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M. F. K. Fisher (1908-92) http://tinyurl.com/MFisher

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A Thing Shared

From The Gastronomical Me, 1943.

Reader: Jessica Teeter

"A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness . . . ." Eternal words for an eternal recipe for contentment, especially here in California.

M. F. K. Fisher was born in Michigan but grew up in southern California. In her 1943 book The Gastronomical Me, Fisher recalls a childhood moment when a canyon setting, family companionship, and a well-prepared meal first combined to evoke Fisher's deeply satisfying response to food.

That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person. I saw the golden hills and the live-oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since; and I saw the dimples in my little sister's fat hands in a way that still moves me because of that first time; and I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity. . . .

Now the hills are cut through with super-highways, and I can't say whether we sat that night in Mint Canyon or Bouquet, and the three of us are in someways even more that twenty-five years older than we were then. And still the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream we ate together that August night live in our hearts' palates, succulent, secret, delicious.

Author of more than a dozen books, Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher was a consumate chronicler of the satisfactions of food. In 1989 she received the James Beard Foundation Book Award for The Art of Eating.