Customer Reviews

The Gastronomical Me

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Do the former critics not read Tolstoy because he was a Count? I was born into a working class neighborhood in New York, and this is one of my favorite books. Being a gourmand is an enlightened point of view, a matter of personal taste. In my opinion this is Ms. Fisher's very best book. The writing, and the personality, are exquisite. Especially in the chapter about her Father and a childhood journey, and the discovery of her crush on a fellow boarding school student (female) and her love of oysters, at the same time! Am I the only one who feels that I've shared all of those wonderful meals with her when I put down this book? Great to pack along when you are traveling, even if you've read it before!

Fisher recounts her life through her intimate association with food, growing up, travelling alone to meet her formidable uncle (knowing when to order consomé,) eating blue point oysters at a sorority banquet, falling in love with her first husband, living with him in 1930s Dijon at a boarding house where the landlady made ananas au kirsch, divorcing him, nursing another sick husband, being wooed while still married, travelling on cruise liners, watching the rise of the Nazis in Europe, and finally travelling to Mexico in her widowhood. Fisher reveals food as a civilizing force, revelling in its sensual pleasure while remaining starkly aware of a world going wrong. She writes real characters; it's journalism in a short story style, using that technique of fiction. With remarkably serene prose, delicate and sensuous, Fisher shows herself to be a singular woman who understands all too well the foibles of humanity and gracefully counteracts them with an almost pious devotion to the riches and possibilities of elegant cuisine.

First I should admit I'm not a usual fan of MFK Fisher. I find her rambling and neurotic style a bit unsettling. Even in this book, one minute she's a snob and the next minute ... well I don't want to give it away. Nonethless, I loved it through and through. Much less neurotic or rambling than her other stuff. Marvelous stories. Wonderful points of view coming through. I really loved the story about that cook in her childhood who ... okay, I won't tell. If you like autobiography, this is a good one.

"The baker had a fight with the chef soon after we left port, and the barber took over all the pastry making..."

Mary Frances had the perfect recipe for blending food writing and autobiography. Inimitable, and such a product of her era. Of all her books, this is the one most suitable for non-foodies. The Sensual Me might have been a better title. Food and drink (LOTS of drink) do get a lot of coverage, but that's only a slice of the book, not the whole pie. Along with the gastronomical, she offers up impressions visual, tactical, aural, and visceral.

The chapters are loosely connected snapshots of her life, roughly chronological but with large blocks of time unaccounted for.
She begins in 1912 at age four, with her first memory of an irresistible taste -- the foam on top of a kettle of strawberry jam. On through boarding school and her first live oyster, followed by a college gluttony phase, and then Dijon, France as a newlywed. Those early years in France brought the discovery that food was something to be relished and treated with reverence, and it set the course for her life as a gourmand and food writer. [A big chunk of this part of the book was lifted wholesale and plopped into a much later memoir, Long Ago in France, which I read a few months ago. Skip that one. This one's better.]

After they leave Dijon things get a little hazy, and I suspect some deliberate vagueness. Mary Frances started a new relationship while in the process of divorcing her husband. She never explains exactly how things developed between herself and Chexbres, the new man. They seem to have led a near-idyllic life in Switzerland until the coming war forced them to flee in the 1930s. She nursed him through a lingering illness until he died, and was on her own at the close of the book.

She ends the book in the early 1940s with a maddeningly cryptic story of a trip to Mexico featuring a mariachi musician called Juanito. She was only in her mid-thirties when this book was published in 1943, and I got the feeling from the way it ended that she might have been planning to pick up where she left off at some time far in the future.

I've tried to read some of M.F.K.'s other books which are devoted strictly to food. For me, they can't measure up to this one. Her gift for observation and her dry and often mordant wit are best suited to these first-person reminiscences.

Having read this years ago -- and many other of M.F.K. Fisher's works over the years -- I found The Gastronomical Me to be a bit of a mixed bag, and a bit of a disappointment upon re-reading it in 2009.

Mrs. Fisher's work is like a maddening jigsaw puzzle, with bits of stories glossed over in one book, only to be written about again and fleshed out in more detail in another. Here, for instance, just when we're getting interested in her life with Chexbres (Dillwyn Parrish) we turn the page and read he's died -- the entire thing and his reasons for committing suicide glossed over, and in fact much of their life together glossed over. Then the book ends with a sequence in Mexico, the entire Crying Game-like reveal of which is too small to justify so much space in the book (hence I found it a weak ending, and terribly tedious to trudge through).

While initially charmed with the descriptions of life as a young couple in Dijon and the historical details of what that life was like (communal bathrooms and showers for the village people, making due with little more than a gas ring for a kitchen, some of the characters met along the way, and so on), upon re-reading this and acknowledging these elements (often referred to as the "travel memoir" genre today), what's left beyond seems a collection of sometimes pointless reminiscences that are sometimes maddeningly compressed while at other times maddeningly drawn out (and usually in the exact opposite places you want them to be).

Overall, one senses that while making her living as a writer who essentially shared her reminiscences with the world for money, Mrs. Fisher always had a great reluctance to actually open up about herself and share the details of her life that would have made for a compelling (and cohesive) narrative; and yet at times in the book there are sections that can make you overlook that, and where her talent is clear.

All in all a mixed bag, worth a look, but in the end ... maddening.

What was charming as one of the early travel memoir-style authors at a time when few existed begs the question of whether Mrs. Fisher's writing will be at all relevant in years to come now that the genre has exploded, and everyone who dreams of buying a house in a foreign land deigns to finance their dream by writing their version of the same story. Frankly, while I enjoy the historical detail in Mrs. Fisher's work, I had a LOT more fun reading Annie Hawes' Extra Virgin and its's sequel, Ripe for the Picking.

For anyone who lives tactitilly, and for those who enjoy the taste and aroma of white truffles, as well as the ferrous flavor of blood after a good fist fight, MFK Fisher is a catalyst, who not only shares her experience of food and companionship, but triggers ones own memories , good or otherwise, of family, friends and important events. After reading "The Gastronomical Me", I appreciate the memories of youth and the fiestas on Guam, goat cheese and Rioja wine shared with a lover, and "suffering a wound with the pleasure of a scar."

This is a great read for food lovers and francophiles. It isnt really a travel book at all, but Fisher's highly personal and frequently witty account of the experiences that shaped her thinking and made her one of the most noted food writers of the 20th century.

Fisher was an American, and her adult life in France began in 1929 when she and her new husband moved to Dijon. One quickly appreciates how difficult her experiences as a newcomer must have been -- no stove, no refrigerator, no heating in winter. Some reviewers didn't like the way the book left gaps in her personal life story. That's true, but it isnt a standard biography, it's a literary sketch book.

If you're looking for a travel book, this isn't one. Stylistically, because this book was written 65 or 70 years ago, there is no comparison between it and much later accounts of spending a year in Provence, touring the wine country, or houseboating on the Seine.

Finally, one reviewer here thought the last part of the book about her time in Mexico seemed out of place. I agree, so if you get the book and read everything but the bit about the Mexican soujourn, you will have gotten to the heart of what I think she wanted us to know, anyway.

no one could have turned the culinary world into literature. she shames these narrow consumer-oriented marketeers like martha stewart. this is an artist and craftswoman at her best.

This is a terrific piece of history with lovely insights into food and love. She was naive, but eventually wise and always wonderful. A great read.

M.F.K. Fisher writes with elegant economy about food, and her style, which tends toward the vignette, is savory and inspriring as her subject. Set in short chapters and taking place mostly in France, her tales in The Gastronomical Me use the occasion of mealtime to explore what food serves, which is to say life or, rather, friendship, love, community, and the moments that define and nourish each. The Gastronomical Me concludes with a particularly striking and poignant moment from one of Fisher's trips to Mexico, in which a meal figures prominently in a touching romance that fails. Read this memoir because it is delectable, a bittersweet reminder that we all have gastronomical adventures and that however delicious the food, it is the company we share it with and the emotion it evokes that most powerfully endures.