The iconic food writing of MKF Fisher

MFK Fisher was the most iconic food writer of the last century. Born in 1908, she grew up in a rapidly changing America, watching the world around her transformed by two wars and the Great Depression. Between the wars, she lived in Europe, where she began her literary career. Ms Fisher’s writing highlights the enjoyment and the experience of food, rather than the making of it. Her recipes, as a result, are quick, quiet affairs: a short list of ingredients and an illustrative description of how they are to be combined. She expects her reader to know what suet is, or when jams and pickles are canned, or how to bake a pastry shell. She expects her reader, in short, to be familiar with the workings of a kitchen, and such courtesy can be as heartening to a novice cook as it is frightening for an ignorant one. That there is a difference between the two categories is perhaps Mary Fisher’s greatest contribution to the art of writing about food. Ms Fisher wasn’t a cook or a restaurant reviewer, and it was never her ambition to compile a Julia Child style Joy of Cooking encyclopaedia. In some senses, she originated her literary format when she began rhapsodising to her audience about ‘continental’ delicacies, a legacy carried on today by millions of food bloggers and photographers. Unlike her contemporaries — AJ Liebling or Elizabeth David — she was rarely associated with a magazine, writing books from the outset of her career. What she shared with them, however, was a sensibility. Ms Fisher writes for anyone who approaches eating as a sensual rather than necessary experience. Food, for her, feeds the soul as much as the stomach, and there are few ills a splendid meal in good company cannot salve. [caption id=“attachment_109594” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“She writes descriptively and anecdotally, remembering meals and the way they shaped her and those around her. Image by MichaelGraf from Flickr.”]  [/caption] She writes descriptively and anecdotally, remembering meals and the way they shaped her and those around her. In An Alphabet for Gourmets, she tackles the culinary alphabet. Each is about an aspect of eating, not cooking: A is for dining alone; F is for Family; O is for Ostentation. X is for Xanthippe —Socrates’ supposedly shrewish wife — and Ms Fisher warns against nagging one’s spouse during dinner, a sure recipe for a mildewed marriage. She suggests scrambled eggs to temper an angry cook:

“It’s very consistency, slow and creamy, is a deterrent to irritation, and if it were attempted by any female who deliberately planned to lean over it, once on its plates, and whang it at her guests… I would rather have my scrambled eggs turn into hard, fanged snakes and writhe away. I love this recipe [below], for its very gentleness, and for the demands it makes upon one’s patience, and the homage it deserves from its slow tasting. "

Best of all this alphabet, though, is “Y is for Yak”, in which she embraces all manner of strange meat with cheerful gusto:

I was married for a time to a man whose father, a most respectable Presbyterian minister, once spent a large chunk of the weekly budget on a whale steak and brought it home gleefully, a refuge from respectability for that one day. Who can know how many memories of unutterably dull prayer meetings the exotic slab of meat wiped from his mind? It may well have been opium, moonlight, orchids to his otherwise staid soul. Whatever the escapism of his purchase, it threw his harried wife and his four habitually hungry children into a pit of depression. They had no idea how to cook it, and stood looking helplessly at it, wishing it were a good pot roast… It was possibly the first, and certainly the last, attempt the minister made to flee from his proper routine of prayers and pot roast, pot roast and prayers.

Ms Fisher wrote more than 25 books during her long life (she died at the age of 84), several of which are considered classics in gastronomic writing. In my time as a Fisher acolyte, I have acquired a few of them, from her first book (Serve it Forth) to her memoir (The Gastronomic Me). My current favourite is Consider the Oyster, which inspired the David Foster Wallace essay Consider the Lobster. Oysters, it turns out, are interesting molluscs, and the book begins with a brief biography of everyone’s favourite aphrodisiac. Oysters are ambi-gendered: each is born male and winds up female, assuming it evades an alarmingly long list of predators (sponges, eels, starfish, men…). As Ms Fisher writes, however hard human life is, an oyster- sentient, deaf, frozen, sedentary — has a worse one. It is almost a favour, one concludes, to eat them. I recently consumed my first (dozen) oysters. My initial reaction was that I had slurped down a liquid mushroom. By the fifth oyster I began to relish the “delicate grey taste”; by the last one all I wanted to do was find some more. When I do, I shall not be eating them raw. I’ll obey, instead, Ms. Fisher’s recipe for “Grilled Oysters”, which she located in Paul Reboux’s Plats du Jour:

Surely, this recipe cannot have the approval of the SPCA. But it is probable that the oysters possess a sensitivity analogous to the French tax-payer, so that they are incapable of very characteristic reactions. That, then, is why there is little reason for weeping tenderly at the idea that these molluscs be placed on a grill. As they submit to the same end that overtook St Lawrence, the oysters open. It is exactly like the purse of the government pensioner as Income Tax day rolls around: one does the only possible thing in the presence of bad luck. Take advantage of their being open to pop in a little melted butter, some pepper, some bread crumbs. Then close them up again: at this moment they will be too weak to resist you. Let them cook a little longer, and serve them very hot. Some people like this very much.

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