Cara Parks recognizes the 70th anniversary of The Gastronomical Me, the landmark work of food writing by M.F.K. Fisher, who “eschewed page after page of recipes in favor of an amalgam of memoir, travelogue [and] essay”:
The collection of essays, which stretches from her childhood to her life in France, the beginning of World War II, the dissolution of her first marriage and the death of her second husband, marked Fisher’s emergence as one of the great voices of her time.
It is telling that Fisher, who wrote so hedonically of food, so often chose to discuss hunger in these pages. The book is not about dumb indulgence but the constant roving of human appetites, be they for love, power, money, or food. She relates a train trip with an uncle while she was still an adolescent, when her teenage habit of blithely ignoring the menu was finally quashed by a stern look. “I looked at the menu, really looked with all my brain, for the first time,” she writes, and then orders her iced consommé and sweetbreads sous cloche with determination and poise. We are all hungry, she tells us, but we must remember to make choices, not drift to whatever is at hand. Our hunger unites us; our choices, in restaurants and in life, make us individuals.
Fisher’s sensual accounts of the connection between food and emotional inner lives severed food writing from kitchen drudgery. She begins another essay with an account of her landlords in France, a family with which she and her first husband boarded. But she interrupts herself from a straightforwardly gastronomic account, describing the “cold meats and salads and chilled fruits in wine and cream …” only to stop herself and realize, “When I think of all that, it is the people I see. My mind is filled with wonderment at them as they were then, and with dread and a deep wish that they are now past hunger. They were so unthinking, so generous, so stupid.” The reader travels with her from a jolly 1930s French kitchen to the desolate aftermath of World War II. For Fisher, food is not just evocative; it is a unique language she wields to explain subtleties glossed over by the written word.
The Dish 