What Would MFK Fisher Do?

Inspiration comes in many forms. Between the story of Julia Child’s time in France and MFK Fisher’s time in Europe before WWII, food lifestyle writing seems to have been thought up by women. These two great women have such exciting stories to tell, that it’s not worth missing any of them.

I wanted to alert those of you who don’t know MFK Fisher a little of the pleasure that her thinking can bring into your life. Perhaps it’s the vaguely outrageous (for its time) references to her divorcing someone who appeared to be a perfectly wonderful, but ultimately unstimulating, first husband (who was apparently a professor from my alma mater, Occidental College, in Los Angeles), and dumping him for her next door neighbor’s husband–with whom she lived in France and Switzerland.

Perhaps it’s the incredible life that she and that playboy stitched together as he fell ill with chronic pain all too quickly after marrying, and then died tragically–a suicide. So just as war was coming to her doorstep and requiring her to move back to dreadfully dishwater-dull America in the early ’40s, she and her contraband second husband found themselves alone again: he in his heaven, she in wartime America. So she set about writing

MFK Considering the Oyster

Her Wiki contributors give us simple background, “Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992) was a preeminent American food writer. She was also a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. She wrote some 27 books, including a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin. Two volumes of her journals and correspondence came out shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books are an amalgam of food literature, travel and memoir. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the “arts of life” and explored this in her writing. W.H. Auden once remarked, ‘I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.’”

To Wit:  ”There in Dijon, the cauliflowers were very small and succulent, grown in that ancient soil. I separated the flowerlets and dropped them in boiling water for just a few minutes. Then I drained them and put them in a wide shallow casserole, and covered them with heavy cream, and a thick sprinkling of freshly grated Gruyere, the nice rubbery kind that didn’t come from Switzerland at all, but from the Jura. It was called rape in the market, and was grated while you watched, in a soft cloudy pile, onto your piece of paper.”

Her memoirs of learning to eat oysters properly at her girls finishing school, her clear-headed efforts to promote lifestyle-eating in her writing rather than just the humdrum recipe-writing and restaurant reviewing of the day, MFK Fisher brought a certain je ne sais qua to journalism and to her solipsistic novelization of a life that many would kill for and which still eludes most of us.

Fierce Mary Francis

I only hope my blog can begin to do her justice. I value your feedback and attention to these efforts.

As I was developing this blog, I noticed how few blogs there were that were findable with this sort of esoteric/eclectic/entrancing point of view. I mean really, if you were to search for really interesting food writing what would you type into the Google bar to pin-point this sort of clever evocation of a place and time?

Search Engine Optimisation and the general inflexibility of the average marketing materials that come my way to promote this blog make getting the word out very, very challenging.

“What is the purpose of your blog, anyway?” Frank and Bret asked today over lunch, “Would it kill you if you suddenly had advertisers asking to promote their wares on your site?” I didn’t really know how to answer their questions that followed: “I assume you want followers, don’t you? What are you doing to get more pageviews?”

After our chat I arrived home tonight and thought the better of it. I found myself wondering, “What would MFK do?” I have my own ideas, but I put it out there to you: What do you think MFK would do in my shoes?

Please, dear reader, share with me your thoughts. Either here or by email at gardenflat@aol.com. Thanks in advance for considering my request. Consider the Oyster.

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