M.F. K. Fisher

The problem with most food writing is that it is too much about ingredients and not enough about appetite.

Her books are full of private cravings.

Those of us who love her above all other food writers must be grateful that she ignored her friend’s advice. There is a liberating generosity to the way she exposes those private appetites that most of us struggle to hide. No one was ever so confident in her own hungers or so determined in her quest to satisfy them.

Hunger is something deep, Fisher shows, and it can’t just be satisfied by dainty morsels. One of the great themes of the book is that food nourishes more or less depending on the frame of mind you are in when you eat it. You might eat the most delicious tamale pie – as cooked by Fisher’s husband Al – and burst into tears because you are lonely and scared and living in a freezing cold apartment in Strasbourg. Or you could be on a train in Italy and eat the most unexpectedly lovely meal of ‘bread and salami’ and ‘those big white beans, the kind Italians peel and eat with salt when they are fresh and tender’.

Very few food writers have ever been so honest about death. She shows us that to have hungers and the means to satisfy them is how we can tell we are fully alive.

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?

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. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.

‘Eat what’s set before you, and be thankful for it,’ Grandmother said often; or in other words, ‘Take what God has created and eat it humbly and without sinful pleasure.’

‘Their table manners are getting worse,’ Grandmother observed between belches. And that was true, if you believed as she and unhappy millions of Anglo-Saxons have been taught to believe, that food should be consumed without comment of any kind but above all without sign of praise or enjoyment.

My little sister Anne and I had come in Ora’s few weeks with us to watch every plate she served, and to speculate with excitement on what it would taste like. ‘Oh, Mother,’ we would exclaim in a kind of anguish of delight. ‘There are little stars, all made of pie crust! They have seeds on them! Oh, how beautiful! How good!’

Mother grew embarrassed, and finally stern; after all, she had been raised by Grandmother. She talked to us privately, and told us how unseemly it was for little children to make comments about food, especially when the cook could hear them. ‘You’ve never behaved this way before,’ she said, thereby admitting the lack of any reason to, until then.