The Gastronomical Me E-Book

M.F.K. Fisher

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'Her writing makes your mouth water.' -- Financial Times'Unique among the classics of gastronomic writing . . . a book about adult loss, survival, and love.' -- New York Review of BooksA classic of food writing that redefined the genre, The Gastronomical Me is a memoir of travel, love and loss, but above all hunger.In 1929 M.F.K. Fisher left America for France, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time. It inspired a prolific career as a food and travel writer. In The Gastronomical Me Fisher traces the development of her appetite, from her childhood in America to her arrival in Europe, where she embarked on a whole new way of eating, drinking, and living. She recounts unforgettable meals shared with an assortment of eccentric characters, set against a backdrop of mounting pre-war tensions.Here are meals as seductions, educations, diplomacies, and communions, in settings as diverse as a bedsit above a patisserie, a Swiss farm, and cruise liners across oceans. In prose convivial and confiding, Fisher illustrates the art of ordering well, the pleasures of dining alone, and how to eat so you always find nourishment, in both head and heart.'Many authors whisper, as though to a diary, or chat, as though to a friend, but Fisher communicates with the heady directness of a lover.' -- Bee Wilson, author of The Way We Eat Now'She is not just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop.' -- Rachel Cooke, Observer'The greatest food writer who has ever lived.' -- Simon Schama'Poet of the appetites.' -- John Updike'I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.' -- W.H. Auden

Leseprobe

‘The greatest food writer who has ever lived.’ – Simon Schama

‘Poet of the appetites.’ – John Updike

‘I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.’ – W.H. Auden

‘She is not just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop.’ – Rachel Cooke, Observer

‘Her writing makes your mouth water.’ – Financial Times

‘Unique among the classics of gastronomic writing … The Gastronomical Me is a book about adult loss, survival, and love.’ – New York Review of Books

For Anne Kennedy Kelly

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learnt your place in the world.

Santayana

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphForeword Preface   The Measure of My Powers • 1912A Thing Shared • 1918The Measure of My Powers • 1919The Measure of My Powers • 1919–1927The First Oyster • 1924The Measure of My Powers • 1927The Measure of My Powers • 1927–1928Sea Change • 1929–1931The Measure of My Powers • 1929–1930To Feed Such Hunger • 1930The Measure of My Powers • 1930–1931Noble and Enough • 1929–1931The Measure of My Powers • 1931 The Measure of My Powers • 1931–1932Sea Change • 1932Sea Change • 1935Sea Change • 1936Define This Word • 1936The Measure of My Powers • 1936–1939Once I Dreamt • 1938I Remember Three Restaurants • 1936–1939Sea Change • 1937–1939The Lemming to the Sea • 1938The Flaw • 1939The Measure of My Powers • 1941Feminine Ending • 1941 About the Author Also by M.F.K. Fisher Copyright

Foreword

The problem with most food writing is that it is too much about ingredients and not enough about appetite. Every time I return to M.F.K. Fisher – and she is the most re-readable of all prose stylists – I am struck that she tells you all the vital stuff that other food writers leave out. Her books are full of private cravings.

Many writers will give you a fine description of dinner but forget to tell you what it meant to the people at the table. Not Fisher. Meals, for her, are not just about what was served, but who ate it and how it made them feel. Her dinners are about disappointments, the passing of time and the thrill of laughing uncontrollably over gin and toast and caviar with a secret lover. She can be so bracingly personal that other food writing seems euphemistic by comparison. When she writes of hunger, as she famously explains at the start of this book, she is ‘really writing about love and the hunger for it and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and it is all one’.

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908–1992), whose work has never been as well known in Britain as it deserves, was the opposite of those gourmand restaurant critics for whom food is to be coldly appraised on aesthetic grounds. The American writer Clifton Fadiman once said that what made her great was that she wrote ‘not as a specialist but a whole human being, spiky with prejudices’. The only downside of this wonderful book, for a modern audience, is its title. The word ‘gastronomical’ has not worn well since the 1940s and to anyone who has read Harry Potter, it sounds a bit like Magical Me by Gilderoy Lockhart. You fear that you are going to be given lectures about pretentious meals by a tedious snob who only cares about her own stomach. In fact, this is a series of wise, funny and profound interludes showing how food is woven into the texture of a person’s life, from a picnic of peach pie eaten with a beloved father to the champagne a man drinks with abandon when he knows he will soon die.

Fisher first learned to write from her father Rex Kennedy, who ran The Whittier News in California. As a teenager, Mary Frances worked as a stringer for Rex, sometimes writing up as many as fifteen human interest stories a day on an old Remington typewriter. Her newspaper experience taught her to write fast and not to be boring. To the end of her long writing career, she never rewrote or edited her own prose, according to her biographer Anne Zimmerman.

But she only fully found her food voice – which is like no other – in her twenties.

It was the result of France and of love. With her first husband, Al Fisher, an academic, she lived in Dijon for three years and discovered ways of eating she had never imagined, from dark glossy sauces to pungent cheeses and small, succulent cauliflowers which she cooked with heavy cream. When she and Al returned from France to live in Laguna, California, she met someone whom she loved even more than Al, to whom she wanted to confide, and with whom she wanted eventually to share, all the joys and secrets of French eating. He was a married artist called Dillwyn ‘Tim’ Parrish, who became her great love. Tim was memorialised in her books – including this one – as ‘Chexbres’.

Fisher’s first book, published in 1937, was Serve it Forth. It was a collection of food essays, on mostly historic themes, many of which had been written as amuses-bouches to read out loud to Tim for his amusement. This partly explains the thrilling candour of her tone. In that first book, she wrote as if to a lover, with whom she could be free and frank. There’s also an air of trying to impress us with her precocious wit. ‘There are two questions which can easily be asked about a potato: What is it and Why is it?’ starts one of the essays. She continued with this candid and scholarly voice in Consider the Oyster (1941) and How to Cook a Wolf (1942). The latter was a book about how to eat well in wartime, with tips not just on frugal vegetable cookery but ‘How to Rise Up Like New Bread’ and ‘How to Comfort Sorrow’.

By the time she wrote The Gastronomical Me, in 1943, everything had changed and Fisher was franker still. Two years earlier, her beloved Tim had shot himself at the age of 47, after suffering from three years of debilitating pain from Buerger’s disease. The Gastronomical Me was written in a white heat during ten weeks holed up in a boarding house in Altadena, California while she was pregnant with her daughter Anne (whose father’s identity she never revealed). According to Zimmerman’s biography of Fisher, she told her friend, the critic Larry Powell, that she was worried because it was ‘the first thing I’ve ever written, really, without Tim’s cold judicial ear to listen’.

As a result, this collection of reminiscences – of her life with Al in Dijon and with Tim in Switzerland and much else besides – was more personal than anything she’d written. She is no longer trying to impress anyone. We are being addressed by a grieving pregnant woman in a hurry who doesn’t give a damn about the social niceties any more, insofar as she ever did. She tells us of mad Ora, a cook who uses her kitchen knife to slice her wrists and throat. The astonishing final essay, ‘Feminine Ending’, recounts the life of Juanito/Juanita, a Mexican mariachi singer, who sings ‘wild, cracked’ songs and wears dresses and hungers after Fisher’s brother David.

On reading The Gastronomical Me, one of Fisher’s friends remarked that she ought not to have written so much about herself. It’s a stupid comment to make about an autobiography, but you can see why some in the 1940s might have been shocked at the way she lays herself bare. In one of the chapters, she tells how she swallowed her first raw oyster at a school dance before dancing in the arms of the most intelligent girl in the school, Olmstead. Her shock at the oyster and her wondrous lesbian flirtation with Olmstead are presented as two equally new experiences, the one neither more nor less startling than the other.

Had Fisher wanted to, she could surely have left all these personal details out and stuck to writing about food. No one was better at pure, sensuous food description. This book will make you hungry for the ‘greyish-pink fuzz’ on Fisher’s grandmother’s strawberry jam (the first thing she remembers tasting and wanting to taste again) and the way she cooks peas in a heavy casserole ‘swirling them in butter and their own steam’. It’s a mark of Fisher’s genius that she can even make something remarkable out of the first potato chips she ever eats in Europe, on her way from France to Germany in the 1930s. These crisps are not ‘uniformly golden’ like the American ones in bags, but ‘light and dark, thick and paper-thin, fried in real butter and then salted casually with the gros sal served in the country’.

But to Fisher, it would be dull to focus too much on the potato chips without also talking about the appetite of the woman who eats them – herself – in a ‘strange, private orgy’, like a pregnant woman craving ‘chocolate-cake-at-three-in-the-morning’ (which, at the time of writing, she was). Those of us who love her above all other food writers must be grateful that she ignored her friend’s advice. There is a liberating generosity to the way she exposes those private appetites that most of us struggle to hide. No one was ever so confident in her own hungers or so determined in her quest to satisfy them. To read her is to feel that we, too, should be a little bolder in feeding ourselves. After Chexbres dies, she tells us she sometimes goes ‘to the best restaurant I knew and [orders] dishes and good wine as if I were a guest of myself, to be treated with infinite courtesy’.

Hunger is something deep, Fisher shows, and it can’t just be satisfied by dainty morsels. One of the great themes of the book is that food nourishes more or less depending on the frame of mind you are in when you eat it. You might eat the most delicious tamale pie – as cooked by Fisher’s husband Al – and burst into tears because you are lonely and scared and living in a freezing cold apartment in Strasbourg. Or you could be on a train in Italy and eat the most unexpectedly lovely meal of ‘bread and salami’ and ‘those big white beans, the kind Italians peel and eat with salt when they are fresh and tender’. What seasons the meal, however, is the presence of Chexbres, who is already ill but still mercifully hungry, for food and Fisher’s company. ‘It was good to be eating and drinking there on that train, free forever from the trouble of life, surrounded with a kind of insulation of love.’

Reading M.F.K. Fisher often makes me shiver and the reason, I finally worked out, is that she has as strong a sense of memento mori as a Dutch still-life master. She is alive to the way that at the end of every meal, there is a wistfulness, because we will never get it back again. Very few food writers have ever been so honest about death. She shows us that to have hungers and the means to satisfy them is how we can tell we are fully alive. She reminds us that in the midst of peach pie, we are in death, which is all the more reason to enjoy the pie while we can.

Bee Wilson 2017

Preface

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 honour 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 and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.

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.

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?

M.F.K. Fisher

The Measure of My Powers

1912

The first thing I remember tasting and then wanting to taste again is the greyish-pink fuzz my grandmother skimmed from a spitting kettle of strawberry jam. I suppose I was about four.

Women in those days made much more of a ritual of their household duties than they do now. Sometimes it was indistinguishable from a dogged if unconscious martyrdom. There were times for This, and other equally definite times for That. There was one set week a year for ‘the sewing woman’. Of course, there was Spring Cleaning. And there were other periods, almost like festivals in that they disrupted normal life, which were observed no matter what the weather, finances or health of the family.

Many of them seem odd or even foolish to me now, but probably the whole staid rhythm lent a kind of rich excitement to the housebound flight of time.

With us, for the first years of my life, there was a series, every summer, of short but violently active cannings. Crates and baskets and lug-boxes of fruits bought in their prime and at their cheapest would lie waiting with opulent fragrance on the screened porch, and a whole battery of enamelled pots and ladles and wide-mouthed funnels would appear from some dark cupboard.

All I knew then about the actual procedure was that we had delightful picnic meals while Grandmother and Mother and the cook worked with a kind of drugged concentration in our big dark kitchen, and were tired and cross and at the same time oddly triumphant in their race against summer heat and the processes of rot.

Now I know that strawberries came first, mostly for jam. Sour red cherries for pies and darker ones for preserves were a little later, and then came the apricots. They were for jam if they were very ripe, and the solid ones were simply ‘put up’. That, in my grandmother’s language, meant cooking with little sugar, to eat for breakfast or dessert in the winter which she still thought of in terms of northern Iowa.

She was a grim woman, as if she had decided long ago that she could thus most safely get to Heaven. I have a feeling that my father might have liked to help with the cannings, just as I longed to. But Grandmother, with that almost joyfully stern bowing to duty typical of religious women, made it clear that helping in the kitchen was a bitter heavy business forbidden certainly to men, and generally to children. Sometimes she let me pull stems off the cherries, and one year when I was almost nine I stirred the pots a little now and then, silent and making myself as small as possible.

But there was no nonsense anyway, no foolish chitchat. Mother was still young and often gay, and the cook too … and with Grandmother directing operations they all worked in a harried muteness … stir, sweat, hurry. It was a pity. Such a beautifully smelly task should be fun, I thought.

In spite of any Late Victorian asceticism, though, the hot kitchen sent out tantalising clouds, and the fruit on the porch lay rotting in its crates, or readied for the pots and the wooden spoons, in fair glowing piles upon the juice-stained tables. Grandmother, saving always, stood like a sacrificial priestess in the steam, ‘skimming’ into a thick white saucer, and I, sometimes permitted and more often not, put my finger into the cooling froth and licked it. Warm and sweet and odorous. I loved it, then.

A Thing Shared

1918

Now you can drive from Los Angeles to my Great-Aunt Maggie’s ranch on the other side of the mountains in a couple of hours or so, but the first time I went there it took most of a day.

Now the roads are worthy of even the All-Year-Round Club’s boasts, but twenty-five years ago, in the September before people thought peace had come again, you could hardly call them roads at all. Down near the city they were oiled, all right, but as you went farther into the hills towards the wild desert around Palmdale, they turned into rough dirt. Finally they were two wheel-marks skittering every which way through the Joshua trees.

It was very exciting: the first time my little round brown sister Anne and I had ever been away from home. Father drove us up from home with Mother in the Ford, so that she could help some cousins can fruit.

We carried beer for the parents (it exploded in the heat), and water for the car and Anne and me. We had four blowouts, but that was lucky, Father said as he patched the tyres philosophically in the hot sun; he’d expected twice as many on such a long hard trip.

The ranch was wonderful, with wartime crews of old men and loud-voiced boys picking the peaches and early pears all day, and singing and rowing at night in the bunkhouses. We couldn’t go near them or near the pen in the middle of a green alfalfa field where a new prize bull, black as thunder, pawed at the pale sand.

We spent most of our time in a stream under the cottonwoods, or with Old Mary the cook, watching her make butter in a great churn between her mountainous knees. She slapped it into pats, and put them down in the stream where it ran hurriedly through the darkness of the butter-house.

She put stone jars of cream there, too, and wire baskets of eggs and lettuces, and when she drew them up, like netted fish, she would shake the cold water onto us and laugh almost as much as we did.

Then Father had to go back to work. It was decided that Mother would stay at the ranch and help put up more fruit, and Anne and I would go home with him. That was as exciting as leaving it had been, to be alone with Father for the first time.

He says now that he was scared daft at the thought of it, even though our grandmother was at home as always to watch over us. He says he actually shook as he drove away from the ranch, with us like two suddenly strange small monsters on the hot seat beside him.

Probably he made small talk. I don’t remember. And he didn’t drink any beer, sensing that it would be improper before two unchaperoned young ladies.

We were out of the desert and into deep winding canyons before the sun went down. The road was a little smoother, following streambeds under the live oaks that grow in all the gentle creases of the dry tawny hills of that part of California. We came to a shack where there was water for sale, and a table under the dark wide trees.

Father told me to take Anne down the dry streambed a little way. That made me feel delightfully grown-up. When we came back we held our hands under the water faucet and dried them on our panties, which Mother would never have let us do.

Then we sat on a rough bench at the table, the three of us in the deep green twilight, and had one of the nicest suppers I have ever eaten.

The strange thing about it is that all three of us have told other people that same thing, without ever talking of it among ourselves until lately. Father says that all his nervousness went away, and he saw us for the first time as two little brown humans who were fun. Anne and I both felt a subtle excitement at being alone for the first time with the only man in the world we loved.

(We loved Mother too, completely, but we were finding out, as Father was too, that it is good for parents and for children to be alone now and then with one another … the man alone or the woman, to sound new notes in the mysterious music of parenthood and childhood.)

That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person. I saw the golden hills and the live oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since; and I saw the dimples in my little sister’s fat hands in a way that still moves me because of that first time; and I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice daily necessity.

I forget what we ate, except for the end of the meal. It was a big round peach pie, still warm from Old Mary’s oven and the ride over the desert. It was deep, with lots of juice, and bursting with ripe peaches picked that noon. Royal Albertas, Father said they were. The crust was the most perfect I have ever tasted, except perhaps once upstairs at Simpson’s in London, on a hot plum tart.

And there was a quart Mason jar, the old-fashioned bluish kind like Mexican glass, full of cream. It was still cold, probably because we all knew the stream it had lain in, Old Mary’s stream.

Father cut the pie in three pieces and put them on white soup plates in front of us, and then spooned out the thick cream. We ate with spoons too, blissful after the forks we were learning to use with Mother.

And we ate the whole pie, and all the cream … we can’t remember if we gave any to the shadowy old man who sold water … and then drove on sleepily towards Los Angeles, and none of us said anything about it for many years, but it was one of the best meals we ever ate.

Perhaps that is because it was the first conscious one, for me at least; but the fact that we remember it with such queer clarity must mean that it had other reasons for being important. I suppose that happens at least once to every human. I hope so.

Now the hills are cut through with superhighways, and I can’t say whether we sat that night in Mint Canyon or Bouquet, and the three of us are in some ways even more than twenty-five years older than we were then. And still the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream we ate together that August night live in our hearts’ palates, succulent, secret, delicious.

The Measure of My Powers

1919