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
There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
First we eat, then we do everything else.
I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.
No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.
Sharing our meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations.
There are may of us who cannot but feel dismal about the future of various cultures. Often it is hard not to agree that we are becoming culinary nitwits, dependent upon fast foods and mass kitchens and megavitamins for our basically rotten nourishment.
It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to bursting point on anything from quail financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly.
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.
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.
You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!