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A review by jabarkas
The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher
Just a quick reminder that I never give star ratings on Goodreads, and if I finish a book I automatically give it 5-stars on Amazon.
Whoo boy. Where. To. Start. Here, lets go with this:
M.F.K. Fisher is my favorite writer. This is not to say that everything MFK ever wrote is better than any other thing I've ever read. It is however to say, that at the moments when she reaches her artistic apogee, I feel more spiritually in touch with her writing than anything else I've ever read in my life.
This book is an omnibus of many, though not necessarily all, of Fisher's work. It includes what are probably her two most famous pieces, Consider the Oyster, and How to Cook a Wolf. Both of these are excellent, and in How to Cook a Wolf especially I find Fisher to be not only a moving writer, but a kindred spirit as a chef. The way that she writes about cooking, as an intimate act in which both cook and food are equal, dialectic participants, appeals to me far more than contemporary hand-holding recipes.
The next entry though, The Gastronomical Me, is where Fisher's writing truly approaches it's hallucinatory, literary zenith. A set of phrases that Fisher is fond of coining is that old saw about eating to live versus living to eat. In this semi-tragic travelog, what she manages to evoke is the indivisibility of the two, that to live is to eat, that to eat is to live. From creekside pies in California in the days before we butchered our milk as throroughly as we do the cows it comes from, to meek yet enchanting salads and whisky bumpers on cruise ships, through Burgundian snails, Swiss lake perch, to tortillas and beans on Guadalajaran verandas evoked so sympathetically you can feel the breeze. This book, though short, is one I could reread every month for the rest of my life and never grow tired, both a balm and a torment during America's particularly disastrous present.
There are other titles in here, less memorable though by no means bad, but I won't bore you with describing them. The summation of all this is that I can't guarantee this is the best food writing you will ever consume, but I believe that if it touches you in the way it does me, it will make parts of your brain sing in ways you didn't even know was possible.
Whoo boy. Where. To. Start. Here, lets go with this:
M.F.K. Fisher is my favorite writer. This is not to say that everything MFK ever wrote is better than any other thing I've ever read. It is however to say, that at the moments when she reaches her artistic apogee, I feel more spiritually in touch with her writing than anything else I've ever read in my life.
This book is an omnibus of many, though not necessarily all, of Fisher's work. It includes what are probably her two most famous pieces, Consider the Oyster, and How to Cook a Wolf. Both of these are excellent, and in How to Cook a Wolf especially I find Fisher to be not only a moving writer, but a kindred spirit as a chef. The way that she writes about cooking, as an intimate act in which both cook and food are equal, dialectic participants, appeals to me far more than contemporary hand-holding recipes.
The next entry though, The Gastronomical Me, is where Fisher's writing truly approaches it's hallucinatory, literary zenith. A set of phrases that Fisher is fond of coining is that old saw about eating to live versus living to eat. In this semi-tragic travelog, what she manages to evoke is the indivisibility of the two, that to live is to eat, that to eat is to live. From creekside pies in California in the days before we butchered our milk as throroughly as we do the cows it comes from, to meek yet enchanting salads and whisky bumpers on cruise ships, through Burgundian snails, Swiss lake perch, to tortillas and beans on Guadalajaran verandas evoked so sympathetically you can feel the breeze. This book, though short, is one I could reread every month for the rest of my life and never grow tired, both a balm and a torment during America's particularly disastrous present.
There are other titles in here, less memorable though by no means bad, but I won't bore you with describing them. The summation of all this is that I can't guarantee this is the best food writing you will ever consume, but I believe that if it touches you in the way it does me, it will make parts of your brain sing in ways you didn't even know was possible.