Culinary-Literary Solutions

February 2008

Elegant phrases from the culinary writer MFK Fisher often open the pages of cookbooks. This is the only place I had encountered her writing until a few short weeks ago, when my mother-in-law passed me a copy of The Gastronomical Me. Immediately, I was transported. Perhaps regrettably, Fischer’s lyricism had me considering giving up all efforts made with a pen (or keyboard) as her way with language seemed so effortless and perfect. When you stumble on a writer who seems to say everything you wish you had, it is both exhilarating and grossly disheartening.

MFK Fisher was raised in southern California, but her culinary awakening came when she accompanied her first husband to Dijon in 1929. There she discovered the cuisine of Lyon, and in it her muse. But plenty of people can write about a particularly splendid meal or two in an evocative way. What Fisher brought to the page was a lovely certainty that when you were talking about food, you were speaking of so much more. Indeed, the most important matters of life were at hand at the table. She wrote an answer to the question “Why do you write about food?” in the foreword of Gastronomical Me: “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.”

Fisher remained in France and later Switzerland during the interwar period, right up until 1939, when she and her second husband had to pack up their home and flee the coming catastrophe. She injects into these tightly historic years a sense of quiet grandeur. And she also takes the time to describe her gustatory adventures: the slight curl of a fresher than fresh filet of sole, cooked in hot brown butter, cuts of meat infused in herbs and napped by cream, round buttery cakes and an accompanying glass of sherry. It’s the kind of writing that makes you hungry for food as well as new horizons. I found I digested the book a bit better, a bit more sympathetically, if I had a piece of good bread, a smear of goat cheese and a glass of red wine by my side.

All of this sensual rememberance aside, as MFK packed up and fled Europe, a food revolution was brewing in the chemistry labs of the West. Part of what won the war for the Allies was a great leap forward in petrochemical technologies. The laboratory synthesis that made destruction on a mass scale possible for the first time in history also gave us manufactured “nutrients” to boost the growth and production of plants. Previously the nitrogen and potassium inputs employed by farmers in the US came from mined potash, or guano imported from Chile. The ability to produce these substances as a byproduct of petroleum reduced their cost enormously, and created a revolution for intensified inputs for farms. In short, the agro-industrial era was born. The argument of “green revolution” supporters was that with chemical enhancements we were suddenly supposed to be able to produce enough food to nourish the world. Hunger and famine would be eradicated and plenty would abound. Even the most distracted observer of the last 60 years of history can see that this did not transpire. While currently one fifth of the world’s population is chronically undernourished, another fifth is chronically overnourished. Disparities are still the order of the day. And in the meantime, the byproduct of our nitrogen fueled system of food production is a dangerously compromised earth and deeply toxified streams of health.

There is a lot of bleak news coming out about how we are not addressing our current food crisis. We’ve recently had a farm bill that isn’t full of reform, a massive recall of meat from downer cows (much of which went to school lunch programs) and recalls of alfalfa sprouts infected with e-coli. These and other concerns are starting to feel routine rather than calamitous. So perhaps, by reading MFK, I sought to return to the halcyon days when producing food could be revered and certainly less fraught. But is this sort of culinary-literary escapism really so unwarranted or unrealistic? Whenever I feel fed up with my observations of our current system, I remind myself that agriculture has been a human practice for ten thousand years. And industrial agriculture has been the order of the day for only about sixty. See? Isn’t that refreshing? So perhaps a deep, spiritual reinvestment in the way things used to be done is not so radical, but rather is the ultimate conservatism.

Given that I can neither travel through time nor space to the France where Fischer really learned to eat anytime soon, I would like to remind readers that experiences like hers can be had at Craigie Street Bistrot. Chef Tony Maws brings the intensity and craft of bistrot moderne to the American palate. In Amanda Dates’ Thanksgiving post about the kitchens in which he tested his mettle, we are reminded of this tremendously rich tradition. Lovelier still then, that it is on offer both in spirit and in presentation, on a plate in Cambridge.