Serve It Forth by M.F.K. Fisher

Serve It Forth Reviews

• 
  P.

  PREFATORY DIGRESSION:
  I was (and still am) a huge Chronicles of Narnia fan. I would re-read those suckers yearly. They are the first books where I remember wanting to eat what the characters are eating. The word "delicious" is used a lot. There's a point in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where the children are hiding with the beaver family in this little cave. Of course it's all winter outside. It goes like this:
  
  

  "'Wherever is this?'" said Peter's voice, sounding tired and pale in the darkness. (I hope you know what I mean by a voice sounding pale.)
  
  "...[It was] just a hole in the ground but dry and earth. It was very small so that when they all lay down they were all a bundle of clothes together, and what with that and being warmed up by their long walk they were really rather snug.... Then Mrs. Beaver handed round in the dark a little flask out of which everyone drank something--it made one cough and splutter a little and stung the throat, but it also mad eyou feel deliciously warm after you'd swallowed it--and everyone went straight to sleep."

  
  
  So, the combination of having a voice described as pale (I LOVED that) and the minute description of how the delicious liquid affected the children, and the closeness of the cave combined with the coldness of the world outside meant that I conflated it all so that my personal mental conception of the word "delicious" is that of waking very early and warm in a dark cave and biting through the thinnest layer of ice possible so that it melts in your mouth and slakes your thirst.
  
  WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THAT
  
  M.F.K Fischer's book is delicious. Now you know exactly what I mean when I say that.
  
  It is full of small, wonderfully-described personal stories like the one I just told. But better! Each chapter is like a little hard candy of a story that begs savoring. But I ended up crunching them all quickly. Luckily I own the book so I can go back.
• 
  Eric

  Worth it for "César" alone, hidden at the back of this volume, which amounts more to the feeling and form of a short story than that of an essay, as many great essays do, and is an exceedingly strange and beautiful piece of writing.
• 
  Greg

  “If Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality.” May it be filled too, one might add, with fine writing like this. Serve it Forth is such a delightful read, full of surprising ideas and sentences. The chapter “The Standing and the Waiting” is quite simply one of the finest things I’ve ever read - unique, affecting, unforgettable. Five stars for that alone.
  
• 
  Eingram

  I have read some strange recipes in my day - Roman condiments made from the juice of rotten fish, the front half of a capon sewed to the back half of a suckling pig (lest your dinner guests get bored), mellified man - but what follows is one of the weirdest, because, WTF England?
  This is for a beverage supposedly drunk in England between, say, 1100 and 1450 AD.
  
  "To make Cock Ale," instructs one ancient recipe reprinted in 1736 in Smith's Compleat Housewife , "take ten gallons of ale and a large cock, the older the better. Parboil the cock, flea him, and stamp him in a stone mortar until his bones are broken. You must craw and gut him when you flea him. Put him into two quarts of sack, and put to it 3 pounds of raisins of the sun stoned, some blades of mace, and a few cloves.
  "Put all these into a canvas bag, and a little while before you find the ale has done working, put the ale and bag together into a vessel. In a week or 9 days' time bottle it up, fill the bottles but just above the necks, and leave the same to ripen as other ale."
  
  What?
• 
  John

  This is not nearly as polished as Fisher's
  Consider the Oyster, which is my favourite of hers. This one is earlier, in fact her first published book, and it is patchy. In places she writes with a pretentious mock-scholarly tone which is nonsense. But in other places her raw talent as a writer (WH Auden apparently considered her the best writer in America) shines through. The short story, "Standing and Waiting," is absolutely singular; one of the greatest pieces of short narrative I've ever read. After reading three of her books (plus her translation of Brillat-Savarin), Fisher has moved into "collectable" for me. She's got a couple of dozen titles to her name; I imagine I'll be reviewing more of them here in months and years to come.
• 
  Hilary Hanselman

  Some lovely chapters that exemplify the charming and thoughtful prose I associate with Fisher, but also a fair few chapters that left me wanting more. I wouldn't hold this up as a great example of her talent but for any lover of her writing there are plenty of wonderful passages that make this a book worth reading
• 
  Christina

  I am a little bit in love with her.
• 
  Kay

  Meh. I liked Fisher's attitude toward food (and share it): keep it simple. My preference is for the one main ingredient recipe. The latest penchant for what I call "baroque cooking" is an abomination. (I made the mistake of buying Half-Baked Harvest written by one of the cool new "baroque" cooks and the piling-on of ingredients was quite awful.) But I wasn't keen on Fisher's snobby voice, or her mistaken sense of her own profundity.
• 
  Deon

  "If Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and the embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality."
• 
  J.C.

  The more I read the more I think she's the best writer ever.
• 
  Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance

  Brilliant essays, loosely written on the theme of food.
  
  “WHEN shall we live, if not now?” asked Seneca before a table laid for his pleasure and his friends’. It is a question whose answer is almost too easily precluded. When indeed? We are alive, and now. When else live, and how more pleasantly than supping with sweet comrades?
  
  M.F.K. Fisher looks at food in history, sharing some little-known stories of the foods people found and put together to eat, stories of the way a means of sustenance turned into art.
  
  Sometimes there were big meals.
  
  “Fifty swans, a hundred and ten geese, fifty capons ‘of hie grece’ and eight dozen other capons, sixty dozen hens, five herons, six kids and seven dozen rabbits (strange place here for such lively fourlegged wingless little beasts!), five dozen pullets for jelly and some eleven dozen to roast, a hundred dozen peacocks, twenty dozen cranes and curlews, and ‘wilde fowle ynogh.’”
  
  Sometimes it was the presentation.
  
  Flowers were often used thus by the Middle English, sometimes most fortunately. What could be more ludicrously lovely than a tiny crackled piglet all garlanded with lilies and wild daffodils? Or a baked swan in its feathers, with roses on its proud reptilian head?
  
  The stunning changes that resulted from Catherine de Medici's decision to bring her chefs with her from Italy to France. A sad tale of a once-magnificent waiter's last night at the helm. The story of "a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction."
  
  If you call yourself a food reader, this and M.F.K. Fisher's other collections of essays are must-reads. And even if you are not, even if you are simply a lover of great writing, this and Fisher's other works will delight you.
• 
  Tama

  I read MFK Fisher's book The Gatronomical Me, about a year ago and ~loved~ it. To me this one is more like a report done for a class, with the occasional chapter of her heartfelt, delicious writing interspersed. My library book group ended up with this title because we wanted something by her, and this was the only one in stock at our distributor's warehouse. It's not bad, it's just feels like a first book, which it is. I'll very happily go on reading her later works, and glad to have gotten this one out of the way.
• 
  Etienne Mahieux

  Voilà des années que mon amie Mathilde me parle de ce "Fantôme de Brillat-Savarin" et comme je suis un gars plutôt lent, elle me l'a coll�� dans les mains à la fin de ma dernière visite et elle a bien fait.
  Mary Frances Kennedy, Fisher par mariage, née en 1908 et morte en 1992, n'est peut-être pas la dernière, mais tout de même une cousine tardive dans la longue lignée des écrivains américains (j'entends par là états-uniens) liés par un lien de fascination au vieux continent. Alors qu'elle ne dédaigne aucunement les produits du ranch, la nature de cette fascination a un nom : gastronomie. "Le Fantôme de Brillat-Savarin" est son premier livre, un recueil savamment construit d'essais qui tissent méticuleusement l'art culinaire et l'art de vivre, un genre profondément vivant dans la culture anglo-saxonne mais qui plonge ses racines dans l'expérience littéraire de Montaigne : bien que les affinités biographiques françaises de M.F.K. Fisher soient plus bourguignonnes que gasconnes, voilà une parenté marquée du sceau de l'évidence. Bien sûr elle évoque avant tout Brillat-Savarin, natif du Bugey, dans son texte sinon dans le titre original (l'éditeur français monte la référence en épingle).
  Le livre a deux préfaces : une de W.H. Auden, pas moins, qui fait l'éloge de l'oeuvre de Fisher sur le fond et la présente comme la plus grande prosatrice anglo-saxonne de son époque (et la compare, de façon pertinente, à Colette, pas moins non plus) ; et un essai liminaire de l'autrice elle-même, qui tâche de décrire ce que ce livre ne sera pas, et dresse à cette occasion un autoportrait en creux, récusant à la fois l'image de la vieille mémorialiste et celle de la jeune intellectuelle. Et là un vertige me prend : elle a publié ce livre à vingt-neuf ans, et parle avec aplomb de l'âge, de ses effets sur la digestion (sujet essentiel), du parcours d'une vie, du fait d'avoir quarante ans, cinquante ans… plus… de bientôt mourir, comme en est persuadé César, un boucher sans clients qu'on devine provençal et la figure centrale du dernier essai. Et là, de deux choses l'une : soit le livre a été profondément remanié au fil des rééditions, soit c'est une sacrée écrivaine.
  Soit les deux.
  Le recueil fait alterner sans systématisme rythmique des essais qui évoquent des périodes charnières de l'histoire de la gastronomie — une histoire qui évidemment est datée : notamment on a eu depuis, me semble-t-il, d'abondantes occasions de réévaluer l'art culinaire du Moyen-Âge — mais une histoire toujours savoureuse, et d'autres qui ont trait à une expérience tout à fait intime et personnelle du plaisir gustatif. Et si une première lecture en traduction française ne permet pas de discuter sérieusement le verdict d'Auden, il faut dire que le recueil se dévore, au point de se dire qu'on va trop vite, qu'on bâfre — et de vouloir ralentir heureusement, faire durer les dernières dizaines de pages, lues à l'occasion d'une surveillance d'examen blanc, occasion propice s'il en est pour maîtriser absolument le rythme de sa lecture, du moins avant les dernières dizaines de minutes où les copies pleuvent sur le bureau du surveillant.
  La conception qu'a Fisher de la gastronomie est d'une grande modernité : partisane de la légèreté contre l'abus des épices et de (certaines) sauces, de l'excellence du produit et de l'expérience qu'on peut en avoir, elle semble théoriser la Nouvelle Cuisine bien avant qu'elle ne soit mise en pratique par les chefs les plus excellents, bien qu'elle ait manifestement un certain plaisir à évoquer les banquets les plus délirants de l'Antiquité comme les pièces montées du dix-neuvième siècle français : mais son choix est fait entre ce qui brûle la langue sous l'excès des sollicitations, et ce qui l'éduque et la rend plus sensible, un épicurisme bien compris et qui n'est pas ennemi de la frugalité.
• 
  Rick

  MFK Fisher is celebrated as one of the greatest writers about food. As someone that likes good books and good food. This collection of observations about food hit the sweet spot for me. Fisher is a superb stylist who writes brilliantly and tartly about food and the consumers of food human beings.
  Fisher clearly believed that life should be celebrated and that good food and good conversation were civilizing and splendid. I look forward to reading more of her work.
  Note I also read Fisher’s Consider the Oyster a very brief tribute to oysters and the people who eat them I love oysters and order them frequently. My preference is raw oysters but Fisher has me ready to order up some oyster stew at the grand central oyster bar in NYC when the time comes.
  This short read may be too precise and have too many recipes for most readers.
• 
  Chris

  Delightful overall. Some pieces hit better than others but Fisher's voice is fantastic, winking, wry, sardonic and always just a bit holier-than-thou. My favorites were her burlesque portraits of the gastronomic excesses of the ancient Chinese or Romans, etc. Some of the character studies were great as well; particularly the final one, about a bawdy hard drinking french butcher. Taken together, the essays and stories form a a sort of manifesto for a way of appreciating gastronomy that involves much more than just the contents of one's plate.
• 
  Vanessa

  Mary Frances is a delight! She writes not just about food but about people, intertwining stories from history with her own dinner conversations from the many tables she has dined at around the world. Her descriptions of French cuisine are especially delightful, and her unabashed, contagious *hunger* - for food, exploration, and human connection - is at the core of her charm.
• 
  Daphne

  Amazing writing, full stop. Come for the food topic, stay for the incredible, stylish, hilarious writing. My favorite essay was about the potato. I found all of it fascinating, every single essay. I have an omnibus of 5 of her books and am working my way through all of them. Highly recommend, even if you don't love food writing!
• 
  Faith

  Starting The Art of Eating, with the first of five of her books on food. The history is interesting and she's quite the character. I've read other books of hers so some of this will be re-readings but since I'm old, it's all new!
• 
  Kelsey Berry

  This book is like a perfect piece of buttered toast. Richly simple and I want a second (and ultimately fifth) piece. I had to slow down at the end because it was going too quickly. Might reread it immediately, but her next book- Consider the Oyster- arrived.
• 
  Reyna Eisenstark

  Perfect. Smart, witty, clever, as per usual. I am tempted to say I ate this book up but I will refrain. Now, on to the next!
• 
  Sarah Critchley

  If you like eating and reading and haven't picked up any M.F.K. Fisher, you are doing yourself a disservice!
• 
  Kristin

  I've read that this is the weakest of her books and I still really liked it. It's nice to dip in every now and again. The culinary history is particularly interesting.
• 
  Kathleen Flinn

  MFK Fisher is one of my favorite writers, and a huge inspiration to my work as a food writer.
• 
  Emily

  Delightful, if you enjoy eating and history and travel.
• 
  Hannah Paige

  A playful combination of history and culinary commentary. Fisher’s wit and unabashed voice never fails to entertain and educate simultaneously.