Bound in blocked cloth. Set in Garamond. 272 pages. Frontispiece and 12 pages of black & white photographs. Lightweight printed slipcase. Book measures 9.5in x 5.75in.
In 1929, M. F. K. Fisher, young and newly married, left her home in California and sailed with her husband to Dijon, at the time hailed as ‘the gastronomic capital of the world’. In The Gastronomical Me she charts her culinary coming of age and maps all the significant moments of her life – relationships formed and broken, homes made and moved on from – against meals she has enjoyed and wine she has drunk. Hers is a truly distinctive voice, and this chronicle of her passionate embrace of a whole new way of eating, drinking and celebrating the senses marked Fisher’s emergence as a new kind of food writer – one for which food is a metaphor for living.
‘There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars and love? ’
In a series of short, engaging essays, Fisher describes her childhood, school and college days; the ‘sea change’ she underwent during her first trip to France; her first marriage to Al Fisher and their life in Dijon; and her later relationship with Dillwyn Parrish, the love of her life – known in this book only as Chexbres. Starting with an account of the first supper she and her sister ate alone with her father (‘warm round peach pie’ with ‘cool yellow cream’), Fisher also shares with her readers her first taste of oysters at a school Christmas feast; memories of Ora, her childhood cook and early hero who one day calmly went home and chopped her own mother to pieces with her favourite kitchen knife; her first, revelatory meals in Dijon (‘terrines of pâté ten years old’, ‘hot leek soup with white wine and snippets of salt pork’ and ‘snails, the best in the world’); and the gradual formation of her own approach to eating and cookery.
‘I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose’ W. H. Auden
These vivid and often witty snapshots are filled with sensuous detail, not just of the meals Fisher cooked, ate and enjoyed, but the remarkable people she encountered and came to be fond of. Fisher understood well the link between taste, scent and memory, and uses it to entrancing effect. The first real food memoir, The Gastronomical Me went on to influence the wider literary world as well as food writing, and, like a good meal, it is best when shared with others.
Chef and food writer Ruth Reichl, who corresponded with Fisher over many years, has provided a heartfelt and illuminating introduction. In it she writes of the inspirational power of Fisher’s life and work, and how she was ‘the first to write about food as a way of understanding the world’. The 12 pages of plates are divided into three sections, reflecting the three periods of Fisher’s life that are the focus of this book: her childhood in California, her ‘gastronomical awakening’ in Dijon, and the happy but brief years spent with Parrish.