In an age of elaborate tablescapes, meticulously documented meals and an almost inexhaustible appetite for culinary inspiration, there is a curious absence. We have perhaps never been so preoccupied with food, nor so removed from some of its simplest pleasures. The spontaneous dinner, the lingering lunch, the particular intimacy of sharing a meal in someone's home.
Which is why the writing of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, more than three decades after her death, feels unexpectedly relevant.
Born in 1908, M.F.K. Fisher was among the twentieth century's most singular literary voices. An essayist, memoirist and formidable observer of human nature, she wrote ostensibly about food, although the distinction seems inadequate. Her subject was life itself, approached through the appetites and peculiarities of eating and drinking.
Her sensibility was shaped by France, where she arrived as a young woman in 1929. Among her earliest revelations was an unassuming meal aboard a train traveling from Cherbourg to Paris: crusty bread, tender lettuces, fresh cheese, apples, red wine and bitter coffee. The simplicity of its ingredients, and the pleasure taken in them, left an impression that endured throughout her life.
Long before Anthony Bourdain made a literary adventure of the world's kitchens, Fisher recognized food as a means of exploring more complicated territory. Love, loneliness, desire, mortality. Her prose was intimate, sensual and frequently irreverent, moving effortlessly between the pleasures of the palate and the complexities of human nature.
Her first book, Serve It Forth (1937), announced an assured and provocative new voice. How to Cook a Wolf (1942), written against the backdrop of wartime scarcity, was a spirited defense of pleasure amid adversity. In The Gastronomical Me (1943), remembered meals became a means of reconstructing a life, while An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949) explored the peculiar theater of appetite with characteristic wit.
What distinguishes Fisher is her indifference to appearances. She appreciated beauty and ceremony, but understood their place within a larger experience. The food, the setting, the company were inseparable, their significance residing in the sensations and memories they produced.
There is something almost subversive about this sensibility today. The visual language of entertaining has grown increasingly sophisticated, yet the pleasure of hospitality risks becoming entangled with the pressure of its presentation.
Fisher's world was hardly without uncertainty. War, personal loss and profound loneliness informed much of her writing. Yet her appetite for life remained remarkably intact. Pleasure was neither frivolous nor an escape from reality, but a means of inhabiting it more completely.
Perhaps this is why her work resists the passage of time. The cultural circumstances have changed, but the human impulses she understood so well have not. Her great achievement was to recognize that the apparently ordinary experience of sharing food could contain an entire emotional landscape.
As she observed in The Gastronomical Me, “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”