M. F. K. Fisher
M. F. K. Fisher
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisherwas a preeminent American food writer. She was also a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. She wrote some 27 books, including a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin. Two volumes of her journals and correspondence came out shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books are an amalgam of food literature, travel and memoir. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth3 July 1908
CountryUnited States of America
When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.
It is puzzling to me that otherwise sensitive people develop a real docility about the obvious necessity of eating, at least once a day, in order to stay alive. Often they lose their primal enjoyment of flavors and odors and textures to the point of complete unawareness. And if ever they question this progressive numbing-off, they shrug helplessly in the face of mediocrity everywhere. Bit by bit, hour by hour, they say, we are being forced to accept the not-so-good as the best, since there is little that is even good to compare it with.
I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best....
It was there [Dijon], I now understand, that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be. It was there that I learned it is blessed to receive, as well as that every human being, no matter how base, is worthy of my respect and even my envy because he knows something that I may never be old or wise or kind or tender enough to know.
A pleasant aperitif, as well as a good chaser for a short quick whiskey, as well again for a fine supper drink, is beer.
There is a communication of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love.
The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight... [Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.
... having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat ...
Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.
But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.
Digestion is one of the most delicately balanced of all human and perhaps angelic functions.
I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world.
A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.
I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.