M. F. K. Fisher

"Most of us, unhappily, shudder and ache and rumble as secretly as possible, seeming to feel disgrace in what is but one of the common phenomena of age: the general slowing of all physical processes. For years we hide or ignore our bodily protests and hasten our own dyspeptic doom by trying to eat and drink as we did when we were twenty. When we are past fifty, especially if we have kept up this pathetic pose of youth-at-table, we begin to grow fat. It is then that the blindest of us should beware. Unfortunately, however, we are too used to seeing other people turn heavy in their fifties: we accept paunches and s as a necessary part of growing old. Instead, we should realize this final protest of an overstuffed system, and ease our body's last years by lightening its burden. We should eat sparingly."

"We lived for almost three years in , which the s called without any quibble and with only half-hearted contradictions "the gastronomic capital of the world." ... ... We ate s of ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed butter. We tied napkins under our chins and splashed in great odorous bowls of Écrevisses à la '. We addled our palates with s hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy. In village kitchens we ate hot with and snippets of salt pork in it."

"Food for the soul is a part of all religion, as ancient savages know when they roast a tiger's heart for their god, as Christians know when they partake of Body and Blood as the mystical feast of . That is why there can be an equal significance in a sumptuous banquet for five thousand heroes, with the king sitting on his iron throne and minstrels singing above the sound of gnawed bones and clinking cups, or in a piece of dry bread eaten alone by a man lifting his eyes unto the hills. That is why, to my mind, there can be nothing irreverent or illogical about putting together in one collection of feasts such apparently disparate things as St. Luke's story of the and Lewis Carroll's tea-part for , the and 's gluttonous orgy in decadent Rome."

"B is for Bachelors ... and the wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining aplomb and kitchen chaos. Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman."

"I made this translation by myself, and can therefore thank none for it but perhaps my first teacher, who helped me learn to read. I have put it into the simplest words I know, since I feel that it is a singularly straightforward and unornamented piece of prose to have been written in a flowery literary period."

"Fortunately, good and premium wines are at the command of almost anyone in America who wants to drink them. Also, they are almost always dependable—a far cry from the old idea that "gentlemen" had their own s and their resultant giddy high life, and that the rest of the world lived on beer and s."

"We went away, away ... in this case to the , where we consumed s and s according to our natures, and as returned amateurs seemed to grow like water-flowers under the greening buds of the s, in the flowing tides of that street."

"... When I am alone and perhaps a little low, it is good to heat a can of and some milk or water, pour them into a warmed bowl with a sprinkle of in it, and go to bed with it."

"I never set out to be a writer. I write compulsively. I am like a drug addict. I can't help it. I do what pleases me."

"The first taste of bread, that day: chunks, chopped from loaves four feet long stacked at the end of the like skis, and it was the best bread I had ever eaten and I knew that forever, as of that noontime, I would be intolerant of the packaged puffy stuff called bread at home."

"WH Auden’s famous observation on the writer MFK Fisher – “I do not know of anyone in the States who writes better prose” – has been pressed into service on the cover of this reprint of Fisher’s most beloved book The Gastronomical Me (1943). The power of the puff lies in the fact that Auden wasn’t praising another poet or even a novelist but a food writer, a species conceived at that time as a domestic science teacher with a fail-safe recipe for . Implicit in Auden’s praise was the suggestion that Fisher should be removed from this category and set alongside Hemingway or Faulkner as a literary practitioner in her own right. These days we would get around the whole vexed business by saying that Fisher’s hybrid of culinary and memoir writing falls into the category of the personal essay, the kind of thing that has launched a thousand blogs and become a staple of the New Yorker’s annual food issue. The only hitch with this is that Fisher – or, to be formal, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher – was on record as hating the idea of the personal essay. To the proud daughter of a California newspaper man, the term signalled self-importance and, worse, over-writing. Fisher prided herself on never doing more than one draft which, if true, means she was a genius. Here she is on the food she encountered in Burgundy as a newlywed in the 1930s ..."

"… Mrs. Fisher herself believes that strolling is a lost art these days, but in fact she is the perfect rambler. A Considerable Town is one long ramble. It rambles through the city, its monuments, its quays, its shops and its cafes, but more important, it rambles through the author's mind and memory—she has known since 1932, and seems to have forgotten nothing. … Mrs. Fisher loves ships, s and s. She likes fresh fish with dry white local wine at lunchtime. She has a susceptible fondness for rogues and vagabonds, and a Dickensian taste for the scramble, the rasp, the blarney and even the petty pretensions of city life. Nobody can describe the sound of bells or the feel of churches better than Mrs. Fisher, and surely nobody in the history of has more exactly defined the pleasures of eating."