If you are one of the very few people who’ve followed this blog from the beginning you’ll know that I’m somewhere near that point on the neurodiversity spectrum where lists become a bit obsessive. You’ll need to be a foodie to get this one –
- MFK Fisher
- Serve it Forth – 1937
- Touch and Go 1939
- Consider the Oyster 1941
- How to Cook a Wolf 1942
- The Gastronomical Me 1942
- Here Let us Feast: A Book of Banquets 1946
- Not Now but Now 1947
- An Alphabet for Gourmets 1949
- The Physiology of taste. Translation of Brillat-Savarin 1949
- Elizabeth David – A book of Mediterranean food 1955
- Elizabeth David – French Country Cooking – 1951
- Elizabeth David – Italian Food – 1954
- Elizabeth David – Summer Cooking 1955
- Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd – Plats du Jour 1957
- Elizabeth David – French provincial cooking UK 1960, US 1962
- Simone Beck and Julia Child – Mastering the art of French Cooking Vol 1 US 1961
- Simone Beck and Julia Child – Mastering the art of French Cooking Vol 2 1970
- Richard Olney – The French Menu Cookbook 1970
- James Beard – How to Eat (and Drink) Your Way through a French (and Italian) Menu 1971
- Richard Olney – Simple French Food 1974
- Elizabeth David – An Omelette and a Glass of Wine 1984
- Patience Gray – Honey from a Weed 1987
As I predicted in my last post – well, last posting – “last post” looks a bit funereal – I/we spent this week cooking in the inspirational glow of our lovely Italian meal in Birmingham at the weekend. The kitchen was by now a slum and we had to fit in an extra visit to the gym to head off full porker status. In the midst of all this we were both visited by a non fatal but nasty virus which had us coughing heartily all night, and I decided to redeem the shining hour by reading one of the many random volumes I’ve bought but never read. You can see from the cover photo why this might be – I’d never heard of M F K Fisher but I must have read the abbreviated reviews on the covers “The greatest food writer who has ever lived” – Simon Schama – really ? ……..
But then, I didn’t as much read the book as fall on it. As Monica Furlong once memorably said – “lust is love, overwhelmed by hunger” and this book – aside from providing the first nine entries on my list – exploded my whole idea of what food writing might be and introduced something far more dangerous and lovely. It’s not a book about cooking as much as a book that embraces the whole of the ethos I wrote about in the last posting –
……. but resistance is everything. Loving, carousing, delighting, laughing and feasting; generosity, faith in the future, cooperation and mutual respect are like tank traps to the soulless and mechanised descendants of that miserable bank manager who went after me on the radio.
Dave Pole What would you spend your last £100 on?
At first I found the early chapters slightly irritating; this fortunate young American woman immersing herself in the food and wines of Burgundy, necking off fine wines and fine foods and travelling by freighter between Europe and America in considerable luxury. But her forensic eye and ear for writerly detail – conversations; appearances; dress and a hundred other prescient details captivated me. Here was someone watching France, along with the rest of Europe, drift into the shadow of fascism. Unlike some of her fellow Americans she was far from just a tourist. She noticed things, people like waiters and chefs, railway guards and ships’ crews, the elderly landladies, the street life that sustained pre-war France. Not, then, a book about cooking but a book about eating; the people who prepare food and those who eat it, but especially the manner of their eating – the cultural matrix that enables celebration but conversely sometimes crushes it. It’s a book about love – not the etiolated marriage that was slowly consuming her, but reckless passion that must learn to reckon with terrible loss and yet survive. By halfway through the book I was lost to it and when the last section came I never wanted it to end. It ended, though, as it always had to with a coda of such erotic tenderness I thought I was reading D H Lawrence. My mind was churning with the kind of excitement that could only be discharged by cleaning the kitchen in a mad outbreak of displacement activity. Later, stinking of bleach (psychotherapists may make of that what they will), I threaded my way through the milling crowds at the Bath Christmas Market like a salmon swimming upstream, smiling slightly madly at everyone I passed.
To return to the list, for a moment – until yesterday it began with Elizabeth David when she published “A Book of Mediterranean Food” in 1955. But I knew that the genealogy was incomplete. There’s always a “before”. The list contained all the books I’d read, treasured and worked with over the past 55 years, culminating with Patience Gray’s “Honey from a weed” in 1987. And of course there are dozens more I could have mentioned, many of them published much later and I’ve used them many times – but these were the books that entered my bloodstream. I can plot the genealogy from Elizabeth David to the present day quite easily; it was always the ‘before‘ that eluded me. MFK Fisher is, for me, a newly discovered and irreplaceable step in that before, and it came as no surprise that she was friends with Julia Child whose book taught me and a million other autodidacts to chop an onion.
The common thread that binds these books together is that none of them are recipe books. They are all about France and her whole culture and they brought a wholly new way of understanding and replicating the qualities of the food. Very few books do this – Marcella Hazan and Anna Del Conte but especially Patience Gray do it for Italy; Jane Grigson,Dorothy Hartley and Gillian Ayrton for Britain. I haven’t yet found the writer for Spain and so I cook from memory.
The miracle is the post war transition that came to inflect the best of British and American cooking and prepared the way for the whole seasonal, slow food, local food revolution. There are countless chefs who dance on the thin ice of novelty and rarity and you need a shipping container full of half used condiments to replicate their style. But MFK Fisher understood that cooking, eating and loving are mysteriously connected in a way that no amount of gold leaf can imitate. Better to be well fed every day than amazed twice in a lifetime. Mercifully the message got out and I still have a lot more reading to do.
Postscript
There’s a fine documentary – on MFK Fisher that’s just been released on YouTube – well worth 90 minutes of your time.