The Gastronomical Me

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.

The fact that she, the most wonderful girl in the whole school, and the most intelligent, and the most revered, should ask me to dance when she knew very well that I was only a Sophomore, was so overwhelming that it made even the dreamlike reality that she had called me Kennedy, instead of Mary Frances, seem unimportant.

When I was eleven we all moved to the country. We had a cow, and chickens, and partly because of that and partly because Grandmother had died we began to eat more richly.

We had chocolate puddings with chopped nuts and heavy cream. The thought of them makes me dizzy now, but we loved them. And lots of butter: I was good at churning, and learnt very well how to sterilise the wooden churn and make the butter and then roll it into fine balls and press it into moulds. I liked that. And we could have mayonnaise, rich yellow with eggs and oil, instead of the boiled dressing Grandmother’s despotic bowels and stern palate called for.

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.

‘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!’

‘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.’

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.

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?

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.

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’.