‘Unique among the classics of gastronomic writing . . . The Gastronomical Me is a book about adult loss, survival, and love.’ New York Review of Books
The Gastronomical Me redefined the genre for food writing, it is a memoir of travel, love and loss, but above all hunger.
Beginning with her first food memory – the greyish-pink fuzz of her grandmother’s strawberry jam – M. F. K. Fisher traces the development of her appetite from her childhood in America to her arrival in Dijon as a young woman, where she tasted French cooking for the first time. In Europe she embarked on a whole new way of eating, drinking and living, and she recounts unforgettable meals shared with an assortment of eccentric characters, set against a backdrop of mounting pre-war tensions.
Here are meals as seductions, educations, diplomacies and communions, in settings as diverse as a bedsit above a patisserie, a Swiss farm, and cruise liners across oceans. In prose both convivial and confiding, Fisher teaches us the art of ordering well, the pleasures of dining alone, and how to eat so that you always find nourishment, in both head and heart.
‘I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.’ W.H. Auden
‘Her writing makes your mouth water.’ Financial Times
‘She is not just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop.’ Observer
With Bold Knife and Fork
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher did write exquisitely. She also wrote a vast amount, and one might fear indigestion on so hefty a diet of opinion, scathing contempt and passion for the many and varied...
Read morePure Arcadia
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....
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