30 DAYS OPEN PURCHASEM.F.K. Fisher wrote about food for more than 50 years and is generally regarded as one of America's finest prose writers, an opinion shared by W.H. Auden, among others. What is unusual is that she is not really writing about food at all. She writes about hunger in a broader sense, about appetite, longing, loneliness and love, and food is the way in.
This volume brings together her five central books from 1937 to 1949: Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me and An Alphabet for Gourmets. Her debut was published under her initials alone because the publisher did not want readers to know that the author was a woman.
She lived in Dijon as a young woman, and that is where her writing began. She also translated Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste into English in 1949, which says something about where she placed herself within the tradition.
There are hardly any recipes here. Nor is that why it is worth reading.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 784
Language: English
First published: 1954
