The Gastronomical Me

classic of food writing that redefined the genre, The Gastronomical Me is a memoir of travel, love and loss, but above all hunger. In 1929 M.F.K. Fisher left America for France, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time. It inspired a prolific career as a food and travel writer. In The Gastronomical Me Fisher traces the development of her appetite, from her childhood in America to her arrival in Europe, where she embarked on a whole new way of eating, drinking, and living. She recounts unforgettable meals shared with an assortment of eccentric characters, set against a backdrop of mounting pre-war tensions. Here are meals as seductions, educations, diplomacies, and communions, in settings as diverse as a bedsit above a patisserie, a Swiss farm, and cruise liners across oceans. In prose convivial and confiding, Fisher illustrates the art of ordering well, the pleasures of dining alone, and how to eat so you always find nourishment, in both head and heart.

Christened by John Updike as the "poet of the appetites," M.F.K. Fisher changed the way Americans understood the art of living. But she was also a master mythologizer. This multifaceted portrayal is no less memorable than the personae Fisher crafted for herself.

This contains the author's five most popular books - "Consider the Oyster", "The Gastronomical Me", "Serve it Forth", "How to Cook a Wolf", and "An Alphabet for Gourmets". The volume contains an array of thoughts, memories and recipes.

M. F. K. Fisher, whom John Updike has called our “poet of the appetites,” here pays tribute to that most enigmatic of ocean creatures, the oyster. As she tells of oysters found in stews, in soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared à la Rockefeller or au naturel—and of the pearls sometimes found therein—Fisher describes her mother’s joy at encountering oyster loaf in a girls’ dorm in the 1890s, recalls her own initiation into the “strange cold succulence” of raw oysters as a young woman in Marseille and Dijon, and explores both the bivalve’s famed aphrodisiac properties and its equally notorious gut-wrenching powers. Plumbing the “dreadful but exciting” life of the oyster, Fisher invites readers to share in the comforts and delights that this delicate edible evokes, and enchants us along the way with her characteristically wise and witty prose. “Consider the Oyster marks M. F. K. Fisher’s emergence as a storyteller so confident that she can maneuver a reader through a narrative in which recipes enhance instead of interrupt the reader’s attention to the tales. She approaches a recipe as a published dream or wish, and the stories she tells here...are also stories of the pleasures and disillusionments of dreams fulfilled.”—PATRICIA STORACE, The New York Review of Books “Since Lewis Carroll no one had written charmingly about that indecisively sexed bivalve until Mrs. Fisher came along with her Consider the Oyster. Surely this will stand for some time as the most judicious treatment in English.”—CLIFFTON FADIMAN

Like the savory, simple dishes she favored, M. F. K. Fisher's writing was often "short, stylish, concentrated in flavor, and varied in form," writes Joan Reardon in her introduction to this eclectic, lively collection. Magazine writing launched and helped to sustain Fisher's long, illustrious career and in these fifty–seven pieces we experience again the inimitable voice of the woman widely known to have elevated food writing to a literary art. A Stew or a Story covers five decades of Fisher's writing for such notable and diverse publications as Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Ladies Home Journal, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vogue. But collected here also are articles nearly impossible to find from lesser–known, more ephemeral magazines. Essays on people, places, and of course food, mix here with delightful fiction to become a delectable feast.

“Eagle, a chef and food writer, uses a nine-dish lunch as the occasion to ruminate about cooking, and life” (New York Times Book Review). First, Catch is a cookbook without recipes, an invitation to journey through the digressive mind of a chef at work, and a hymn to a singular nine-dish festive spring lunch. In Eagle’s kitchen, open shelves reveal colorful jars of vegetables pickling over the course of months, and a soffritto of onions, celery, and carrots cook slowly under a watchful gaze in a skillet heavy enough to double as a murder weapon. Eagle has both the sharp eye of a food scientist as he tries to identify the seventeen unique steps of boiling water, as well as of that of a roving food historian as he ponders what the spice silphium tasted like to the Romans, who over-ate it to worldwide extinction. He is a tour guide to the world of ingredients, a culinary explorer, and thoughtful commentator on the ways immigration, technology, and fashion has changed the way we eat. He is also a food philosopher, asking the question: at what stage does cooking begin? Is it when we begin to apply heat or acid to ingredients? Is it when we gather and arrange what we will cook—and perhaps start to salivate? Or does it start even earlier, in the wandering late-morning thought, “What should I eat for lunch?” Irreverent and charming, yet also illuminating and brilliantly researched, First, Catch encourages us to slow down and focus on what it means to cook. With this astonishing and beautiful book, Thom Eagle joins the ranks of great food writers like M.F.K. Fisher, Alice Waters, and Samin Nosrat in offering us inspiration to savor, both in and out of the kitchen. Winner of the Fortnum and Mason’s Debut Food Book Award Shortlisted for the 2018 Andre Simon Food & Drink Book of the Year BBC Radio 4 Food Programme Best Foodbooks of 2018 Times Best Food Books of 2018 Financial Times Summer Food Books of 2018 “A contemplation of cooking and eating, a return to the great tradition of food writing inspired by M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me . . . Eagle writes with a wit and sharpness that can turn a chapter on fermenting pickles into a riff on death and decay while still making it seem like something you would like to put in your mouth.” —Mark Haskell Smith, Los Angeles Times “In two dozen short chapters linked like little sausages, he serves up a bounty of fresh, often tart opinions about food and cooking . . . Eagle is a natural teacher; his enthusiasm and broad view of food preparation is both instructive and inspiring . . . Eagle’s prose, while conversational in tone, is as crafted and layered as his cuisine. Never bland, it is also brightly seasoned with strong opinions . . . Rare among food writing, this book is bound to change the way you think about your next meal.” —Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor

First published in 1942 when wartime shortages were at their worst, the ever-popular How to Cook a Wolf, continues to surmount the unavoidable problem of cooking within a budget. Here is a wealth of practical and delicious ways to keep the wolf from the door.