September 25, 2011
This exceedingly modest book (a mere 77 pages) presented me with some modest, unexpected dilemmas. Seeing it in a book swap and recalling, from an encounter years ago, that I was determined to read one of her volumes someday, I picked it up, thinking I'd breeze through it and return it to the swap--I'm trying to pare my library. But I find I don't want to let go of it. Now the question is whether it belongs in my kitchen with the cookbooks (because it does contain recipes) or somewhere among the more serious nonfiction. Though I can hardly call myself a cook, I'm tempted at least to try the oyster stuffing in a turkey someday. On the other hand...
A good portion of human life in the more indulgent cultures these days is devoted to gastro-porn: a form of life-out-of-balance in which too much time, money, and attention is expended on increasingly fine points of restaurants, recipes, ingredients, schools of thought on nutrition, and the like. Pay attention to sex this way and you may be labeled an addict. M. F. K. Fisher was apparently never susceptible to this kind of excess, because food was apparently never the main point. Like an ellipse (if you remember your high-school geometry), she has two focal points: one is food, the other is, to put it simply, the romance of people and places--i.e., the rest of life. Here, her account includes the curiously bi-gendered life of the oyster itself, an imaginative reconstruction of a dining delight from her mother's boarding-school days, the tale (fanciful but still true in its way) of a nervous collegian hoping to bolster his virility, and the only funny recipe I've ever read, as recounted to her by "a cadaverous old man who had reigned at various times in the kitchens of all the crowned heads and banker-princes of fin-de-Hapsbourg Europe."
Because she has restored the balance to my sense of the place food may have in our affairs, in a way that's positively classical--something that no mere cookbook or food-magazine article has ever done--I think I know which shelf I'll put this on.
A good portion of human life in the more indulgent cultures these days is devoted to gastro-porn: a form of life-out-of-balance in which too much time, money, and attention is expended on increasingly fine points of restaurants, recipes, ingredients, schools of thought on nutrition, and the like. Pay attention to sex this way and you may be labeled an addict. M. F. K. Fisher was apparently never susceptible to this kind of excess, because food was apparently never the main point. Like an ellipse (if you remember your high-school geometry), she has two focal points: one is food, the other is, to put it simply, the romance of people and places--i.e., the rest of life. Here, her account includes the curiously bi-gendered life of the oyster itself, an imaginative reconstruction of a dining delight from her mother's boarding-school days, the tale (fanciful but still true in its way) of a nervous collegian hoping to bolster his virility, and the only funny recipe I've ever read, as recounted to her by "a cadaverous old man who had reigned at various times in the kitchens of all the crowned heads and banker-princes of fin-de-Hapsbourg Europe."
Because she has restored the balance to my sense of the place food may have in our affairs, in a way that's positively classical--something that no mere cookbook or food-magazine article has ever done--I think I know which shelf I'll put this on.
