Mfk Fisher Quotes

Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

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.

First we eat, then we do everything else.

When shall we live if not now?

...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.

No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.

The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight... [Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.

I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best....

I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.

I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me.

A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.

But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.

Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.

You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!

Like most humans, I am hungry...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...

All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realization of life, whether they are poor or rich.

We sink too easily into stupid and overfed sensuality, our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds.

...but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.

It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.

In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.

There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

...having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat...

Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps, even, we will remember how to make good bread again. It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with peace, and the house filled with one of the world's sweetest smells. But it takes a lot of time. If you can find that, the rest is easy. And if you cannot rightly find it, make it, for probably there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

Never be daunted in public' was an early Hemingway phrase that had more than once bolstered me in my timid twenties. I changed it resolutely to 'Never be daunted in private'. - M.F.K. Fisher "A Is for Dining Alone

Perhaps they should feel this safe sand blow away so that their heads are uncovered for a time, so that they will have to taste not only the solid honesty of my red borscht, but the new flavor of the changing world.

...after rare beef and wine, when the lobes turn red, was the time to ask favours or tell bad news.

I live with carpe diem engrave on my heart.

It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.

I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless....

It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster. Enough of hit-and-miss suppers of tinned soup and boxed biscuits and an occasional egg just because I had failed once more to rate an invitation!

It's really fine that you found a good archivist to do the basically difficult and at times harrowing work of cleaning out old papers. I hope you keep her digging into all the old boxes as long as there is ONE left.

(We loved Mother too, completely, but we were finding out, as Father was too, that it is good for parents and for children to be alone now and then with one another...the man alone or the woman, to sound new notes in the mysterious music of parenthood and childhood.) That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person. I saw the golden hills and the live oaks as clearly as I have ever seen them since; and I saw the dimples in my little sister's fat hands in a way that still moves me because of that first time; and I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity.

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

PROBABLY one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.

...it was one of the best meals we ever ate. Perhaps that is because it was the first conscious one, for me at least; but the fact that we remember it with such queer clarity must mean that it had other reasons for being important. I suppose that happens at least once to every human. I hope so. Now the hills are cut through with superhighways, and I can't say whether we sat that night in Mint Canyon or Bouquet, and the three of us are in some ways even more than twenty-five years older than we were then. And still the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream we ate together that August night live in our hearts' palates, succulent, secret, delicious.

As I remember, the worst result of a World War II block was a flood of Argentine Gin. Sensitive martini-boys and Gibson-girls still shudder....

I have spent my life in a painstaking effort to tell about things as they are to me, so that they will not sound like autobiography but simply like notes, like factual reports.

The stove, the bins, the cupboards, I had learned forever, make an inviolable throne room. From them I ruled; temporarily I controlled. I felt powerful, and I loved that feeling.

I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert the reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.

I used to think in my Russian-novel days, that I would cherish a lover who managed through thick and thin, snow and sleet, to have a bunch of Parma violets on my breakfast tray each morning--also rain or shine, Christmas or August, and onward into complete Neverland. Later, I shifted my dream plan--a split of cold champagne one half hour before the tray! Violets, sparkling wine, and trays themselves were as nonexistent as the lover(s), of course, but once again, Why not?

You can still live with grace and wisdom thanks partly to the many people who write about how to do it and perhaps talk overmuch about riboflavin and economy, and partly to your own innate sense of what you must do with the resources you have, to keep the wolf from snuffing to hungrily through the keyhole.

All these, though, are relatively unimportant. There are only three things I need, to make my kitchen a pleasant one as long as it is clean. First, I need space enough to get a good simple meal for six people. More of either would be wasteful as well as dangerously dull. Then, I need a window or two, for clear air and a sight of things growing. Most of all I need to be let alone. I need peace. From there—from there, on the sill of my wide window, the plan is yours. It will include an herb-bed surely, and a brick courtyard for summer suppers.

When you think you can stand no more of the wolf's snuffing under the door and keening softly on cold nights, throw discretion into the laundry bag, put candles on the table, and for your own good if not the pleasure of an admiring audience make one or another of the recipes in this chapter. And buy yourself a bottle of wine, or make a few cocktails, or have a long open-hearted discussion of cheeses with the man on the corner who is an alien but still loyal if bewildered.

Perhaps some fortunate fish have known it, but for human beings it is rare to float at the bottom of the deeps and yet breathe with rapture the smells of all the living things spread out to sell in the pure, filtered, moving air." --"Two Kitchens in Provence" (1966)

There are three kinds of oyster-eaters: those loose-minded sports who will eat anything, hot, cold, thin, thick, dead or alive, as long as it is oyster, those who will eat them raw and only raw; and those who with equal severity will eat them cooked and no way other. The first group may perhaps have the most fun, although there is a white fire about the others' bigotry that can never warm the broad-minded.

I kept wishing with real regret that I were capable of living in such continued simplicity. But I am not. Sometimes I honestly want to live in a plain room with a narrow bed, a chair, a table. But then I would need a bookcase. I would see a poster I must put on the wall. I would pick up a shell here, a bowl or vase there, another poster, enough books for two bookcases, a soft rug someone might give me--and where would the first plainness be? I cannot fight too hard against it, but I regret it.

Without Al, Mary Frances discovered what she did alone. She liked to cook for herself, to assemble a meal of things he would never consider worth a mealtime- shad roe and toast, soft-set eggs, hearts of celery and palm with a quick yellow mayonnaise, a glass of wine, an open book in her lap, and the radio on. The elements that mattered most were the simple ones: butter, salt, a thick plate of white china and a delicate glass, the music faint, the feel of paper in her hand, and the knowledge that there was more, always more book to read, more wine if she liked it, some cold fruit in the refrigerator when she was hungry again, and the hours upon hours to satisfy herself.

People ask me: Why do you write about food? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honour of my craft. The 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 straighly 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. I tell about myself and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness. There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity. There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?

The problem of an ideal kitchen grows more complex as I ponder on it. There are many small things I am sure about: no shelf-papers; no sharp edges or protruding hooks or wires; no ruffled curtains; and no cheap-coloured stove, mauve or green or opalescent like a modern toilet seat. Instead of these things I would have smooth shelves of some material like ebony or structural glass, shelves open or protected by sliding transparent doors. I would have curved and rounded edges, even to the floor, for the sake of cleanliness, and because I hate the decayed colours of a bruise. Instead of curtains I would have Venetian blinds, of four different colours for the seasons of the year. They would be, somehow, on the outside of the glass. And the stove would be black, with copper and earthenware utensils to put on it. It would be a wood stove, or perhaps (of this I am doubtful, unless I am the charwoman and janitor as well as the cook) electrical with place for a charcoal grill.

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, ad about love, the way others do? They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The 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

There are a thousand small honest breweries in this country that because they have been too poor and localized to compete with the big boys have been forced to close, or else operate under famous names while they turn out yeast, or hops, or some other important but unnamed ingredient of the main company's beer. Now, with the trains full of soldiers and supplies rather than pale ale, perhaps people far from the great breweries will turn again to their local beer factories and discover, as their fathers did thirty years ago, that a beer carried quietly three miles is better than one shot across three thousand on a fast freight.

Claudia Roden, and Paula Wolfert (Mediterranean), Diana Kennedy and Maricel Presilla (Mexico), Andy Ricker and David Thompson (Thailand), Andrea Nguyen and Charles Phan (Vietnam). For general cooking: James Beard, April Bloomfield, Marion Cunningham, Suzanne Goin, Edna Lewis, Deborah Madison, Cal Peternell, David Tanis, Alice Waters, The Canal House, and The Joy of Cooking. For inspiring writing about food and cooking: Tamar Adler, Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Patience Gray, Jane Grigson, and Nigel Slater. For baking: Josey Baker, Flo Braker, Dorie Greenspan, David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich, Elisabeth Prueitt, Claire Ptak, Chad Robertson, and Lindsey Shere.

Vegetables cooked for salads should always be on the crisp side, like those trays of zucchini and slender green beans and cauliflowerets in every trattoria in Venice, in the days when the Italians could eat correctly. You used to choose the things you wanted: there were tiny potatoes in their skins, remember, and artichokes boiled in olive oil, as big as your thumb, and much tenderer...and then the waiter would throw them all into an ugly white bowl and splash a little oil and vinegar over them, and you would have a salad as fresh and tonic to your several senses as La Primavera. It can still be done, although never in the same typhoidic and enraptured air. You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and chill them, and eat them in a bowl.

Men's ideas, though, continue to run in the old channels about oysters as well as God and war and women. Even when they know better they insist that months with R in them are all right, but that oysters in June or July or May or August will kill you or make you wish they had. This is wrong, of course, except that all oysters, like all men, are somewhat weaker after they have done their best at reproducing.

Naturally there have been times when my self-made solitude has irked me. I have often eaten an egg and drunk a glass of jug-wine, surrounded deliberately with the trappings of busyness, in a hollow Hollywood flat near the studio where I was called a writer, and not been able to stifle my longing to be anywhere but there, in the company of any of a dozen predatory or ambitious or even kind people who had not invited me. That was the trouble: nobody did. A Is for Dining Alone, M.F.K Fisher

when our boulevards are lined with an infinity of bad eating houses filled with dead-faced people placed like mute beasts in their stalls; today, when one out of every three marriages ends in divorce ... It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass-poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body, is that meals in the intimacy of a family dining-room or kitchen are unbearable.

I never accepted the plain truth that I myself could hold no interest, no appeal, for the cool, gracious old lady. It was a kind of rebuff that perhaps Americans, very warm, generous, naive people, are especially attuned to. I explained it to myself. Spiritually, we are fresh children, unable to realize that other peoples are infinitely older and wearier than we. We do not yet know much world-pain, except vicariously. Europeans who grow bored or exasperated with our enthusiasm are not simply feeling superior to us; there is also tolerance and understanding, which we are as yet incapable of recognizing.

The oyster’s radar and defensive mechanisms are critical for its survival, for mouths other than human mouths hunger for oyster flesh. Oysters have several principal predators: the starfish wraps its arms around the oyster, forces its shell apart and ingests it; the boring sponge bores tiny holes in its shell, honeycombing it with tunnels; the slipper-limpet and the mussel smother the oysters or starve them by attaching themselves to an oyster’s shell and eating all their food; the dog-whelk and the whelk-tingle also bore into the shell and suck out the flesh. The oyster, beset by such enemies, writes M.F.K. Fisher, ‘lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation, and if she escapes the menace of duck-slipper-mussel Black-Drum-leech-sponge-borer-starfish, it is for man to eat because of man’s own hunger’.

She browned onions and garlic, and from the pot on the windowsill, chopped a few winter-sad leaves of tarragon. The smell was green and strong, and she thought of spring. Spring in Dijon, when she and Al would hike into the mountains with the Club Alpin, the old women forever chiding her tentative steps, her newborn French: la petite violette, violette américaine. She would turn back to Al, annoyed, and he would laugh. Hardly his delicate flower. When they stopped for lunch, it was Mary Frances with the soufflé of calves' brains, whatever was made liver or marrow, ordering enough strong wine that everyone was laughing. The way home, the women let her be. If she wanted calves' brains now, she wouldn't even know where to begin to look or how to pay. She and Al seemed to be living on vegetables and books, tobacco, quiet. She blanched a bunch of spinach and chopped it. She beat eggs with the tarragon, heated the skillet once again. There was a salad of avocados and oranges. There was a cold bottle of ale and bread. Enough, for tonight.

Child was a new kind of celebrity: She was a woman in her fifties, and she played herself on television. She was real. She made mistakes. Of course she was a masterful cook, but when things went wrong, she embraced the opportunity to use her mistakes to teach—here’s what you should do if this happens.

I let myself exist mainly through my children... [but] I could not even guess at the lives my children led.

our dispassionate acceptance of attrition...[can] be matched by a full use of everything that has ever happened in all the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person's mind from his body.

put Rachel facing the door, in a faint subtle effort to make her know that if he had only had enough money and had managed to finish the thesis, he might well have asked her to be his hostess and share her life with him.

If I were rich, I would buy him a new black suit. ... If I had next week's allowance and had not spent this week's on three Cherry Flips ...

And for the person who likes oysters, such a delicate, charming, nostalgic gesture would seem so delicate, so nostalgically charming, so reminiscent of a thousand good mouthfuls here and there in the past...in other words, so sensible...that it would make even nostalgia less a perversion than a lusty bit of nourishment.

Why, Hang Town Fry...I remember once..." Then, for a few minutes or seconds before the part he has been playing so long submerges his real thinking self, and smudges all the outlines into those of a campus character, you see what this big deaf lost man must have been, one night down near the Ferry Building when he ate Hang...Town...Fry...

1 cup mayonnaise 1 teaspoon chopped Chives 1 teaspoon Tarragon 1 teaspoon Chervil 1 chopped gherkin 1 teaspoon capers dash cayenne 1 chopped olive prepared mustard to taste (optional) wine vinegar to taste Mix all ingredients except vinegar, then put that in slowly until the proper tartness is obtained. Approximately 1 tablespoon will be necessary.

First, I need space enough to get a good simple meal for six people. More of either would be wasteful as well as dangerously dull. Then, I need a window or two, for clear air and a sight of things growing. Most of all I need to be let alone. I need peace. From there—from there, on the sill of my wide window, the plan is yours. It will include an herb-bed surely, and a brick courtyard for summer suppers. And an apple orchard perhaps? A far sea view?

and we continue, perversely, to enjoy them probably as much as the Frenchman with his white wine and the Britisher with his ale.

They keep you fit, do oysters, with vitamins and such, for energy and what is lightly called “fuel value.” They prevent goiter. They build up your teeth. They keep your children’s legs straight, and when Junior reaches puberty they make his skin clear and beautiful as a soap-opera announcer’s dream. They add years to your life

An old recipe begins: “Take 300 clean oysters and throw into a pot filled with nice butter . .

Down South there is a long marble or hard wood counter between the customer and the oyster-man, sloping toward the latter. He stands there, opening the shells with a skill undreamed of by an ordinary man and yet always with a few cuts showing on his fingers, putting the open oysters carefully, automatically, on a slab of ice in front of him, while a cat waits with implacable patience at his ankles for a bit of oyster-beard or a caress. He throws the top shells behind him into a barrel, and probably they go into a road or a wall somewhere, later, with cement to bind them.

But further north, men choose their oysters without sauce. They like them cold, straightforward, simple, capable of spirit but unadorned, like a Low Church service maybe or a Boston romance.

And for the person who likes oysters, such a delicate, charming, nostalgic gesture would seem so delicate, so nostalgically charming, so reminiscent of a thousand good mouthfuls here and there in the past . . . in other words, so sensible . . . that it would make even nostalgia less a perversion than a lusty bit of nourishment.

According to the little black-and-gold booklet published for Antoine’s centennial, Oysters à la Rockefeller contain “such rich ingredients that the name of the Multi-Millionaire was borrowed to indicate their value.” Some gourmets say that any oyster worthy of its species should not be toyed with and adulterated by such skullduggeries as this sauce of herbs and strange liqueurs.

In the Good Old Days, those good old days so dull to hear about and so delightful to talk of, thin slices of real pumpernickel-ish brown bread (No machine-sliced beige-colored sponge, for God’s sake!) and honest-to-Betsy lumps of juicy lemon used to come automatically with every half-dozen of oysters,

I had long believed that, once having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat, in proportion of course.

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. M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

but I can say just as surely that this minute, in a northern-California valley, I can taste-smell-hear-see and feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace. They were uneven in both thickness and color, probably made by a new apprentice in the hotel kitchen, and almost surely they smelled faintly of either chicken or fish, for that was always the case there. They were a little too salty, to encourage me to drink. They were ineffable. I am still nourished by them. That is probably why I can be so firm about not eating my way through barrels, tunnels, mountains more of them here in the land where they hang like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all grocery stores, to tempt me sharply every time I pass them.

Inwardly, though, she was blown empty by a giant breath, and while they stood waiting for Mr. Henshaw to tie up the Clara she knew that she would never be the same poor, ignorant woman of an hour ago. She would be poor, all right, and she would be ignorant and she would be a woman, but never in the same ways.

She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not to mention the intenser ignominious dependence of weak knees and various torments of the troubled mind.

What did the child-woman have to say except that she was happy to be living with Hubert--a big, pompous, grasping, scheming, conniving stud who used her at his will and shaped her affections and her tastes and in general raped her spirit.

M.F.K. Fisher says it well: There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. It’s like religion. If you have a glass of water and a crust of bread with someone and you really share it, it is much more than just bread and water. I really believe that. Breaking bread is a simile for sharing bread ... you cannot swallow if you are angry or hateful. You choke a bit ... it’s all very betraying, how we eat.

...he began to feel that he was really not talking to the woman at all, but that she was, with her strange smooth hair and her quiet way of drinking, his inner self, the true and only companion he could talk to lately, the one remaining friend...

A bushel basket is set to receive the empty shells, and the click of the oyster-knives forms a constant accompaniment to the music of laughing voices. Nor are roast oysters amiss upon your own quiet supper-table, when the “good man” comes in on a wet night, tired and hungry, and wants “something heartening.

On the other hand, I have had Pouilly-Fuissé, various kinds of champagnes nature, a pink Peau d’Onion, and both bottled and open wines of Anjou with oysters in France, and whether they were correctly drunk or not, I was. Nobody knew it except my own exhilarated senses and my pleased mind, all of which must enter into any true gastronomic experience.

C'est le manque de nouvelles sensations qui pousse a consommer plus pour obtenir du plaisir. Tout est question de culture et de gout. Mais accepter de regarder les choses avec les yeux d'une autre culture permet d'enrichir notre propre quotiden. Pour manger beau, bon et sain et en faire un style de vie, il faut enrayer la monotonie et la morosite. Manger beau, bon et sain fait partie des plus grands plaisirs de la vie. La beaute nourrit autant que les vitamines. Les Japonais considerent que la grandeur d'un repas tient a 50% dans sa presentation et a 50% dans son gout. L'esthetique en general et dans chaque detail du quotidien exerce des pouvoirs magiques sur notre moral, notre psychisme, notre bonheur. Il n'est pas necessaire d'avoir beaucoup de moyens, mais d'utiliser ce que l'on possede avec style, elegance et gout. Si les gens etaient davantage entoures de beaute, ils ressentiraient moins le besoin de consommer, de detruire, de gagner de l'argent a tout prix. Selon les Chinois, seul le sauvage et le barbare ne cuisinent pas. Tout Chinois eprouve le besoin de cuisiner pour se sentir vivre et apprivoiser le naturel qui sommeille au coeur de l'Homme. Nul exercice de yoga, nulle meditation dans une chapelle ne vous remontera plus le moral que la simple tache de fabriquer votre propre pain. M.F.K Fisher, The art of eating Le o bento est probablement l'une des formes du zen la plus pratique, populaire et accessible a tous: tout prevoir a l'avance, se prendre en charge sans dependre d'autrui, ne pas gaspiller et soigner sa sante tout en vivant avec art. La lassitude gastronomique conduit a une alimentation malsaine, a la morosite de la vie et a la maladie. Les taches domestiques seront peut-etre revalorisees le jour ou nous comprendrons l'importance qu'elles ont sur notre equilibre physique et psychologique. Il faut etre tres riche pour s'enrichir encore en se depouillant. L'art culinaire est devenu une mode, qui, comme tant d'autres formes de boulimie ( plaisir, bonheur, exotisme, depaysement ), nous susurre constamment: "changez, essayez, achetez". Les habitudes etant une seconde nature, tout ce a quoi nous nous habituons perd de son charme.

I was beginning to believe that it is foolish and perhaps pretentious and often boring, as well as damnably expensive, to make a meal of four or six courses just because the guests who are to eat it have always been used to that many. Let them try eating two or three things, I said, so plentiful and so interesting and so well cooked that they will be satisfied. And if they are not satisfied, let them stay away from our table, and our leisurely comfortable friendship at that table. I talked like that, and it worried Al a little, because he had been raised in a minister's family and had been taught that the most courteous way to treat guests was to make them feel as if they were in their own homes. I, to his well-controlled embarrassment, was beginning to feel quite sure that one of the best things I could do for nine-tenths of the people I knew was to give them something that would make them forget Home and all it stood for, for a few blessed moments at least.

I wanted to eat, yes, but more than anything I was hungry to know. I wanted to know about foods I’d never heard of, but I also wanted to know about the best versions of food I already knew. Surely the cheese you ate in France was different from the Brie we bought at the supermarket? Because I thought that supermarket Brie was pretty damn good. The notion that there existed some version of this delight that I couldn’t even grasp until I consumed it was the tantalizer that spurred me into nearly everything I did for about twenty years. Each new flavor felt like a dare and an impossible promise. All my books were telling me there were transporting versions of everything I knew out in the world. It was all—MFK Fisher’s paean to ultra-fresh peas, Ephron’s description of cool ripe tomatoes hitting hot linguine—about magic, not stumbling on it but learning how to conjure it.

Tycoons with inlets in Maryland have their highfalutin molluscs flown for supper that night to a penthouse in Fort Worth, or to a simple log-cabin Away from It All in the Michigan woods, and know that Space and Time and even the development of putrescent bacteria stand still for dollars.

Like most normal people, I didn't have any M.F.K Fisher quotes memorized. So I selected one of her books at random---well, not random, the one that looked the least valuable---and flipped to a random page. Hoping I'd find something beautiful but decidedly unsexy, maybe about the smell of a mushroom farm or boxes of durian. Where my eyes landed: Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly. Thanks a lot, Mary Frances Kennedy.

IDID LIE in the meadow in the penetrating Provençal sun, and I did drink teas brewed from herbs picked that morning by my children, and I even lay in baths redolent of branches of fresh thyme . . . I let the hot sun and the meadow smells soothe me.

One thing that makes good corn bread difficult to get is regional prejudice. A man from Arkansas blanches, for example, at the thought of putting molasses on his dodger like a Missourian, and instead wants it buttered, or plain with a dish of black-eyed peas and sowbelly. And he wants it made of white meal, not yellow.

The thought of all the bewildered sturgeons and barracudas dodging depth bombs is a sad one, as is the end of that wistful little Japanese who wrote so tenderly of the first succulent taste of bonito in the spring.

Once the Vicomte de Mauduit revealed to somebody, or perhaps somebody revealed to the Vicomte de Mauduit, that eating is an art worthy to rank with the other methods by which man chooses to escape from reality.

In the deep sauté, she has made a stew: eggplant and tomatoes, onions and summer squash, a sort of ratatouille, tiella, samfina, pisto, there are as many names for it as countries, and she has stopped caring for all the names of things. She has made stew, and there are ripe peaches and cream for dessert, a few bottles of wine to choose from.