Pure Arcadia

Les Deux Garçons is a famous mirrored rococo café on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence. As I sat there alone one day in 1960, a plump but elegant, tall, cherubic-faced woman beckoned me over to her table. She imagined this thin student looked in need of a good meal. Thus began a friendship with M. F. K. Fisher that lasted until she died in 1992.

Her daughters were at the local lycée and we would all meet periodically to eat and attend the exquisite little theatre where plays by Sartre and Ionesco were being put on before going to Paris. The civilizing of this green, naïve Englishman had begun. She once admonished me for placing a milk bottle on the table. I have never dared do so since. ‘M. F.’ had imbibed her love of French culture and food from a time spent in Dijon in the 1930s with the first of her three husbands. She had grown up in Quaker Whittier, Southern California, and when she suggested California as a place to learn the art of printing, to my shame I scarcely hid my horror. Nine years later and newly wed to Solveig, I found myself the art director of Stanford University Press in California. Ho hum, as M. F. would have said. She was herself now back in California and our friendship was renewed. Solveig was also to become a close friend of M. F.’s, for they shared a passion for food. I had no idea that M. F. had been writing two books while in Aix: Map of Another Town and A Cordiall Water: A Garland of Odd and Old Recipes to Assuage the Ills of Man or Beast. And I certainly had no idea how highly regarded she was in her native America, where she became a celebrity in the last years of her life. She moved noiselessly and with slow deliberation around the kitchen of her old house in St Helena, humming to herself, with a Persian cat at her feet. She empathized with cats. Her eyebrows were fascinatingly painted with a strange arched squiggle in the middle of one of them. She told us that an accident had burned her original eyebrows. The squiggle gave her a quizzical, patrician air. She could be rather frightening. However, her letters were full of witty and acute observations on human foibles, and she would address me as ‘the D.O.G.’ (Dear Old Gentleman). Her prose style was famously considered by W. H. Auden to be unsurpassed in America. Her secret was to combine personal anecdotes with practical tips. Underlying all her writing is a passionate desire to communicate the importance of the act of sitting at a table and breaking bread, which she considered sacred and civilizing. She described food as ‘something beautiful to be shared with people instead of a thrice-daily necessity’.

Humphrey Stone

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There was nothing actually cooking when we first arrived, but I can still smell the kitchen of the old house where M. F. lived when I first met her. I loved both house and owner from that first second. Everything about the house was right, from the bamboo which surrounded it, casting shadows across the floors of the rooms with no curtains, to the books which I pulled from the shelves by the dozen, and the old furniture – coming as we did from the Bay area where everything appeared to have been made the night before. Mary Frances, or Dotey as we came to call her, had an enchanting Marilyn Monroe-esque voice which emanated from a tiny rosebud mouth. She was certainly very alluring. Four years after my marriage to Humphrey, M. F., in a typically generous gesture, gave us a late wedding present. We were to join her in Marseille for a week. At the time she was writing her portrait of it, A Considerable Town. Our room, with the best view over the harbour, was especially chosen by her. It was a revelation to me, in my early twenties, that someone in late middle age could cast such a spell without even having to speak. A portrait we have of M. F. as a young woman, photographed by Man Ray, shows what a striking beauty she must have been. Very soon we got into a regular habit of visiting M. F., driving through the Napa valley, past the vineyards, to a wonderful welcome in St Helena. The nineteenth-century wooden house had been built by Chinese labour. It had a huge cool cellar where she worked and practically lived during the hot summer. We, on the other hand, liked sleeping under an old patchwork quilt on the roasting top floor which smelt of hot wood, meeting to eat under the large fig tree at the back of the house. Frequently M. F. sipped bouillon from a tiny mug. I think her stock was just so delicious she couldn’t help tasting it. Towards lunchtime the contents of the mug changed to vermouth. To our consternation, in 1970 her doctor advised her to give up the large house and very sadly, over several weekends, we helped her pack it up. David Pleydell-Bouverie built her a house on his ranch in the Sonoma valley amidst Californian oaks, waterfalls and wild flowers. It was called ‘Last House’ because it was going to be the last he built and the last she was to live in. The sign, as you turned into the ranch, said ‘Trespassers will be violated’, but once there it was magic. The late Lord Clark said it was ‘pure Arcadia’. It was left by David P-B, after his death, to the Audubon Society. The new house had two vast rooms – one with a coved redwood ceiling, to eat and entertain in, the other, lined with bookshelves, to sleep and work in. There was a lavish bathroom, painted in Pompeian red, M. F.’s extravagance after an advance for one of her books. The hall where we slept, and a huge veranda where she often slept, completed the extent of the house. David lived in the ‘big’ house, with a slate dance floor outside, an aubergine-coloured swimming pool and crystal chandeliers on the terrace where we ate. M. F. was his ‘interesting’ resident and was often roped in to entertain his guests. Jessica Mitford and Maya Angelou were frequent visitors. Mostly M. F. was delighted, but sometimes she resented the intrusion and desperately wanted to escape. When some stick-thin women from San Francisco arrived to take a lesson from her, she described, with huge disdain, their fear of dipping their red-nailed fingers into beaten egg. She had, after all, written How to Cook a Wolf. In fact she had a genius for book titles, and they exactly illustrate her blissfully witty sense of humour. She was always receiving cookery books to review and was dismissive of ‘modishly enormous and expensive books being written by gentlemen chefs and lady globe-trotters’. M. F. once got caught up in a wild correspondence about how to tell when an oyster is bad: ‘One experienced old trencherman/chef advised me to drink copiously of the lowest type of rotgut red wine if ever I suspected that I had downed a potential murderer, and thus flush it out of my system on an almost lethal flood of tannic acid.’ After she had just swallowed an oyster she suspected to be bad, and with at least nine more on her plate, her fellow guest remarked: ‘As in certain other forms of physical assault, sit back and enjoy it. You will either be dead or feeling fine in exactly six hours.’ As a result I still wait for exactly six hours when I (generally in India) wonder about something I have eaten. It is a great relief when the seventh hour begins. I don’t really consider M. F. a cookery writer per se. She is a sort of food alchemist and is positively sensual about the pleasure of food. ‘I just wish my fellow countrymen were more relaxed. They have been conditioned to believe there is something basically evil about physical and moral sensuality.’ Her books are full of recipes, not all of them about food. Take her fascinating chapter in With Bold Knife and Fork on ‘The anatomy of a Recipe’ which includes the following:

Name: To Drive a Woman Crazy Ingredients: 1 or more nutmegs, ground; 1 left shoe; 1 woman Method: Sprinkle small amounts of nutmeg on left shoe every night at midnight, until desired results are obtained with woman.

With Bold Knife and Fork also includes my favourite recipe, which I make every summer.

Unstuffed Zucchini

The Unstuffing 3 cloves garlic 1 cup olive oil 2 green peppers in chunks 1 cup coarsely chopped parsley 4 eggs 1 teaspoon dry ‘Italian herb seasoning’ 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon pepper 2 cups grated Parmesan or other dry cheese Dry breadcrumbs to make thick paste

In blender, mix garlic and oil to thin paste. Gradually add peppers and parsley until coarsely blended. Add eggs and seasoning, blend once more, and pour into large bowl. Mix cheese well into liquid, and then enough dry crumbs to make thick paste. Let chill at least two hours. Taste to rectify seasoning, and stir once more.

The Vegetable 12 or more small firm zucchini Olive oil

Blanch squash by plunging into boiling water, cooking rapidly until barely tender, and then plunging into cold water. Drain well, and split lengthwise, leaving tips on for added strength. Do not hollow, as is customary, but using a teaspoon and the fingers pack a thick layer of unstuffing on each half, and place close together in shallow baking pan. Drip olive oil amply over each piece, and bake about 1 hour, in 350° oven, or until lightly browned. Serve hot as vegetable, or well cooled as hors d’oeuvre.

Of all her work I think M. F.’s translation of Brillat Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy gave her the most satisfaction. A copy arrived for us just as we were about to fly back to England for a holiday. It was a revelation. Her translation was both brilliant and poetic, and I barely looked up for the whole flight. Her love of language is what sets her books apart. In the chapter ‘Especially of the Evening’ from With Bold Knife and Fork, which begins, ‘Any half-decent approach to maturity in the use of words is as mysterious as that of sex initiation into a Congolese tribe, but slower’, is the following:

A professionally mad Basque, really a nice, mild Spanish aristocrat raised in Paris . . . shocked me almost silly by prattling persuasively at my first grown-up dinner party about the pity of wasting the word ‘iodine’ on a foul medicament. ‘Correctly pronounced,’ he cried, ‘it would grace any lovely woman! If I should ever have a daughter, I would call her Yo-deen!’

Did Mary Frances have a retentive memory or was she merely inventive? Does one even remember one’s first dinner party? Her father discouraged three subjects at mealtimes: politics, sex and money. Good manners, she thought, were a ‘matter more of innate taste than of outward training’. Hers were impeccable. Her books are full of personal experiences and advice. She is also an historian and equally interested in remedies and potions. In her middle age, which is when we knew her best, she was very interested in old age. She had amassed volumes on the subject and planned to write a book. Once, when I was grumbling about someone being old and difficult, she corrected me, saying that people didn’t become old and difficult, they were like that at six months old. In a letter to her close friend Lawrence Clark Powell, librarian and eminent historian of Californian literature, she also wrote, ‘I don’t believe in all this stuff about grief because I think we grieve forever, but that goes for love too, fortunately for us all.’ After our return to England we corresponded frequently until one day she asked if I minded all our letters being copied to Yale University. Somehow that spoilt the spontaneity for me. However, my friendship with her was a pivotal influence in my life, and I only wish I could now spirit up an M. F. K. Fisher for my daughters.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © Humphrey and Solveig Stone 2007