Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon (Destinations) [Paperback]

M.F.K. Fisher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 1992 | Series: Destinations

In 1929, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher arrived in Dijon, the provincial capital of Burgundy and the gastronomical capital of France, there to be initiated into the ways of love and life. LONG AGO IN FRANCE is Fisher's exquisitely evocative, deliciously candid memoir of her three-year stay in Dijon. It is a delightful journey backward - in the grandest of company - into a voluptuous, genteel world that has vanished forever.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Fisher ( The Art of Eating ) arrived in Dijon, the ancient capital of Burgundy, in 1929, she and her new husband were both American postgraduate students, in love with each other, with France and with the people among whom the couple lived. During the Fishers' three-year stay in Dijon, the author absorbed the essence of the French character and the joys of Dijonnais cookery; her exquisite perceptions and eloquent evocations of those years appeal with more than nostalgia. Fisher's memories arouse envy of the wonderful feasts that even the poor students could afford, appreciation for her tough-tender Burgundian neighbors and aching empathy with the innocent young lovers.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Fisher spent three years in Dijon in the halcyon days between the wars. This is a brief and wholly delightful memoir of that time, an account rich with wines, meals, and crisply etched portraits. Fisher has often been categorized as a food writer--as if cooking and eating were activities somehow apart from life. Here she writes just as exuberantly of her monstrously vital landlady as she does of disintegrating snipe roasted on "toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards." Jan Morris reminds us in her introduction that W.H. Auden called Fisher's prose the best in America, a verdict this volume comes close to confirming. Highly recommended.
- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (February 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671755145
• ISBN-13: 978-0671755140
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #632,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Reader's Feast, November 15, 2002

By 

M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon (Destinations) (Paperback)

Between 1929 and 1932, young M.F.K. Fisher (later a famed chef and memoirist) and her husband Al Fisher lived and studied in Dijon, France. Here she discovered the people and the food of Burgundy, and she describes both with warmth, sensuality, and humor (without becoming overly sentimental: "It was there, I now understand, that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be."

Her writing is crisp and evocative. "He took the apple slices from the bowl one by one, almost faster than we could see, and shook off the wine and laid them in a great, beautiful whorl, from the outside to the center, as perfect as a snail shell. We said not a word. The music trembled in the room." Fisher helps the reader discover the beauty of our appetites. She writes of an old soldier who offers her chocolate: "The chocolate broke at first like gravel into many separate, disagreeable bits...Then they grew soft, and melted voluptuously." Then a doctor offers her bread, admonishing, "Never eat chocolate without bread, young lady!" There is a delicious denouement: "...in two minutes my mouth was full of fresh bread, and melting chocolate, and as we sat gingerly, the three of us, on the frozen hill...we peered shyly and silently at each other and chewed at one of the most satisfying things I have ever eaten..."

This was a time of great importance for Fisher, and she generously shares her experiences in a richly satisfying book. It's a small treasure.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best from America's 1st literary foodie, July 23, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon (Destinations) (Paperback)

MFK Fisher holds a special place in the hearts of all `foodie' Americans. She was perhaps the 1st person to see the sense of writing food-based literary books and articles, and of course it's now a genre unto itself. But few have rivaled her beautiful prose, and I recall reading that she once said she considered it a day well-lived if she'd managed to compose one perfect sentence. To consider her just a food writer is to do her an injustice; she is a writer, first and foremost, who happens, sometimes, to write about food.
Long Ago in France is a memoir of her years in Dijon in the 30s, a book full of rich wine, rich ideas, character portraits filled with rich detail. It's about Life, a life filled with joy, experience, food, travel, and memorable people. This book is a paean to a lost era.
Highest recommendation.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent - 'the art of eating' & how to live one's life, July 9, 2000

By 

Susannah Indigo - See all my reviews

This review is from: Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon (Destinations) (Paperback)

MFK Fisher wrote like an angel about food and wine and people and conversation and just about everything else that could possibly matter. She lived an enviable life, always at ease whether she was in Dijon or Switzerland or Sonoma Valley, and always writing brilliantly about how to live one's life fully. "Long Ago in France" tells of her discovery of voluptuous living in Dijon in the 1930's; "As They Were" is a collection of essays from her travels that rivals Paul Theroux for vivid evocations of place; "With Bold Knife and Fork" is a collection of some 140 recipes all wrapped up in lovely chapters with titles like "Some Ways to Laugh" and "The Trouble With Tripe." (Reviewed in detail by Susannah Indigo for Clean Sheets Magazine ...)