In exchange for reviewing a Shakespeare manuscript, the University of California Press sent me a box of recent books. On the top of the stack was Joan Reardon’s M. F. K. Fisher Among the Pots and Pans, a biographical tribute to America’s greatest food writer, who grew up in nearby Whittier and Laguna Beach, spent her formative food years in France and Switzerland, and kept house during the second half of her life in Napa Valley.
Reardon wrote a longer biography in 2004; here, she’s decided to keep her touch light by documenting the different kitchens rented, remodeled or simply passed through by Fisher in her progress through three marriages, the birth of daughters legitimate and illegitimate, and the writing of many, many books and articles.
Most of Fisher’s kitchens (like the one featured above in Dijon, France) consisted of little more than a hot plate and a pantry. Fisher insisted on eating and cooking in the same space, and her best meals were apparently also her simplest, though they required being in the right place at the right time (fresh peas with butter served with “tiny roasted birds and warm baguettes from the village”). Horrified by the “square meals” promoted by mainstream U.S. food organs, Fisher preferred a “balanced day” to a “balanced meal.”
Her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf, written during the first years of World War II, addressed “the preparation of food in times of scarcity and bomb shelters.” Recently widowed by the suicide of her second husband, this document of frugality, crisis and creativity was also the first book Fisher wrote in order to support herself.
Watercolors by Avram Dumitrescu recreate the kitchens. Designer Sandy Drooker has given the book a small footprint suitable your airplane carry-on. I read the book in an evening (as if it were “a cheese souffle and a light salad”), but is well worth holding onto for its portrait of “an intellectual cook.” In Fisher’s own words, she was “a writing cook and a cooking writer,” “bold at the desk as well as at the stove.” A suite of updated recipes divide each chapter, providing some hands-on sustenance for Fisher fans.
Other notables I harvested from UC Press’s California Studies in Food and Culture, edited by the incomparable Dara Goldstein, include:
The Taste of Place: A Culture Journey into Terroir
by Amy B. Trubek
Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France
by Jean-Louis Flandrin
— Julia Lupton · 2008-11-30
|
THE BOOK