| Title | : | The Gastronomical Me |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0865473927 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780865473928 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1943 |
The Gastronomical Me Reviews
-
A fascinating way to approach a memoir. Now I want to read everything that M.F.K. Fisher ever wrote. Next stop: How to Cook a Wolf. How can I resist that title?
-
"The baker had a fight with the chef soon after we left port, and the barber took over all the pastry making..."
Mary Frances had the perfect recipe for blending food writing and autobiography. Inimitable, and such a product of her era. Of all her books, this is the one most suitable for non-foodies. The Sensual Me might have been a better title. Food and drink (LOTS of drink) do get a lot of coverage, but that's only a slice of the book, not the whole pie. Along with the gastronomical, she offers up impressions visual, tactical, aural, and visceral.
The chapters are loosely connected snapshots of her life, roughly chronological but with large blocks of time unaccounted for.
She begins in 1912 at age four, with her first memory of an irresistible taste -- the foam on top of a kettle of strawberry jam. On through boarding school and her first live oyster, followed by a college gluttony phase, and then Dijon, France as a newlywed. Those early years in France brought the discovery that food was something to be relished and treated with reverence, and it set the course for her life as a gourmand and food writer. [A big chunk of this part of the book was lifted wholesale and plopped into a much later memoir, Long Ago in France, which I read a few months ago. Skip that one. This one's better.]
After they leave Dijon things get a little hazy, and I suspect some deliberate vagueness. Mary Frances started a new relationship while in the process of divorcing her husband. She never explains exactly how things developed between herself and Chexbres, the new man. They seem to have led a near-idyllic life in Switzerland until the coming war forced them to flee in the 1930s. She nursed him through a lingering illness until he died, and was on her own at the close of the book.
She ends the book in the early 1940s with a maddeningly cryptic story of a trip to Mexico featuring a mariachi musician called Juanito. She was only in her mid-thirties when this book was published in 1943, and I got the feeling from the way it ended that she might have been planning to pick up where she left off at some time far in the future.
I've tried to read some of M.F.K.'s other books which are devoted strictly to food. For me, they can't measure up to this one. Her gift for observation and her dry and often mordant wit are best suited to these first-person reminiscences. -
The Gastronomical Me was a delightful and very intimate memoir by M.F.K. Fisher. In the Foreward, Ms. Fisher addresses the questions frequently directed, and often somewhat accusingly, as to why she writes about food and eating and drinking. In her own words, the author has a beautiful answer that is reflected throughout this lovely book:
"There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity.
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 or love?"
This is a book that encompasses Mary Frances Kennedy's first memories of food as she recalls delightful picnic meals with her mother and grandmother as well as the preservation of foods in the race against the summer heat and process of rot as jams and preserves were canned with some red cherries for pies. This was the early twentieth century in southern California as M.F.K. Fisher perfected her appreciation and skills of food preparation and her time in a boarding school where she experienced her first oyster. Upon graduation, she attended a small college in the winter of 1927-28 that she refers to as a period of conscious gourmandise, or perhaps gluttony. From the years 1929 to 1931, the stock market crashed and Mary Frances Kennedy got married for the first time and traveled to a foreign land across an ocean, all affecting her deeply.
"Paris was everything that I had dreamed, the late September when we first went there. It should always be seen, the first time, with the eyes of childhood or of love."
Several years were spent at the University in Dijon where her love and appreciation of food and different cultures only intensified as there was unrest in Europe with Hitler's rise to power but she also learned the importance of ritual and foods and wines as evidenced in her observation:
"We toasted many things, and at first the guests and some of the old judge and officers busied themselves being important. But gradually, over the measued progress of the courses and the impressive changing beauty of the wines, snobberies and even politics dwindled in our hearts, and the wit and the laughing awareness that is France made us all alive."
This beautiful book continues on through World War II and M.F.K. Fisher's return to America for a visit only to return to Europe when she and her second husband bought a home in Switzerland, named for centuries Le Paquis, "the pasture," where they remained from 1936 to 1939. It had special meaning because it was almost the only piece of land between the Lausanne and Vevey that did not have grapes on it. During these years, the author relates her memories of three special restuarants and their regional dishes and cuisine in Switzerland: one on the lake near Lausanne, another in the high hills of Berne, and the last on the road to Lucerne in German-speaking country.
This was a very personal book that I savored. The Gastronomical Me is definitely my favorite of Ms. Fisher's books where one appreciates how she was so pivotal in her writing about food and her importance on the food scene, whether that be in Provence or in Napa. Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher began her writing at a time when the appreciation of food and wine was lacking at best. It is a book that I want to read again. -
I don't know how I stumbled upon MFK Fisher, but now that I have, I don't know how I missed her. She is a premier food writer, and a must-read for anyone who loves foodie-type books. This one is about her early food years.
-
I didn't finish this, even the writing is quite good and Fisher has a fascinating personality. There was something mean-spirited about it that left a nasty taste in my mouth, no pun intended. Part of it was probably simple realism -- lots of unpleasant things happen to human beings, especially women in history, and a keen observe reports them. But Fisher seems to feel a sort of revulsion-sans-empathy for those she encounters; one I suspect she hid quite well, as people seem to have been quite nice to her (well, we all like pretty, clever people, don't we?).
Based on the first half, I think this would be an interesting read for someone interested in early 20th century social history and travel. It's not so dominated by food that you need to care about the culinary elements (nor, conversely, is there enough about cuisine that I'd recommend it if you're considering it mostly for that subject). -
This is the way food writing should be done. In her careful, spare, elegant way, Fisher uses food to write about everything else that means anything in life: love, war, death, and second chances. One of the most beautiful works of modern English.
-
M.F.K. Fisher tells the story of her life through the foods she experienced. Fisher begins with her forays into college life and her first marriage, and then tells of her gradual development as a food writer that was highly influenced by her move to France.
Fisher almost skips over key details in her life including her divorce and the decline and eventual suicide of her second husband, so I had to do a bit of research to fill in the gaps.
No matter what Fisher is writing about---whether it's her life or stories about people she meets or places she lives or the food she eats---her writing is mesmerizing. -
This is, in theory, a book about food. But a lot of it's not actually about food. There's a lot of talk about A) alcohol, B) Random events in the author's life, and C) traveling on boats. But for all that, I liked most of it fairly well. MFK Fisher wrote about food in the 30's and 40's (at least in this particular book) shamelessly. Apparently, initial readers thought her essays must have been written by a man because the style was so forthcoming. Her writing is, for me, very reminiscent of comfort food, actually. She writes about good wine, good liquor, good cheese, particularly good meals, waiters, and the atmospheres in which she experienced all of these things in a very personal but not intimidating way. I haven't tasted the vast majority of what she writes about, but she made me feel okay with that and like I could still just sit back and imagine the tastes and textures. (I actually looked this book u because I once read an essay by Fisher about the joys of mashed potatoes and ketchup that was one of the most vivid, sensuous things I've ever read.) That said, in between all the food is a lot of weird stuff: homicidal cooks, weird facts about her physical reactions to sea travel, anecdotes about her landladies and husbands and World War II and naked exchange students and all manner of other things. Some of it's interesting and pairs well with the food, but some of it is just jarring. Ah well.
-
My first foray into food lit. Seriously - I hate reading/talking/listening about food. I just like eating food. But then this turned out to not really be a "foodie" (I also hate that word) thing, and so I was actually liking it. But then, sigh. It's really disjointed. Like, basically it seems like you're reading a bunch of blog entries. Which is great for blogs, less so for books. I wanted editorial cohesiveness so badly, and I got none, but she does have some great passages and interesting ideas, and you get to figure out how she really came into being a confident adult self by tasting new foods, cultures, and people. As for Juanito? Um - yeah. I've got nothing.
-
People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking?
The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.
I've only recently begun to read MFK Fisher - definitely one of the doyennes of American food writing - and I can certainly understand why she has passionate devotees. Her writing is vivid, distinctive and definitely flavourful. It has, always, a strong point of view. It doesn't focus so much on recipe and technique as much as does it sensation, atmosphere and memory.
This book is a memoir of her development as a woman and a food writer. It is episodic, a series of vignettes punctuated by journeys. Although she begins by describing some early memories from her California childhood, and a brief stint at a Midwestern university, most of these vignettes take place in Europe or or the various ships she takes as she crisscrosses the Atlantic. She lived in France with her first husband Al and Switzerland with her second husband Dilwyn/Tim (she refers to him as "Chexbres" in the narrative). Most of these journeys are set during the 1930s and occasionally the turbulent politics of that decade intrude. Bizarrely, she and her second husband travel to Switzerland in 1940 - and although Switzerland, and their own personal tragedy, are buffers of a surreal sort, one is still very aware of the fact that Europe is at war. One of the most affecting chapters, for me, is a journey she takes from Europe to the United States on a 'staidly luxurious Dutch liner'. She is travelling to the US in order to break the news to her family that she is divorcing her first husband; most of the other people on board the ship are 'fleeing' Jews. At times this book is just so surreal and so charged with tragedy. It ends, bizarrely, with a family trip to Mexico in 1941 and lots of beer and a cross-dressing (possibly transvestite) mariachi singer. There is a lot of drinking, and sometimes the drinking eclipses the eating. One is often reminded how smoking and heavy drinking were so much more the norm in that era than they are now. Fisher is the kind of person who prides herself on her 'masculine' appetites, and she occasionally points out her superiority by demonstrating her knowledge of wines and her ability to surprise by ordering a particularly fine cognac
Fisher has a particular gift for recreating the people she met on her journeys and waiters and landladies play a large role in her memories. Nobility (in the sense of largeness of character) and various forms of absurdity and grotesqueness seem to accompany her everywhere, in the people she meets and the (sometimes very strange) scenes she describes. It's impossible to know when her memories edge into fiction, and I suspect more often than not; but that doesn't really spoil the story-telling.
I'd like to read this rich book again someday. I need a little rest first, though. -
I hate to say it, but I didn’t really enjoy this much. I think the main reason for that is that are many relational dynamics happening under the surface with Fisher’s family and in her marriage, but there is never any explanation. Fisher is suddenly married to Al and is in Dijon…but why? It’s only much later that we find out Al was a doctoral student. And it’s never really clear if MFK was also a student or just a member of university community because of Al. Then Al is suddenly out of the picture, and MFK is off with a guy named Chexbres. That was confusing because his name sounds French but she eventually tells us that he’s American. And they have a house in Switzerland. But why? And they never seem to be working and yet they eat and drink rather luxuriously. I don’t know…I’m getting better at reading between the lines but there was a lot here that felt unnecessarily obscure. And the relational dynamics made me feel uncomfortable.
There were parts I quite liked. Her prose is excellent. I especially enjoyed her early life with food, her sea voyages and how she learned how to be a good traveler, and some of the descriptions of cooking/eating, especially in France. It was also fascinating to read about France in the years leading up to WWII. Again, there was almost nothing said outright, which is interesting in and of itself. There is only one direct description of a political prisoner on a train in Italy and it is sobering.
I am glad I read this and am not put off reading more MFK Fisher in the future. But I think I’ll stick with more of the pure food writing if that is possible.
Oh, I found it helpful to read Wikipedia’s summary of Fisher’s life. I really wish I had done that at the beginning. -
(4.5 Stars)
This is a book for anyone who enjoys food – not the fancy, pretentious kind of food the word ‘gastronomical’ might suggest, but honest, simple, good quality fare, typically fashioned from flavoursome ingredients. It is, in essence, a blend of memoir, food writing and travel journal, all woven together in Fisher’s wonderfully engaging style.
Backlisted listeners among you may have encountered Fisher through How to Cook a Wolf (1942), her wartime guide to keeping appetites sated when decent ingredients are in short supply. In The Gastronomical Me, Fisher looks back on some of the most symbolic meals and food-related experiences of her first three decades – the quality of the dishes consumed, the people who shared them and the memories they evoked. She writes lovingly of her early life, the most notable culinary occasions, irrespective of their simplicity, and the way our feelings towards certain foods are often entwined with memories of people, places and key moments in time. There is a sense of meals being part of the fabric of a person’s life here, inextricably linked to love, friendship and family – encompassing both happy times and sad.
To read the rest of my review, please visit:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2022... -
To create a truly excellent dish quality ingredients must be used, certainly, but more important are the skilled hand, the discerning palate, and the acquired wisdom of a good cook. M.F.K. Fisher was just such a cook, not only in her various kitchens, but as she stirred and seasoned the events in her life, and most of all perhaps when she served her literary concoctions to the widest range of guests she had ever encountered, the reading public. It is in this spirit that she wrote The Gastronomical Me.
In a book that begins with her childhood and goes on to span 29 years of her life, Fisher writes about her appetites both culinary and spiritual. The cook in the kitchen is analogous to the individual in the wide world, buffeted by steam, awash in strange smells, burnt by haste. And when the cook’s work is done the guest at the table carries the analogy, as partaker of the sweetness and bitterness of life. So her tranquil childhood passes in a series of vignettes that include the summer ritual of canning, a roadside dinner with her little sister and father, a casserole disaster, a review of a few household cooks, and finally a cross country train ride (as seen from the dining car of course) and ends with a flourish in a New York city restaurant. There she orders, for the first time, under the tutelage of an uncle, a more adventurous dinner than ever before. Of course this is just the appetizer, her marriage to Al is washed down with strong Burgundy, followed by her growing familiarity with rich French cooking, and the simple suppers she cooked in a series of her first tiny kitchens. The main course is Swiss, grand dinners at home with Chexbres, visiting friends and parents and siblings, fresh produce from the garden, more good wine, some traveling and truite au bleu, all exquisitely seasoned with nostalgia because of course, no feast can last forever and the war is coming and Chexbres will fall ill, lose his leg, and soon be dead. Destruction then, is the bitter digestif which is followed by a plane to Mexico to visit her brother and sister in Jalisco. The final chapter is almost penitent, a response, perhaps, to gluttony.
In her best moments Fisher transposes the yearnings of the heart over the hungers of the stomach. In her Foreward she writes: “I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.” The implication is that all that is nourishing and sustaining is ultimately perishable, that pleasure is ephemeral, and should therefore be savored and shared like a good meal.
Throughout The Gastronomical Me we revisit two tableaux: Fisher at a table with her intimates, and Fisher dining alone. “…I taught myself to enjoy being alone” she assures us, though we might well wonder how this happened, since the development of her character is often obscured by the descriptions rising like delicious aromas from the dishes lovingly placed before us. The conceit of the book is that the development of her palate signifies the development of character. The metaphor is appealing but the former is not interchangeable with the latter, and Fisher, knowing this, distracts the reader from more profound revelations by throwing a dinner party just when she seems the closest to a personal revelation or when the affairs of the world threaten to encroach on the garden, the wine cellar, or the restaurant. We catch a glimpse of fascists with a prisoner on the train, but wasn’t the lunch delicious, and how kind of the waiters to warn us about the freshly spilled blood on the platform. It is not as if Fisher is burying these things within the narrative, the blood is there, but it is sometimes dismaying that, being left to watch all this from the windows of the dining car as it gathers speed leaving the station we are still expected to profess an interest in the food and the charming company. There are great moments when Fisher herself shines through, and we see that she is more than just the hostess at the banquet of her life, that she has a profound sense of the location of that banquet and the circumstances outside of her own charmed circle, as when she writes in the last chapter:
“…I knew all there was for me to know about Jaunito. And what I knew made me sorry that any of us had ever gone to that village, and ashamed that we were so big, so pale, so incautiously alive.”
The remorse she finally feels, upon recognizing that traveling around and tasting new foods does not a moral person make necessarily is hard won, and the construction of the book lends credence to her realization. Before WWII Americans with the privilege to do so could, we imagine, travel Europe sampling the local cuisine while remaining blissfully ignorant of any sense of responsibility or moral injustice. After the international loss of innocence that marked the middle of the 20th century that blissful ignorance would have been harder to maintain, and travel in Latin American would have certainly proved challenging to anyone hoping to linger in that charmed state. In this way the personal tragedy of Chexbres’ death is situated in the book in such a way that it almost serves as a stand in for the destruction and desolation that was happening in Europe at that time on a much grander scale. The development of her palate, then is made to signify development of character since the conceit of the book is that the latter is a metaphor for the former. though we might wonder how this was accomplished since her character does not seem to develop as much as her palate does.
and that therefore a well-prepared course of happiness should be savored and shared because otherwise it will spoil.
circumstantial. The development of her discerning palate then, the cultivation of skilled hands, the acquisition of a cook’s wisdom -
If the bookmark in my copy of The Art of Eating is any indication, I last read this book around 1985. I had not forgotten Fisher and her writing, but I had jumbled The Gastronomical Me together with the other four books in The Art of Eating. This time round, I am reading this memoir because my book group is discussing it.
Fisher must have been a fascinating friend. She seems to love life, food and friendship. She has a real way with words - her description of eating oysters made me think about my first experience with those slippy animals. I am very happy to be reacquainted with Fisher, her family, Al and Chexberes. Given all the food books that have been written since Fisher started, I think her essays hold up very well.
It has been almost 30 years since I last read this book. This time, given what has happened in memoir writing over the years, I wondered how much of this book is true. Which has led me to The Poet of the Appetites, a biography of Fisher. I hope this won't spoil my love of Fisher's food writing.
If you have read Tender at the Bone, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or The Omnivore's Dilemma, you might want to read this memoir. I believe none of those books could have been written without Fisher blazing the food trail in the middle of the 20th century. -
Fun reading while fasting.
So what I didn't expect is that she would be so funny, but in that way that people look at me surprised after knowing me for a while, and say, with a slight question in their voices, "You're funny?" And it's not funny for funny's sake, it's part of her enviable self-assurance and the ability to focus on a good meal when the world is going to pieces and her sureness of how things should be ("I discovered, there on the staidly luxurious Dutch liner, that I could be very firm with pursers and stewards and such, I could have a table assigned to me in any part of the dining room I wanted and, best of all, I could have that table to myself. I needed no longer be put with officers or predatory passengers, just because I was under ninety and predominately female." and, oh, also "The room was wonderful, austere and airy the way I like a bedroom to be.") I love being allowed to draw my own conclusions as a reader, so that while horror and brutality seem to lurk in the background of every sumptuous meal, that adds to the meaning and preciousness of the food rather than detracting from it. -
There is a strange, almost dreamlike quality to this book. While it is autobiographical, it is nothing as prosaic as a straightforward account of her life. Instead, it is a sequence (in mostly chronological order) of vividly recounted experiences - each one full of meaning (although sometimes what it meant escaped me). The background to each was never explained and it jumps from one to the next with only tenuous connections, just like a dream sequence. The only common theme is (obviously) the detailed, sensuous recounting of the (copious quantities) of food and drink she consumed.
It is very well written, with a great deal of passion, but I couldn't help but dislike her. Reading this was altogether an odd experience. -
This unusual and lovely book by legendary food writer, MFK Fisher, was a revelation to me. She recounts the story of her life--her childhood spent in the shadow of a Victorian-era grandmother; her first marriage to an academic; her travels through France during and after the war, and her second marriage-- through the sense of taste. Through her voluptuous descriptions of food, she creates atmospheric descriptions of the places where she ate, and moving portraits of the people with whom she shared these meals. The prose is exquisite, and Fisher' s approach to life is adventurous, stoic, and ahead of her time. This is the best kind of food writing--the kind that addresses our deeper human hunger for love, independence, art, and beauty.
-
I tried really hard to like this book... but I just got bored and confused :(
The foreword is amazing, I couldn't agree more with her, but I just didn't feel she actually linked food, security and love through this book, eventhough she writes about these three needs. I'm pretty sure she had an interesting life but I just couldn't get her.
I have to admit there are GREAT descriptions of food and they feel like fresh air, but there were not enough of them.
This was not the exiting and interesting book I was expecting :(, maybe I'll come back to it further in my life. -
This was pretty delightful. I liked some of the essays more than others (in some she is really enigmatic and slightly strange) but for the one where she has the crazy interactions with the waitress in France it's worth reading the whole collection. She's also really eloquent about the power of eating alone. I'd never read Fisher before but I could see myself coming back for more.
-
An odd book. There seemed to be a lot that was interesting going on in the background, rather than the foreground of this memoir.
-
Wanted to love it, but honestly, it dragged a little.
-
I could not get into this book. It's a sweet memoir but not very engaging. If you want to know about struggling Americans living in Europe in the 1930s this is the book for you.
-
So much alcohol and so much blind privilege, but nobody writes like M.F.K. Fisher, whose voice rattles in your head long after the book is put away.
-
This was an extraordinary memoir, unlike so many, and why? Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was a 5th generation journalist who chafed under the constraints of formal education, but, who arguably became, one of the great writers of nonfictional prose in the 20th Century as well as a feminist icon.
MFK Fisher ( initials to confuse gender and her parents) was born into an affluent world, albeit one that was hard earned by her parents. Most of her young life was spent in Whittier, California where her family was Episcopalian in a community of Quakers. (Richard Nixon was from here, also a Quaker) Marrying at age 21 to a young, earnest English Lit major on the professorial track, she and her young husband Al Fisher landed in Dijon, France while he pursued his phD in Literature focusing on the Irish wrier James Joyce. This was in the the 1930’s. Their housing consisted of rented rooms in homes needing that extra capital, but resulted in an immersion for the couple into the true French culture. For Mary Frances this culture was the food, the wine, the dining experience. She had heightened senses of taste, smell and observation. Her journalistic familial legacy gave rise to this memoir, one recounting her early years in France with her first husband, and later years in Switzerland and Italy with her second husband, arguably her great love. MFK can be unsparing in her criticisms and is often catty and petty. Her orneriness rears its ugly head at times and one can imagine her as unlikeable and difficult, and a bit of a diva. Irregardless she remains an American treasure, one of the first female writers whose authentic voice empowered subsequent generations of women.
Four stars because I felt the narrative got bogged down at times. Highly recommended. -
this is a confusing book and I don't know how I feel about it. It's almost plotless and completely apolitical, considering the context in which it's set (Hitler-era Europe, pre-war). Basically Fisher is telling us what she ate (and drank! So much drank!) on a quotidian basis as if we're reading her drunken bedside journal. "Oh, by the way, Al and I divorced. I ate guacamole and drank the finest scotch." But epicureans want to know what she ate next ... and her descriptors are sometimes - though not even half the time - poetic.
And the way it ends, what? The? Hell? No spoilers but ... -
MFK Fisher is my favourite food writer - for her, a plate is always a thing of the world, not just a meal on it's own; she makes her reader vividly taste the food, but also the setting, the conversation at the table, the mood of the day. She's smart, big-mouthed, funny as hell, and at her best in this memoir about travelling in Europe to discover her taste for living, loving, eating, and meeting brilliant people. Favourite part - her lessons on how to travel, be, and eat alone.
