letter to Esquire’s Arnold Gingrich, she indicated that she found "[W. H.] Auden’s little essay [for The Art of Eating] very wandering and foggy. She even revisited the introductions she had written, and revisionist that she was, she reintroduced the introductions and conclusions and forewords and afterwords" to her major works in the slender volume called Dubious Honors.

    So, is another introduction to M. F. K. Fisher necessary? Yes, because celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Art of Eating mandates placing this seminal work into the context of twenty-first century gastronomy.

    The volume heralded in 1954 as the Collected Gastronomical Works of M.F.K. Fisher has not only been in continuous print for fifty years, but it has also become a benchmark for all that is original and memorable in America’s culinary writing during the first half of the twentieth century. Fisher brought to the nutrition-oriented and commercial-centered culinary landscape a fresh vision, and she was uniquely positioned to do so. Exposed to French wines and food and steeped in the rich tradition of Continental gastronomical writing while studying in Dijon in the early 1930s, nurtured in the California tradition of fresh and seasonal ingredients, mentored by a succession of variously trained cooks in her family’s kitchen, and more than a little intrigued by the language and lore of culinary history, Fisher found the perfect medium to display her journalistic skill, a legacy from her father and grandfather, and, as James Beard said, her deeply personal thoughts and experiences that resound in one’s emotions. And in each book, beginning with Serve It Forth in 1937, Fisher became more adept at creating her glorious mix of subjectivity and history, legend and lore.

    Fisher said of her first book, Serve It Forth, It will be about eating and about what to eat and about people who eat. And I shall do gymnastics by trying to fall between the three fires, or by straddling them all. The book ranges from Egypt, the Orient, and Greece (3000 B.C.—100 A.D.) to twentieth-century America in a sequence of vignettes highlighting amusing and sober events in the history of food. Woven among the historical essays are personal tales of secret indulgences, restaurants visited, two friendly recipes, and Fisher’s thoughts about an ideal kitchen. The focus of each piece is food—tangerines toasting on a radiator, a perfect waiter spilling the soup, the smell of cabbage denoting class distinction, steak as a masculine prerogative, and diplomate au kirsch at a Sunday family feast. Overlaid with multiple connotations, food becomes a metaphor for our basic human hungers.

    In Consider The Oyster (1941), Fisher ranged more freely, adding the fascinating maritime habits and scientific information of the bisexual bivalve to the aphrodisiac lore and personalities famous for generating the legends defining the oyster. From Antoine’s in New Orleans to a tavern in Connecticut, she collected those recipes that traditionally attracted the aficionados of both raw and cooked preparations. She also drew on fond memories of childhood Sunday suppers of comforting oyster stew, and her mother’s reminiscences of boarding school oyster loaves. The result was less studied than her first book and an interesting blend of facts and personal experiences. That she wrote it to distract her second husband, Dillwyn Parrish, from the debilitating pain of Buerger’s disease accounts for the wit and lighthearted tone that permeates the book; but she was also sharing stories, memories of stories told to her, and recipes the same way she would share a tureen of oyster stew, ladling out a lusty bit of nourishment.

    The progress of World War II in Europe, the tragedy of Dillwyn Parrish’s illness and death, and the advent of America’s involvement in war with the Axis powers mandated Fisher’s third book be aptly called How To Cook A Wolf. Having seen blackout curtains, and experienced food shortages and curfews in Switzerland, she was in a unique position to recommend strategies for Americans intent on living agreeably in a world of constraints. Published in 1942 when shortages and rationing were rampant, she used what was a dire but temporary situation to discuss current fallacies regarding what people should eat, singling out the balanced meals touted by popular home and garden magazines for particular criticism. Every chapter in this book is a how-to guide. How to: Greet the Spring, Be Sage Without Hemlock, Keep Alive, Rise Up Like New Bread, Be Cheerful Though Starving, and Be Content with a Vegetable Love. And there are a few How Not to . . . chapters as well. She proposes breakfasts of heaps of toast, an all-vegetable lunch of soup or salad, steak or a cheese soufflé for dinner, and juice or fruit for a between-meal pick-up. If the entire day, rather than each meal, balances out nutritionally, fine. The important thing is awakening the palate to the pleasures at hand whether they be starches or proteins. She draws on memories of her mother’s gingerbread, French food, and canned foods and arranges the seventy-three recipes into traditional categories like appetizers, egg dishes, poultry, meat, and desserts, adding, with a wink and a nod, tips to ensure the survival of the dog Butch and cat Blackberry during wartime shortages.

    The centerpiece of The Art of Eating, and the most oblique book in the collection, is the autobiographical The Gastronomical Me (1943). Written during her first pregnancy, Fisher used memorable meals and food experiences to tell her own story and assess her career before she assumed the role of a single mother. The people she wrote about were with me then, [with] their other deeper needs of love and happiness—Grandmother Holbrook making jam in the Whittier kitchen; her father Rex and sister Anne dining on fresh peach pie and thick cream by a stream when the three drove home from her aunt’s ranch; her first husband Al Fisher and Mary Frances celebrating their first-month anniversary at the Aux Trois Faison restaurant in Dijon; Dillwyn and she returning to the States on the Normandie, their last trans-Atlantic voyage together; and her brother David’s strange fascination with Juanito’s mariachi band in Lake Chapala. The happy days of Fisher’s youth and romantic days of honeymooning with her first husband become complicated in the ménage à trois in Vevey, Switzerland, where Al Fisher exits the scene and Dillwyn Parrish and Mary Frances live their short-lived idyll at Le Paquis. Present in her stories also are the ocean crossings, resettling in California, tragedy, death, and Fisher taking the measure of her personal and professional powers against the cosmopolitan backgrounds of Europe, Hollywood, and Mexico. Through the revisiting of her shared sequences of meals and events, Fisher learns her place in the world.

    By 1945, Fisher had married her third husband—the former publisher, literary agent, and writer Donald Friede. He quickly began orchestrating her career, introducing her to Henry Volkening, her agent until 1978, and his former partner Pat Covici, an editor at Viking. In what would prove to be the most productive decade of her long career, Fisher wrote a novel, translated Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste that critics hailed as the King James version of Savarin’s Bible, compiled an anthology of literary pieces on eating and drinking, and wrote articles for a spectrum of quality magazines. In 1948 she completed a series of twenty-six articles based on the alphabet, which were to run consecutively in Gourmet magazine. Revised and expanded, the pieces were then published as a book called An Alphabet For Gourmets. The sequence forms a kaleidoscopic image of Fisher’s life in the 1940s. From "A is for dining Alone, a thoughtful essay on living in a studio apartment and making quality but limited meals, to Z is for Zakuski, a piece derived from Donald Friede’s memories of his boyhood in St. Petersburg, Fisher revisits meals savored, draws on Brillat-Savarin’s sage advice, and considers food as an aphrodisiac—all with a light touch. She offers, as one critic wrote, a merry, sometimes biting, often passionate defense of the lovers approach to food—any kind of food."

    Although he was by then divorced from Fisher, Donald Friede proposed what he called an omnibus of his ex-wife’s first five gastronomical books in 1953, and he was able to command a generous advance from World Books, where he worked with Mary Frances’s successor in marriage, Eleanor Kask, whom he wed in 1951. Together they produced a volume with illustrations—called decorations—by Leo Manso and an Introduction by the respected author Clifton Fadiman. Although Fisher resisted the idea initially, saying in a letter to her friend Larry Bachman that the collected edition would make her feel like a minor Somerset Maugham of Sulphur Springs Avenue . . . or a Colette of California . . . ant-size, of course, she soon saw the advantage of keeping her name and reputation before the public during a period when she was actively involved with the education of her daughters, Anna and Kennedy, and not writing as much as she would have liked. The critics proved her right and hailed the omnibus as a refreshing breeze flowing from the twin sources of sense and sensibility. She writes, in short, as one intelligent adult to another—practically, often profoundly, and always beautifully. So said the San Francisco Chronicle. Collecting her five earlier gastronomical books into one volume dramatically enhanced her culinary reputation, because as Fadiman said, It was the work of the most interesting philosopher of food now practicing in our country.

    Fisher was living at Madame Lane’s boarding house in Aix-en-Provence with her two daughters when The Art of Eating arrived in the fall of 1954. Writing to friends and family, she said that she felt quite detached from the glowing reviews. In response, some of them wrote that they hoped that publishing the collection of her early gastronomical books would free her from culinary magazine deadlines and the hot stove of cookery bookery. For her part, Mary Frances felt that there were other things—folk remedies and old age; other places—Aix and Marseille; and other people—waiters, friendly doctors, and taxicab drivers to write about whenever time would permit.

    But The Art of Eating had made its mark in the ever-growing number of books about the pleasures of the table, and Fisher’s audience grew. The popularity of Fisher’s book propelled an impressive publication history both in the United States and abroad. In 1963 Faber & Faber brought out a British edition of The Art of Eating without the inclusion of How To Cook A Wolf apparently because Duell, Sloan and Pearce, the copyright-holding publisher of the book, refused permission. W. H. Auden wrote the Foreword, and it contained the oft-quoted statement, "Mrs. Fisher is as talented a writer as she is a cook. Indeed, I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose. If a reader wishes to test this assertion, let him read the first three pages of the section in An Alphabet For Gourmets entitled ‘I is for Innocence.’" Auden also launched into an elaborate theory about women who developed a passion for cooking, proposing that their animus, or unconscious masculine side, was stronger than normal. Although he did not apply his conclusions directly to Fisher, he did suggest that her preoccupation with wine and food was cerebral as well as creative. Twenty years later, the British publisher Pan Books reissued The Art of Eating, including How To Cook A Wolf with the same W. H. Auden foreword.

    On this side of the Atlantic, the Macmillan Company acquired the rights from World and republished The Art of Eating in 1971 with the original Leo Manso illustrations throughout and the Fadiman introduction. This edition also included an Appreciation written by James Beard in which he emphasized that Fisher has been a rarity in American gastronomy. While this country has countless numbers of cookbook writers, he maintained, there have been precious few writers in the European tradition of Brillat-Savarin, Maurice des Ombiaux, or George Saintsbury. Fisher successfully and incomparably joined memory and the word. "She writes about fleeting tastes and feasts vividly, excitingly, sensuously, exquisitely. There is almost a wicked thrill in following her uninhibited track through the glories of the good life. What pleasure awaits the reader who has not known the five volumes that make up The Art of Eating. In 1990 Macmillan published a paperback with an added Introduction by M. F. K. Fisher, as my one and only fan letter to myself." Whether in hardcover or paperback, during the past fifty years, the omnibus has lost none of its impact or relevance as a contribution to the art of writing.

    Some books are meant to be read and passed on; others require a permanent place in ones personal library for frequent savoring, for delight in what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d. The Art of Eating contains those intimate moments recollected in tranquillity when eating, drinking, and conversing was as good as it could ever be; when freshly picked, simply cooked, happily eaten green peas symbolized the satisfaction of our deepest needs; and when a father and his two young daughters discovered the depth of their relationship while picnicking on freshly baked peach pie garnished with thick cream. This is M. F. K. Fisher’s special genius. [Publisher’s copy, 1954]

    —JOAN REARDON

    Thoughts about M.F.K. Fisher and Her Work

    dingbat Julia Child, cookbook author and teacher:

    How wonderful to have here in my hands the essence of M. F. K. Fisher whose wit and passionate opinions on food and those who produce it, comment upon it, and consume it are as apt today as they were several decades ago, when she composed them. Why did she choose food and hunger she was asked, and she replied, ‘When I write about hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth, and the love of it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied.’ This is the stuff we need to hear, and to hear again and again.

    dingbat Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse:

    This comprehensive volume should be required reading for every cook. It defines in a sensual and beautiful way the vital relationship between food and culture.

    dingbat Dr. Maya Angelou, poet, author, friend:

    "During some golden days in the 1970s I moved to Sonoma, California, in the wine country. I had come to know the town by visiting with my friends David Bouverie and M. F. K. Fisher who lived there.

    "My stove and refrigerator were working but my pots and pans were still in moving boxes. I went to the local cookery shop and bought good kitchenware that I knew I would continue to use even after mine was liberated from its holding prison. I told the shop owners that I had invited M. F. K. Fisher for dinner. They paled with shock and asked me: ‘You mean you are going to cook for Mary Frances in pots you haven’t tried out?’

    The invitation had gone out so I had no choice. We spent a wonderful evening together and although we lived only three miles apart, she sent me a letter thanking me for the splendid evening. Her postscript was typical of the M. F. K. Fisher I knew and who I still miss. It was, ‘P. S. That was the first honest cassoulet I have eaten in years.’

    dingbat Ruth Reichl, editor in chief, Gourmet magazine:

    "In the mid-seventies, when I was a contributing editor at New West magazine, one of my editors announced that he was about to ask M. F. K. Fisher to write something for us. What, he wanted to know, should he read to familiarize himself with her work? In response I handed him my very worn copy of The Art of Eating with this note:

    ‘Mary Frances has the extraordinary ability to make the ordinary seem rich and wonderful. Her dignity comes from her absolute insistence on appreciating life as it comes to her. You’ll see.

    ‘Read in this order:

    Foreword

    Conclusion

    Define This Word

    Feminine Ending

    Pity the Blind in Palate

    A is for dining Alone

    ‘After that you’re on your own, but if I were you I’d read all of The Gastronomical Me, just because I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I can’t tell you how much I envy you the joy of reading Mary Frances for the first time. It will change your life.’

    In the almost thirty years that have passed since then, my feelings about this have not changed one bit.

    dingbat Jacques Pépin, chef, cookbook author, cooking show host:

    "M. F. K. Fisher’s writing is always amusing, smart, and sharp but especially accurate and current. In ‘T is for Turbot’ she is the apologist for steaming turbot in a copper wash boiler, a method created by Brillat-Savarin on the spur of the moment to accommodate the size of that large fish. With a gibe toward Escoffier techniques, she explains the process of the ‘professor’ in mouthwatering detail and, furthermore, gives a simple but elegant recipe for preparing trout in aspic that appears to come straight from the lexicon of nouvelle cuisine."

    dingbat Betty Fussell, food historian:

    Reading M. F. K. Fisher never made me as hungry for food as it made me hungry for the company of one who was so tartly witty and wise, so provocative and persuasive, so artful and contradictory that, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, ‘she makes hungry where most she satisfies.’ To read little is to want more and to read much is to want all. Thank god she wrote a lot. Fisher is truly a fisher of men, a master seducer with words as her medium and food as the bait. Whether this is your first taste of Fisher or a lifelong addiction, don’t try to escape. She has anticipated your every move.

    dingbat James Villas, cookbook author, food writer, friend:

    "When people ask me how Mary Frances Fisher influenced my career and life, no doubt they expect me to relate still another sugary anecdote about a lunch with her at the ranch in Sonoma, or some special dish she cooked for me, or advice she offered regarding my work. All of that I could do with great love and affection for this gentle but complex woman, but no personal experience with Mary Frances over the years could ever equal the indelible impact that one particular passage from The Gastronomical Me had on me when I first began writing about food.

    "The episode pertains to an invocation of a beloved husband slowly dying of cancer during a voyage on the Normandie back in the late 1930s:

    ‘We got up late, and went after bathings and shavings to the Lounge, where we sat in soft chairs by the glass wall and looked out past the people sunning themselves to the blue water. We drank Champagne or sometimes beer, slowly, and talked and talked to each other because there was so much to say and so little time to say it.

    Even when New York loomed near us, we felt outward bound. I bit gently my numb fingers. I seemed beautiful, witty, truly loved . . . the most fortunate of all women, past sea change and with her hungers fed.’

    "The passage, for me, is not only one of the most heartbreaking that Mary Frances ever composed but the finest example I know of her unique art. In just a few sentences, every sense comes into play as she juxtaposes highly charged emotion with tragic resignation and transforms a wretched experience into a positive philosophical phenomenon. The tension and ambiguity of human relations, the absence of self-pity and honest acceptance of Fate, the quiet desperation to feed a hunger that far surpasses that of the stomach, the determination to confront Time and defeat its onslaught—only a poet like Mary Frances could reduce such complexities to a few well-chosen words. It doesn’t matter whether Champagne or beer is drunk or whether it’s good or bad; what matters is that it’s sipped slowly and relates to the drama. Other food writers would wax endlessly and stodgily over flavors and textures and impressions; with Mary Frances, such secondary details are useless unless they contribute to the pathos of an event or sensation. Here, as elsewhere, she manages to transcend the subject so that the art of living takes supreme precedence over the more subordinate act of nourishing our bodies, and in doing so, she elevates ‘food writing’ to a level that is both noble and extremely difficult to imitate.

    "And such, I am convinced, is the true art of M. F. K. Fisher, an art that is so deceivingly simple and unpretentious but one that imparts a dynamic message that lingers a lifetime. Today, still, I never drink Champagne or beer (especially on my crossings aboard QE 2) without recalling Mary Frances’s powerful story—her ‘sea change.’ And I still struggle to write sentences like those in this exquisite passage."

    dingbat Amanda Hesser, cookbook author, food writer (New York):

    "As a reader I feel I know M. F. K. Fisher like a friend. Who can deny me this? Why, I know her family and friends! I can picture her father vividly: the calm, thoughtful newspaper editor who sent her to the dictionary to look up words she did not know. I could draw her small adobe house, piled with books, in Glen Ellen. Madame Rigoulot’s dining room in Dijon, where she and Al, her first husband, were overfed in The Gastronomical Me. And, in the same book, the snowy windowsill where she chilled dried tangerines.

    "I can’t find a single passage where what follows is described, but I can nonetheless see her with her hair pulled back from her round face. She is sitting in an armchair, stroking a cat on her lap while talking to visitors over cocktails. She is at a café in Aix with her daughters, fat square ice cubes melting at the bottom of their emptied glasses of citron presse. I have shared so many meals with her. She made me, everyone who read her, feel so close.

    "I fell in love with the emotional, social Mary Frances. She is the sensualist I wanted to become. She is the woman who cried after revisiting M. Ribaudot’s restaurant, her old haunt; who swept her children off to France for no other reason than that she was drawn back to Aix. And she is the diner who never said ‘No’ to that last glass of marc.

    "Food came alive for her in a social context; the table was where everything that mattered happened. It was where she, Al, and Norah ate papayas, ‘cold and smooth as butter,’ and drank Champagne on their voyage from France to California. And where she learned, by observing a diner across the room, how to eat Burgundian snails, tipping the garlicky juice from the shell into her mouth and then swabbing the shell, with a morsel of her crusty bread.’

    "But there is one place where I have never felt quite as if I could peer over her shoulder, or listen to her thoughts and worries: the kitchen.

    "Certainly Mary Frances’s skills as a cook and as an observer are at work in many of her recipes. Explaining how to make her Aunt Gwen’s fried egg sandwiches, she wrote: ‘Heat the drippings in a wide flat-bottomed skillet until they spit and smoke. Break in the eggs, which will immediately bubble around the edges, making them crisp and indigestible, and break their yolks with a fork and swirl them around, so that they are scattered fairly evenly through the whites. This will cook very quickly, and the eggs should be tough as leather.’

    "And in How To Cook A Wolf, there are dozens of cooking tips, including a great one for purifying and saving cooking fat. (Pour it into a jar and cover with water. The burned bits will be absorbed into the water and the pure fat will rise to the top and harden.)

    "When I look back now at How To Cook A Wolf I am surprised by how much specific cooking advice it contains. And I can only guess that the reason it didn’t stick with me was that it was more didactic than sensual. It is a cooking manual written from the perspective of a woman in the know, not a woman discovering—and not the woman who let us in on so many other parts of her emotional life.

    "Mary Frances admits to overcooking eggs, and confesses to keeping a mirror in the kitchen, so that if ‘the Prince of Wales or Charles Boyer’ comes to the door, she could be forewarned of the smudge on her nose, but she doesn’t readily relive any cooking dramas or leave us with any vivid fascination or joy with the kitchen.

    "For her, process was process. She was not leaning into her oven, sweating as she chopped onions, licking her fingers, wishing her husband would stop standing in her way. Well, she was, probably, but she wasn’t telling us about it. I can barely picture a single pan that she owned. Nor can I imagine where the window was, if there was one, in any of her kitchens.

    "She addressed only lightly the questions that obsess today’s food lovers. What kind of knives did she have? How did she arrange her refrigerator? Did she make her own mayonnaise? Did she ever lose sleep over a dinner party? Cookware fetishes were not yet born. Good cooking skills were not yet a social asset like being well-read or witty.

    "Mary Frances left other voids in her writing, as well. Though she writes that her mother disapproved of her open enjoyment of food as a child, calling it ‘unseemly,’ Mary Frances never explores the possibility that her profession may have begun as a rebellion. And when she and Al split up, you never witnessed a single fight.

    "Though she may not have specifically explored her relationship with her mother in print, she definitely fleshed out her long rebellion. Through her writing, she told a public steeped in Puritan values that it was okay to treat eating as an act of pleasure rather than an act of duty and restraint.

    "It’s an issue that continues to test people, and this is one of many reasons that Mary Frances’s work holds up so well today. Her early life—taking long overseas voyages to Europe, living through war rations, and being a single mom in Aix—may now require a good deal of imagination to embrace. But people still come of age, get in bad relationships, suffer, rejoice, and move on. So The Art of Eating could not be more current.

    "Yet we readers are selfish—we can never get enough from people we love. For me, her life as a cook will always feel like a missing piece. Mary Frances grew up in an upper-middle-class family, where the kitchen was not likely a place that anyone gathered but the help. Maybe she found that expressing pleasure at the table was amply progressive, while self-revelation in the kitchen remained shameful.

    "Or perhaps the explanation for her self-abnegation in the kitchen can be found in a short passage in Serve It Forth, slipped in there subtly, like butter into a sauce. In the passage, she goes into great detail about what her ideal kitchen would look like. There are open shelves, a window or two, and space enough to prepare a meal for six. And one last thing, she writes: ‘Most of all I need to be let alone. I need peace.’ And no hungry readers peeking over her shoulder."

    dingbat Susan Herrmann Loomis, author, On Rue Tatin and other books:

    "As I turn the pages of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher’s works—The Art of Eating, or Boss Dog, or Two Towns in Provence, or others—I find myself alongside her. She paints a picture so deftly, with strokes of such natural and living hues, that it is possible to smell the marc she sips, the chocolate she orders for her girls, the faint wisps of perfume and cigarette smoke that cloak nearly any French situation, anywhere in France. I feel the cloth of her characters’ clothing, smell the rich aromas of food they put on the table, receive their whispered comments as does she. Even when she has just finished a hike on a hill near Les Laumes-Alésia of the Côte d’Or in Burgundy and is breathing hard, she makes me feel and smell the cold thin air ‘ . . . which felt like heavy fire before it thawed,’ with the same sensuality as the subsequent chocolate she put in her mouth, which ‘broke at first like gravel . . . then . . . grew soft, and melted voluptuously into a warm stream down my throat.’ (Serve It Forth)

    "In her writings, M. F. K. Fisher introduces me to a cast of characters around her, few of whom are intimates, yet whom she reveals intimately through her keen, lush observation and undoubtedly lively yet ever-so-slightly dark sense of life. She describes her own manner so well in the following description of a dining room, taken from The Gastronomical Me, ‘The room was so intimate and yet so reassuringly impersonal. . . .’ This is her key, I believe, beyond a voluptuous sense of life and adventure—she writes of everything and airs her opinions without emotionally embroiling the reader. She wraps her observations in food and eating, yet it seems to me her true concern is physical desire and satiation, and she turns her wit and intelligence to the subjects with great style.

    M. F. K. Fisher’s writing, her life, and her attitudes are endlessly fascinating and succulent, and ever-inspiring.

    dingbat Jack Shoemaker, one of Fisher’s publishers and friends:

    I learned so much from Mary Frances—that pleasure is serious business and the consequences of not having a sufficient amount of pleasure are dire, that daily life is where life happens and we should treat daily life as a sequence of moments granted us as sacred gifts. She taught and practiced a philosophy of living inside those moments to the fullest degree possible, and she would have sounded like a Zen teacher, ‘a perfectly realized master,’ in a different culture. She thought the English language, if carefully used, had the potential to be one of the world’s great languages, and when poorly used was uglier than nearly every other language on the planet. ‘She’s a nice enough person,’ I can hear her say, ‘but I wish she would learn to write a sentence!’ And she thought life was the process of acquiring age with grace and enthusiasm, not something to endure. I think she thought the literary depressives, neurasthenics, and professional existentialists were rather pitiful. Reading her prose is like listening to her talk, and listening to her talk for a long afternoon was as glistening and exciting as an evening spent with Beethoven’s piano sonatas.

    dingbat Marsha and Patrick Moran, Fisher’s assistant and friends:

    "The Art of Eating is a fine book, which both of us continue to pick up to remember not only our friend Mary Frances, but also just to remind ourselves about how good sentences are constructed. In reading through it, we are also reminded of Mary Frances’s ability to turn a phrase on itself so that it most often surprises and delights her readers, and always nourishes them. Her hunger to put her own self into her words is revealed from the very first writings in her journals, which spring off the page as fully formed, mature creations, even though they were inked from the pen of a teenager. And, from that point forward, it seems her greatest appetite was to reveal the humanity in each of us, or lack of it, through the portal by which we sustain ourselves physically, through the food we eat."

    dingbat Jeannette Ferrary, author, M. F. K. Fisher and Me: A Memoir of Food and Friendship and six cookbooks:

    "‘When shall we live if not now?’ So begins Serve It Forth, one of the five books in the collection of M. F. K. Fisher’s works called The Art of Eating. In it she writes of the preciousness of time, especially time spent at the table. She begins with lofty invocations about the ‘honor and sanctity in eating together,’ but it isn’t long before she gets down to brass tacks. She doesn’t waffle about her specific preferences for everything from the height of the chairs and the size of the plates to the optimal number of guests and how they should be chosen (they should be able to sit and eat for five or six hours before a ‘meal of soup and wine and cheese as well as one of twenty fabulous courses’). She also counsels not to invite people who are in the first ‘tremors of love’ because it’s simply, as she puts it, a ‘waste of good food.’ Just as you’re thinking of finding a pencil to make a checklist of these imperatives so you don’t get it wrong, you realize that’s not her point.

    "What she’s telling you is that you’re not alone if you obsess a bit about these same sorts of things. If you’re the kind of person who can make a ceremony out of eating a sandwich or a pickle or a few tiny pearls of caviar, you’re not so crazy after all.

    "At least that’s how I felt when I first read M. F. K. Fisher almost thirty years ago.

    "Until I discovered her writings, I had serious doubts about my sanity. And for good reason. I couldn’t help noticing that other people could eat an entire meal and not utter a word about it. There were those who actually didn’t begin musing about their dinner choices before they brushed their teeth in the morning. I could name quite a few friends who never memorized Gourmet magazine, who didn’t have cookbooks piled ceiling high on their night tables. I had occasionally wondered if this behavior was entirely normal.

    "All that changed when I was introduced to the work of M. F. K. Fisher. In The Art of Eating—all five books of it—I found a soulmate. Visiting these pages, I could drift off to Dijon (where I’d never been) and breathe in the French gingerbread called pain d’épice with its ‘smell as thick as a flannel curtain.’ I curled up with her book-length observations of the oyster and its ‘dreadful but exciting life.’

    "I chuckled—and humor is one of her often overlooked attractions—with such commentary as: ‘One way to horrify at least eight out of ten Anglo-Saxons is to suggest their eating anything but the actual red fibrous meat of a beast.’ I tasted the salad ‘made in a bowl you used to see in Venice, the cooked and the raw entwined in an easy marriage.’ I was right there with her when she spoke of her ‘belief that unexpectedness and a modicum of astonishment enliven any good dinner.’

    "On her honeymoon in Paris—her very first visit as a young woman—I imagined sitting with her watching the Seine flow past as we sipped hot chocolate and nibbled croissants on the Quai Voltaire. I felt myself tremble with the rapture that enveloped her as she shared with Dillwyn Parrish, the love of her life, the wine that ‘was like music on our tongues.’

    Her writing helped me understand that food is a valid and fascinating world to explore as a writer, which ultimately changed my life. It was the kind of experience known to many who become Alices in her wonderland, enchanted by her sensual renderings. It was both transformation and confirmation. In M. F. K. Fisher, I found permission to be myself.

    dingbat Norah Barr, Fisher’s sister and coeditor of Fisher’s letters:

    "Mary Frances was the person closest to me from 1917 to 1991—very difficult to reduce to a paragraph or two. But I am very sure that she would welcome this anniversary edition of The Art of Eating. This is a wonderful gift for all of us, but especially so for people born in the past fifty years who may not have yet read Fisher. These books are so young, so sensitive and aware of the power of her experience that readers will fall in love with this writer as her contemporaries did. And they will find that her books only deepened and became more enjoyable as Mary Frances grew older."

    dingbat Anna Parrish, Fisher’s older daughter:

    I remember the sound of the typewriter at odd hours and that sound can still put me right to sleep. I felt safe and knew that sound meant my mother was doing what made her happiest. Her cooking? Simple, unfashionably simple and good. (She would serve salami, prosciutto and melon, a big salad of romaine, crisp sourdough, and good wine. Maybe some grapes or ice cream for dessert. My friends were baffled, but always came back for more.) Her writing has the same effect on me that it probably does on her other readers: she weaves a very complex spell of words, beautiful, resonant English. The language I heard spoken as I grew up and the language I love to read. When I put down one of her books, I have been to her world, and I am refreshed. Oh, and usually hungry.

    dingbat Kennedy Friede Golden, Fisher’s younger daughter:

    "I was eight years old when The Art of Eating was first published, and appropriately oblivious to my mothers profession. I was engaged in being a child, playing with my older sister, enjoying family get-togethers, and moving away from the family home in Whittier to new frontiers in northern California and Aix-en-Provence. M. F. K. Fisher was my mother, and I have no sense of knowing her as anything else. She no doubt prepared our meals and gathered us at table with family and friends, but to me she was my mother, and no more.

    "Now, fifty years later, rereading The Art of Eating has been a wonderful experience. I am pleased that this anniversary edition will give today’s readers access to her stories, to experience her love of people and enjoy her artful use of the English language. From the sad story of Charles in ‘The Standing and the Waiting’ to her discussion of the art of eating alone in ‘A is for dining Alone,’ this book is filled with stories of passion, compassion, love and loss. It is sad for me that I never appreciated her written words during her life, but I have certainly enjoyed reading them now.

    "The connection I feel between The Art of Eating and my experience of forty-six years of life with my mother is as complex as I believe she was. In her life and her writing, her passion was always for simplicity and goodness in both food and people. In this volume she shares that passion, bringing to life her intense personal connections with waiters, cooks, vendors in outdoor markets, men, women, children, and elders. In her stories I believe that readers will experience a richness of life seldom committed to paper, in her case, typed in the early morning hours while the rest of the world slept.

    "From the sex life of the oyster to the complexities of loss and death, The Art of Eating gives an intimate view into the many facets of being alive. Each story is brought within easy reach of the reader with food as the common element, whether it be the ‘twenty-six or -seven quarts an hour’ drunk by the tiny oyster or the peach pie eaten together under a canyon oak by a father and his seven-year-old daughter. In life’s most simple plan, we must all eat to stay alive.

    "The Art of Eating has aged well and is a book to be enjoyed by today’s busy cooks, parents, travelers, lovers, and anyone who has a love of life and a desire to live it to the fullest."

    MFK Fisher on a family picnic

    Family picnic, California, 1950. Left side, front to back: David Barr (nephew); John Barr, Jr. (nephew); M. F. K. Fisher; John Barr, Sr. (brother-in-law); Matthew Barr (nephew); Norah Barr (sister). Right side, front to back: Kennedy Friede (daughter); Anna Friede (daughter); Donald Friede (husband); Rex Kennedy (father).

    Photo courtesy of Kennedy Friede Golden

    One More Time

    I NEVER DID LIKE to write introductions, especially to my own stuff, although I find now that three good men have tried their hands at explaining why the first five books I wrote have been collected into this one volume called The Art of Eating.

    The original collection was brought out by The World Publishing Company about forty years ago, and Clifton Fadiman was already well known as an important literary critic when he wrote the introduction to it. His agent asked a fee of five hundred dollars. This was appalling to me, and it was only after a month of trying to do something myself about me that I grudgingly agreed to borrow half the fee from my father, if World would come up with the other half. Of course, this all seems puny now, but it was a real problem to me when it happened, for various reasons connected with my aversion to debts and my completely penniless condition as a divorced woman with two small children and no monies at all, either patrimonial or alimonial. (Much later on, Kip Fadiman was, of course, horrified by my small tale when he heard it, but he is amused as I am by now, because we are good friends forever.)

    Then the book was sold to Macmillian, and later to Vintage, and I think it was for Alfred Knopf that James Beard wrote a little introduction/preface for that edition to go along with the original by Clifton Fadiman.

    Meanwhile, in England the book had been bought by Faber & Faber, which was fine except that because of some political or publishing snafu, the one section that should have been printed for the hungry limeys, How To Cook A Wolf, was omitted. The book was introduced by W. H. Auden, though, which made it well worth the price of admission to the British scene, and in later printings, the Wolf was included, for reasons quite beyond my comprehension.

    The book has been published by other people in other countries as well as here, and now finally settled with one of its original owners, Macmillan. The best thing about the forty-odd years of its comings and goings is that it has had three of the finest men I’ve ever known write generously and well of it, and whether their interests were purely pecuniary or were based on compassion and even kindness, they happen to have been people I both respect and love. Fortunately, they’ve all known this, but it does me good to have a chance to repeat it here.

    It seems almost ridiculous to add that I myself find it impossible to read anything that I have written, once it is in print. I admit that a while ago, I asked a young man to read me a chapter from another book I’d written, mainly to see if he could indeed read and therefore qualify as a literate college graduate. He managed fairly well to stumble through the chapter about my cat Blackberry in A Cordial Water, and I found it fairly well written and indeed enjoyable. At least I could understand why it had been pointed out to me as a good bit of writing by several people I admire for other reasons.

    The mean cold, cold fact remains, though, that on page one of the chapter, there is a use of one word which I shall never point out to anyone but which offends me gravely. It is the only thing I can remember now about the whole story, I’m so sorry to say, and I’ll regret until the day I die that I know it is there.

    This fault in my behavior is a foolish one, as I’m the first to admit, and I fear that it is too late to remedy it. I know that I should ask someone to read parts of The Art of Eating to me, and indeed I plan to do so before much longer. I shall try to enjoy the words because I know that much better people than I have done so. Many of them have written to me and I am proud of anything they have told me that is good, although I can honestly accept it only in the name of M. F. K. Fisher. As Mary Frances, I am incapable of believing what they say with such grace and generosity, so I shall read it and think long about it, as something written by Fisher for me.

    And perhaps some day I may consider this introduction as my one and only fan letter to myself.

    M.F.K. FISHER

    GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA

    SEPTEMBER 1989

    Appreciation

    THE FIRST OF M. F. K. Fisher’s books to fall into my hands was How To Cook A Wolf, published during World War II. I was a cryptographer in the Army at that point, and I reveled in her brilliant approach to wartime economics for the table. (I later actually tried that life-saving recipe for the Sludge, so intent was I on fighting the wolf.) Like so many readers before me, I was hooked. I quickly searched out her earlier books, Serve It Forth and Consider The Oyster. Oddly enough, though we eventually moved in the same professional sphere, corresponded, talked by telephone long-distance, and shared a number of friends, it took twenty-five years more for us to meet. By then I had long since been a captive to her prose, her charm, and her taste for the better things of this planet.

    On rereading The Art of Eating, which contains the core of her work, I find it amazing that so much of these five books has lingered in the mind and the feelings—not just witty and sensible passages about eating, but deeply personal thoughts and experiences that resound in one’s emotions. M. F. K. Fisher has the effect of sending the reader away with a desire to love better and live more fully.

    Mrs. Fisher is a woman who has had many gifts bestowed on her—beauty, intelligence, heart, a capacity for pleasures of the flesh, of which that art of eating is no small part, and the art of language as well. Though she can write with a silver attelet dipped in sauce of Careme or Montagne, her palate goes beyond ortolans and rare vintages. She can also write about eating and drinking with a pure, primitive enjoyment. I think of that intoxicating description, in Alphabet For Gourmets, of a family meal in Switzerland, al fresco, highlighted by the ritual of eating peas fresh from the garden, cooked right on the spot. This celebration—it could be called nothing less—supports my thesis that good simple food, even rudimentary food, can give the same delight as the most elaborately prepared dishes.

    M. F. K. Fisher has been a rarity in American gastronomy. This country has produced quantities of cookbook writers—all too many who write without personality or originality—but few writers in the great European tradition of Brillat-Savarin, Maurice des Ombiaux, or George Saintsbury. The first of American gastronomes to gain recognition was George Ellwanger, from my home state of Oregon. Ellwanger's initial book, published in 1898, was called Meditations on Gout: With a consideration of its cure through the use of wine. This was followed by the far more explicit and fascinating volume The Pleasures of the Table, first published in 1902 and now available in a facsimile edition. Ellwanger was an esthete who counted gastronomy among his favorite arts and who was ahead of his time in the appreciation of good eating and fine wines. He was succeeded by a few others, such as Theodore Child and Percival Z. Didsbury, who wrote briefly on those subjects, but the field was empty for many years until the advent of M. F. K. Fisher.

    For an art as transitory as gastronomy there can be no record except for a keen taste memory and the printed word. The Art of Eating reminds me again that in M. F. K. Fisher memory and word are joined incomparably. She writes about fleeting tastes and feast vividly, excitingly, sensuously, exquisitely. There is almost a wicked thrill in following her uninhibited track through the glories of the good life. What pleasure awaits the reader who has not known the five volumes that make up The Art of Eating. And for those of us who have already known and loved the work of M. F. K. Fisher, the perpetuation of this great omnibus brings back old delights and comforts.

    JAMES A. BEARD

    Introduction

    LET THACKERAY provide our text: Next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind, must like, I think, to read about them. Amen.

    I have been addicted to eating for half a century and to date show no sign of breaking the habit—or its kindred one of devouring food by courtesy of Gutenberg. I do not speak of recipe books, which are part of the literature of knowledge, but of those belonging to the literature of power, those that, linking brain to stomach, etherealize the euphoria of feeding with the finer essence of reflection. He who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else. I will out-dogmatize Dr. Johnson: He minds his belly all the better who is learned in belly lore.

    We Americans, however, do not as a rule take gladly to the literature of gastronomy. Perhaps a native Puritanism is at fault. Though things are on the mend, we still plump ice cream into carbonic acid gas, rank steak and potatoes just below the Constitution, and contrive the cafeteria. How explain such things except as forms of self-punishment, stern reproofs to the rampant flesh? And, by the same token, to judge from its small audience, we must feel something vaguely licentious or censorable about the literature of food.

    Indeed we will not even discuss it. In Anglo-Saxon countries, as Ford Madox Ford once remarked, food is no more talked of than love or heaven. The tantrums of cloth-headed celluloid idols are deemed fit for grown-up conversation, while silence settles over such a truly important matter as food.

    Now good eating itself is of course the nub of the matter. But good books about good eating have their own noble uses. While the most exquisitely balanced dinner can never be relived, a book may evoke its graceful ghost. I own a small volume called Tables of Content by the dean of oenophiles, André Simon. It merely records some lunches and dinners he was lucky enough to get outside of during the late twenties and early thirties. But the menus, the names of the wines, the notes are enough to start glowing the second imagination that dwells in the palate.

    A writer as good as Simon can set a table in your mind—but he must be good. Part of his goodness flows from the relation he bears to his subject, the relation of love and respect. Much of the literature of gusto is in fact well written. A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs. You will hurl Thoreau at me—Thoreau, who would as lief eat raw chipmunk. You will bring up Shaw, who lived on weeds, water and liver pills. But both these exceptions would have written even better had they collaborated with a good French cook. I am persuaded that poor Thoreau died at forty-five partly of malnutrition, and that Shaw would not have hurried off at the (for him) absurd age of ninety-four had he not progressively weakened himself with his lethal vegetarian messes.

    A good book about food informs us of matters with which we are to be concerned all our lives. Sight and hearing lose their edge, the muscles soften, even the most gallant of our glands at last surrenders. But the palate may persist in glory almost to the very end. Indeed the greatest gourmets alive are elderly men and, less frequently, elderly women. Where is the tongue, the palate that is truly grown-up before thirty? The ability to enjoy eating, like the ability to enjoy any fine art, is not a matter of inborn talent alone, but of training, memory and comparison. Time works for the palate faithfully and fee-lessly.

    Furthermore, the alimentary canal contains the only stream that flows through all history and geography, laving banks on which cluster those works that mark man at his most civilized.

    Finally, gastronomical writing at its best is almost as much touched with the spirit as the bread and meat and wine with which it deals. There are no gross foods, only gross feeders; and by the same token even the homeliest prose about food, provided it be honest, can penetrate to the heart as do all words that deal with real things. A lordly dish of terrapin—or good bread and cheese—can be as uplifting as any landscape, and more so than many workers of art at which we are bid to Oh! and Ah! I have yet to meet that man who, with a good tournedos Rossini inside him, was not the finer for it, the more open to virtuous influences. Asparagus, Charles Lamb says softly, inspires thoughts, and even to read about such things cannot fail to purify our spirits.

    All such pleasures may be savored in this volume, the work of the most interesting philosopher of food now practicing in our country. The term philosopher has been chosen after due thought. Writes Mrs. Fisher: "There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine

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