M. F. K. FisherRezensionen

Clear-eyed evocation of a long-gone France. Read in Dijon, walked down her street, saw the same buildings, some 80 years on.

"L'huître mène une vie terrible, mais palpitante." Comment résister à un tel incipit ?

Kauffmann, Mark

This is a collection of essays written by Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher over the course of her life. They are personal introspection on the topics of her childhood, marriages, people she has known and places she has lived; all around the theme of food and enjoying food with those one loves.
If you have read her work before, you know that her use of language in writing is masterful and evocative. If you have not, you will find that reading her essays is an immersive and transformative experience.

All 5 books included are great treats for food lovers who are willing to allow other opinions to blossom. In one of the last sections of the very last book I was greatly amused to learn the salt free steak had been soaked in soy sauce, but I expect it was as delicious as stated. I learned much about oysters and about the region of Burgundy and the Lake Leman area of Switzerland and was filled with longing to have been there when. Best read when lightly hungry with bread and cheese - good bread and cheese - at hand and a glass of light wine would be welcome.½

Good, but I preferred "Consider the Oyster."

Bears many readings... I found myself comparing it to disaster prep tv shows and guidebooks, if they were written by thoroughly decent people who had actually experienced poverty and want and stayed decent.

An account by an author of growing up among Fiends in Whittier, California, in the early twentieth century.

Well, I swore off oysters a couple of decades ago after a reaction that I attributed to them. It was easy because I was just exploring them after refusing them while I grew up along the Chesapeake Bay and other places along the East Coast where they were popular. And mostly I ate them with immoderate amounts of cocktail sauce and horseradish, which I love much more than the mollusk itself. But after reading this book, I might have to give them one more try. In particular, I’m curious about Oyster Stew, a simple dish my Baltimore grandfather apparently loved and that gets a lot of love here from M. F. K. Fisher. She raves about the stew at the Doylestown Inn in particular, of which she says

“It was as good as he had said, the best in the world, and as all the other people had told me…mildly potent, quietly sustaining, warm as love and welcomer in winter.”

But I checked, and while the inn is still there in a present incarnation, the restaurant does not have it on the menu. And it’s a little far from my usual haunts when I’m “back home.” But I did find it still on the menu at one of my favorite places, Bertha’s Mussels in Baltimore’s Fell’s Point. So it’s there I’ll go when this pandemic allows. Despite my origins, I’m more than a bit seafood challenged, so it says a lot about how much I enjoyed this book and how much authority and fun Fisher brought to the subject that I’m contemplating oyster stew. And I’ll spare you my junior high school witticism about what I imagine Oyster Stew would be like aesthetically and texturally. And even with this detour to oysters, it won’t prevent me from my usual pilgrimage to eat as much Maryland Blue Crab as possible, logistically and financially speaking.
Quarter leather binding with mould-made papered boards

I love books about food and cooking for a myriad of reasons, though I haven’t read many fine press editions, mostly because not many exist. I’m the cook at my house and have always nosed about kitchens; my earliest cooking memories are about when I figured out you got to eat more cookies than your brothers if you were the one making them. My first job, coincidentally, was in the kitchen at McGarvey’s Saloon in downtown Annapolis, making crabcakes, crab balls, spiced shrimp, and crab soup for the locals, tourists, and midshipmen. That was in the ‘70s before they had the raw bar, and of course, oysters. I’m also back in the food industry with my on-line tea business (link in the menu above if you’re thirsty and curious).

Even as somewhat of a foodie, I was surprisingly engrossed in Fisher’s mixture of anecdote, science, and recipes delivered in an entertainingly frank and funny writing style. When debunking the myth of abstaining from oysters in months with “r” in them, she states:

"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."

And

"May and June and July, and of course August, are the months when the waters are warmest almost everywhere along the coasts, and it is remarkably convenient that oysters can only breed their spawn when the temperature is around seventy degrees and in months with no R’s in them. How easy it has been to build a catchy gastronomic rule on the farmers’ interest in better crops!"

But don’t worry, whether you say oyster or erster, there are ‘r’s in the name at least. And she also addresses the scapegoating of “bad” oysters as the cause of those “24 hour flu bugs” we often catch after a night of revelry:

"There would be no mistaking it, once on the tongue. When people say, “I must have eaten a bad oyster yesterday…I’ve felt a bit dauncy ever since!” you can be sure that they have eaten a great many other things, and have perhaps drunk over well, but that they certainly have not swallowed what is so easy to blame. If so, they would have known the unpleasant truth immediately, because it would taste so thoroughly nasty…and of course within six hours or less they would have been sick as hell, or even dead."

Her sampling of recipes is very interesting as well, especially to illustrate the difference when anyone on the shore could take advantage of the commons to go oystering for a free meal.

An old recipe begins: “Take 300 clean oysters and throw into a pot filled with nice butter…” One man she references, old Marshal Turgot, who knew almost too much about famines, was able in fatter days to eat a hundred oysters before breakfast just to whet his appetite.

Now I don’t know how old “old” is but at current L.A. restaurant market prices, 300 fresh oysters would be about $1400 not including the butter. Ouch! Just eat a dozen, save a little more and buy this book instead.

My favorite recipe was the incredibly complex Oysters à la Bazeine whose last and simplifying instructions were

"Or fry oysters and serve with ale"

Fisher’s description of the scurrilous chef who related the recipe to her is quite funny in its comparison of his descriptions of the dishes he’d made versus how certain men talk about their female conquests.

Like so many foods once you get into them, oysters apparently vary widely in their tastes and nuances according to their terroir, or whatever the watery equivalent of terroir is. If you like them, and explore them, she tells us we will find that

"…Then, it will taste like a Chincoteague or a blue point or a mild oyster from the Louisiana bayous or perhaps a metallic tiny Olympia from the Western coast. Or it may have a clear harsh flavor, straight from a stall in a wintry French town, a stall piled herringbone style with Portugaises and Garennes, green as death to the uninitiated and twice as toothsome. Or it may taste firm and yet fat, like the English oysters from around Plymouth."

I’m hoping for Chesapeakes, Rappahanocks, or Chincoteagues when I finally get that oyster stew at Bertha’s.

While I don’t recommend actually eating oysters anywhere near this book, Mark Sarigianis has thoughtfully and appropriated included an oyster knife tied to the spine of the box enclosing the box. Ostensibly, this is for helping to open the box but I didn’t find it necessary for that, so he must really mean for you to shuck some oysters. And knowing his waterman background, I’m sure he means just that. But either way it’s a nice design touch and works in lieu of a spine label to identify the book on your shelf.

The binding is a quarter-bound elegant white goat leather foil-stamped with a color reminiscent of the pearlescence of the inside of an oyster shell. And the sea-foam green St-Armand paper has a texture that visually reminds me of the oft-renewed paint on the old wooden skipjacks that used to ply their trade on the Chesapeake Bay. Maybe I’m “reaching” there.
Endpapers

The beautiful end-papers are by Martin Mazorra, whose whimsical illustrations throughout the book are a perfect foil for Fisher’s texts. Knowing her only through this book, I expect she would be highly pleased with the illustrations. The illustrations are printed in the same blue ink as the handset headline typeface used for the chapter headers, recipe titles, and page numbers, which sets them off nicely against the paper and the black ink of the text.

As always, paper is a huge part of my book reading experience, and the custom Saint Armand paper used here is delightful to the touch, takes the bite of the type nicely, has a beautiful deckle edge, and has a nice visual texture that seems to vary in different lights. The mill’s papers were also used on the boards for the binding and on the clam-shell box.

This is yet another quality production from the Press and one I’m sorry to send back after completing my review. With a bigger private press book wish list and “mental library” than budget, I’m always wondering if I’m letting one slip away that I should have acquired or just plain never heard of a book I would have acquired if I had know about it. In the same way that Fisher talks about the oysters her mother talked about from her nostalgic schoolday “midnight feasts”:

"And yet…yet those will always be, in my mental gastronomy, on my spiritual taste-buds, the most delicious oysters I never ate."

Alas for those out of budget books I’ll never own. But at least I got a “taste” of this one.

AVAILABILITY: Consider the Oyster is printed in an edition of 52 copies. As of the writing of this review, copies are still available directly from the Press website. If you are really hungry pick up a Ham on Rye to go with your oysters.

NOTE: The Whole Book Experience wishes to acknowledge the kindness and support of Mark Sarigianis in loaning me a review copy so that I can share this edition with others. I hope that this review might result in some sales for the Press and also provides some vicarious pleasure to those of us that might never own a copy.

For the review complete with photos, please go the my blog, The Whole Book Experience! Or just click
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Fisher is one of the best known and well loved food writers of the last century. When I told someone I was reading With Bold Knife and Fork her immediate reaction was a one word exclamation, "love!" And speaking of love, I loved, loved, loved some of the snarky phrases Fisher used. Here are a few, "...floating dunghill of lassitude, corruption, dirt, and whatever evil I have ever recognized as such" (p 171), "Stuffed with prejudices" (p 287) and "culinary monkey" (p 291). But, back to the "plot" of With Bold Knife and Fork. Fisher will walk you down a myriad of memory lanes with food and how it related to her childhood or the social norms of the day. It was amusing to think of a very young M.F.K. Fisher as a child hearing the siren's song and feeling the pull towards decadent food. There is a definite humor to her storytelling. I had to laugh when she talked about a pressure cooker and how "it should never be used by a person taking tranquilizers or alcohol for his own reasons, or one with a fever or the deep blues" (p 164). There is also a didactic nature to Fisher. I appreciated learning the difference between preserves, conserves, jellies, jams, honeys, and marmalades.

This was a good read, and likely a good introduction to this author, whom I have not read before. It was a collection of essays. Some of them were focused on food, as that is what she is known for, but some reached further afield. There were stories about surviving storms, meeting angels, being alone in a French town during the off season, her house, etc. It is quite good.

Five books collected in one volume. Strange and wonderful; the genesis of what we think of as food writing today. Intensely personal without being embarrassing; focused and precise; opinionated; generous; enlightening.

Why the hell didn't I read this 20 years ago?

Her prose is magic, especially when she writes about a sumptuous meal or wine ... or both. It’s interesting that we meet virtually no friends or family members — people don’t seem to interest her as much unless they’re along as trusted companions at dinner time. So often she’s alone in her reportage ... except for us: we’re right there with her.

I have loved several of M. F. K. Fisher's other books, (Consider the Oyster and How to Cook a Wolf for instance), and treated myself to the Folio Society edition of this classic. As usual, the food was wonderful, from Fisher's childhood realization that there was more to food than boring, unappetizing sustenance; to her first experience with The Oyster; to the delights of French food eaten in France and the excellence of simplicity. The autobiographical bits I found would have been slightly mystifying if I had not educated myself about Fisher's life and loves already. Most puzzling, I feel, is the fact that she wrote about living happily in a Swiss villa with her first husband, Al Fisher, and without any explanation at all, was suddenly writing about living in the same place with someone referred to only as "Chexbres" (her second husband, Dillwyn Parrish, as it turns out). Similarly, she brings in Parrish's illness, disability and death in such an offhanded fashion that rather than merely taking a back seat to the main point of her writing, these sketchy references distract the reader with unanswered questions. I realize this was not written as an entity, but composed of individual essays, so the lack of continuity and coherence shouldn't be considered a failing on the author's part. And overall, I really enjoyed this paean to glorious, simple, elegant, sensuous appreciation of food.

NA

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Such a collection of stories, ranging from the loving execution of a rabbit to a considered look at kitchens, and a still relevant look at the social status of vegetables (think of the commotion about Obama eating arugula).

I would be tempted to give an arm to write like she does -- about anything at all -- with such grace and humor and occasional acid precision.

Quite good.

Autobiographical anecdotes cover the years 1912-1941. Some are fanciful and some are extremely sad. The food detail is always amazing and interesting and I was tickled to note that airline food was bad in 1941 also...
(November 01, 2006)

I think I ran into a reference to this food writer when reading reviews of Garlic and Sapphires (which I haven't read yet) She has a large oeuvre of short essays about gastronomy that began in the 1930s. This was her first publication and it was charmingly dated, light and amusing. Snails, tangerines, subtleties, histories and personalities. (August 30, 2005)

This was originally written during WWII and re-edited in the 50s with a lot of extra commentary. The recipes are old fashioned and strange. I loved it when she complained about how disgusting processed cheese food is. Still is! So if you ever want to know how to prepare a calf's head... (January 28, 2006)

This small book of essays lives up to its name. It made me want to try oyster stew. (May 18, 2006)

I hadn't read any MFK for a while and though I don't always like memoirs, this one was a fascinating window into a decade of nearly a century ago. She describes her childhood memories well with interesting portraits of the people around her in 1910s Whittier, California. It's dated, but interesting.