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Text ©1992 by Sam Waring. All rights reserved.
Created: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 at 02:48:39 UTC
Some of you might have noticed that M. F. K. Fisher died last June. If you did, I hope you realized and were saddened by the lost of one of the most elegant voices in American gastronomy (the study of food and eating).
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher may have been one of the most important people in American food during this century. Food was her principal subject as a writer. She wrote about it wittily, literately, urbanely, and clearly. She didn’t waste time befogging food and its cooking with buzz-phrases and with creating trends—unless you think championing good food well made to be trend-setting. She had little use for the sort of people today called “foodies;” fads in cooking and novelty for its own sake repulsed her. I think that she considered it, after a fashion, to be a torture of the food.
Fortunately, her books are still in print. Her first five books (Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet of Gourmets) can be bought either separately or collected in one volume, called The Art of Eating. They are, it may be, even more entertaining today than when they were written, and are still more than worth reading.
I love to sit down and read in The Gastronomical Me of her adventures in France in a time when lobster was almost as cheap as chicken, when champagne was an ordinary wine, meant to be drunk like the jug wines of today rather than sipped reverently, when Europe was caught up in the exhausted giddiness between the wars. Then, as an antidote, I turn to How to Cook a Wolf, written during wartime rationing, and read of how to make a tasty, balanced meal from what lesser things were left off the OPC ration list or what may be found in the garden, as a sort of digestive to balance the richness that went before.
In her honor, I have picked out a recipe from How to Cook a Wolf (1942, revised 1951). It’s one I could stand to make during the summer heat in my own un-air conditioned kitchen.
| 2 tablespoons fresh chives | 2 tomatoes, peeled and seeded |
| 2 tablespoons fresh chervil | 4 ounces olive oil or walnut oil |
| 2 tablespoons fresh parsley | Juice of one lemon |
| 2 tablespoons fresh basil | 1 mild onion, sliced paper-thin |
| 2 tablespoons fresh marjoram | 1 cup diced cucumbers |
| 1 garlic clove | Salt and pepper to taste |
| 1 bell pepper | ½ cup bread crumbs |
Chop the herbs and mash thoroughly with the garlic, pepper, and tomatoes, adding the oil very slowly, and the lemon juice. Add about three glasses of cold water [I still say this is the correct liquid. But often I use good meat or fish stock.] or as much as you wish. Put in the onion and the cucumber, season, sprinkle with bread crumbs, and ice for at least four hours before serving.
The herbs may be adjusted as you like, more or less of one thing or another, but the total volume of herbs should make a generous handful.
first ran: September 1992
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Text ©1992 by Sam Waring. All rights reserved.