table talk / By Simona Carini

Wolves During Wartime

M.F.K. Fisher on food, security and love

(July 3, 2008) 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 the others do?

… 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.

GALLERY >

— M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me 1943

How is this as an appetizer? Having to choose a morsel that would give you a sense of the meal to come, I think this is a fine one.

Mary Frances Kennedy was born on July 3, 1908. The 100th anniversary of her birth is the immediate cause of this article, the excuse to talk about a deeply human thinker and brilliant writer. If you have never read anything she wrote, I invite you to do it.

I could fill this column with notes about M.F.K. Fisher’s life, her formative years (she grew up in Whittier, Calif.), her husbands (the first of whom was Al Fisher) and daughters, her travels, her house in Glen Ellen (“Last House,” where she lived from the early ’70s until her death in 1992, writing, reading, cooking and entertaining visitors). However, I would rather devote the allotted space to discussion of her beautiful writing.

Of the books penned by Ms. Fisher that I have so far read, my favorite is How to Cook a Wolf, which, I believe, illustrates well the qualities that make her writing enchanting. After spending three years in France with her first husband, she came back to the United States in 1932. Five years later she published her first book, Serve it Forth. “Now I am going to write a book. It will be about eating and about what to eat and about people who eat,” she writes in the first chapter, “To Begin.” In 1941 came Consider the Oyster, a fine read, regardless of your personal relationship with the mollusk of the title: “An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.” That book was followed, in 1942, by How to Cook a Wolf, described by James Beard as “her brilliant approach to wartime economies for the table.”

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