Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Gastronomical Me
    Unavailable
    The Gastronomical Me
    Unavailable
    The Gastronomical Me
    Ebook315 pages4 hours

    The Gastronomical Me

    By M.F.K. Fisher and Bee Wilson

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    ‘Her writing makes your mouth water.’ -- Financial Times

    ‘Unique among the classics of gastronomic writing . . . a book about adult loss, survival, and love.’ -- New York Review of Books

    A 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.

    ‘Many authors whisper, as though to a diary, or chat, as though to a friend, but Fisher communicates with the heady directness of a lover.’ -- Bee Wilson, author of The Way We Eat Now

    ‘She is not just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop.’ -- Rachel Cooke, Observer

    ‘The greatest food writer who has ever lived.’ -- Simon Schama

    ‘Poet of the appetites.’ -- John Updike

    ‘I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.’ -- W.H. Auden

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDaunt Books
    Release dateMay 25, 2017
    ISBN9781911547006
    Unavailable
    The Gastronomical Me
    Author

    M.F.K. Fisher

    Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908–1992) was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. At the age of twenty-one she moved from America to France, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time, and it inspired a prolific writing career centred on a new way of thinking about food and travel. She was a regular contributor to the New Yorker, Gourmet and Vogue, and is the author of twenty-seven books of food, memoir and travel, many of which have become classics. These include Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me.

    Read more from M.F.K. Fisher

    Related to The Gastronomical Me

    Related ebooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Cooking with Eileen Chang

      Jun 22, 2018

      Cooking with Eileen Chang
      7 min read

    • Article

      Laila Gohar

      Aug 2, 2020

      1. AN EVERLASTING MEAL: COOKING WITH ECONOMY AND GRACE (SIMON & SCHUSTER, 2012) BY TAMAR ADLER “This is definitely in my top three books. Tamar Adler is a great writer. I also really identify with her cooking approach, and especially her views on fo

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Profound Comfort Of Kimchi

      Oct 5, 2020

      Several years ago on a drive home with my mom, my physical being and existence came into question when an unsecured jar of tongbaechu kimchi in the back of her 1995 Chevrolet Astro van was jostled loose by an abrupt stop. The gallon-sized glass jar,

      8 min read

    • Article

      Sabrina's Food

      Aug 26, 2022

      Sabrina's Food
      11 min read

    • Article

      Going Home With Ocean Vuong

      Jun 4, 2019

      Going Home With Ocean Vuong
      13 min read

    • Article

      She Was Not a Food Writer

      Oct 4, 2022

      She Was Not a Food Writer
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Flavors Of France

      May 8, 2020

      The Flavors Of France
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Flavors Of France

      May 8, 2020

      The Flavors Of France
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Provocation of a Good Meal

      Dec 16, 2019

      The Provocation of a Good Meal
      5 min read

    • Article

      Lesley Pearse

      Jun 4, 2020

      Lesley Pearse
      4 min read

    • Article

      Mildew On The Magnolias

      Nov 3, 2021

      I AM shuffling books in my bookstore when a customer comes up to me. Peering over her mask, she says: ‘I guess you haven’t been back home during all this. Do you get homesick?’ It’s a friendly question that deserves a friendly answer. I’ve learned th

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Forgotten Form

      Oct 10, 2018

      CRISTEN HEMINGWAY JAYNES is an author and a photographer based in London. She is the former editor of chum literary magazine and is the great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway. Her story collection, The Smallest of Entryways, was published by Church

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Priest Walks Into a Bar

      Jan 18, 2019

      I READ A LOT about junkies. I read a lot about drunks and tweakers and stoners and cokeheads. It’s part of my job because I teach creative writing in jails, prisons, and drug treatment centers. The writers I work with often want to document their liv

      11 min read

    • Article

      Chris Bohjalian

      Apr 12, 2021

      Chris Bohjalian
      12 min read

    • Article

      What We’re Reading This Summer

      Jun 28, 2019

      Atlantic staffers pick 14 books to spend time with this season, including Freshwater, Republic of Spin, Killing and Dying, and more.

      10 min read

    • Article

      Reading Corner

      Aug 6, 2023

      This is Sheila O’Flanagan’s first foray into historical fiction and it was inspired by stories her grandmother told her. The author brings her powerful storytelling skills to a particularly turbulent time in Irish history. It is a dramatic, sweeping

      3 min read

    Reviews for The Gastronomical Me

    4/5

    90 ratings11 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This is a series of essays written about Fisher's life between 1912 and 1941. She covers a wide range of topics; from the first time food became significant to her as a teenager in boarding school to her adventures as a newly married wife living in France. When she said goodbye to her Californian-American palate and encountered French cuisine it was like having an epiphany for Fisher. Her ears (and taste buds) were open to a whole new way of experiencing food and drink. Sprinkled throughout the stories are glimpses of Fisher's personal history. Her relationship with sister Norah and brother David, the demise of her first marriage with Al, the slow death of her second love, Chexbres, and her awakening to a different culture in Mexico.
    • 5/5
      For many years this was "my favorite book" whenever I had to come up with one. It is still one of my favorites. This is memoir at its finest; if a description of something like cauliflower and cream casserole can make your mouth water, you know the author has talent. I always recommend this title for people who are in the midst of a slow food/local food/the-horrors-of-fast-food reading jag, and who isn't these days? I think of MFK Fisher every time I sit down at a restaurant table by myself.
    • 5/5
      good memoir, not telling us everything but that's what the internet is for."fisher builds a life from meals"
    • 5/5
      Food writing at its best. This is a memoir told through food. Much is left out, but the story is made more beautiful, more gossamer and mysterious, as a result. MFK Fisher remains a mystery, but her love (and true understanding) of food is not.
    • 4/5
      M.F.K. Fisher was perhaps the 20th century's best food writer, although food, per se, was not her subject; her subject was all the things that happen while you are getting your food, eating it, and thinking about it: life, in other words. Although an amazingly good prose stylist, but I find that she hid as much as she revealed in her seemingly-personal accounts. I had to do a little research to get the basic facts about her life just to keep myself oriented. I found I could read this book best if I took it in small mouthfuls, like extra-rich ice cream. Could anyone have lived a life like hers? Maybe, maybe not--but read her anyway.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to love MFK Fisher's The Gastronomical Me. Fisher is touted as the doyenne of modern food writing, I love food writing, and have never read anything by Fisher. The Gastronomical Me is an autobiographical look at her early life and her discovery of French food. She is in and out of France in the years leading up to WWII, which lends an additional layer of interest to her stories. But. But. As I read, I found I really didn't like her - I didn't like her at all. She comes off as smug, somewhat arrogant, laughing at herself but especially others about their food gaffes and personal foibles. There was little of the delight in learning about food that one finds in Julia Child or even Anthony Bourdain. I made it about two-thirds through the book and just couldn't continue. When the next book in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series came in at the library, I gladly abandoned The Gastronomical Me in favor of a rollicking sea adventure.
    • 5/5
      This is close to a century old, and it did not strike me as at all dated! I was completely entranced by Fisher's story, and even more by her writing. I'm so tempted to read about her, but I think I want to read everything she's written before I do that. Then I can go back, and re-read them all again!
    • 4/5
      Good writing. Glad I read her.
    • 5/5
      This is the way food writing should be done. In her careful, spare, elegant way, Fisher uses food to write about everything else that means anything in life: love, war, death, and second chances. One of the most beautiful works of modern English.
    • 5/5
      Really great book. The first few chapters and the last few, especially, were absolutely wonderful. Which is not to say that it drug in the middle—it really didn't. If it had all been as good as those chapters on either end, it would have been a nearly perfect book. Still, I loved it as it was.

      The book is a memoir, told almost exclusively through descriptions of food, eating, etc. In case you're not familiar with MFK Fisher, that's the kind of writing she does—it's about food, but it's about so much more. I guess you could say (and in fact she does say at several points) that she's speaking also about metaphorical hunger. True enough, but still it doesn't at all capture the work. She's talking about what it means to grow up, to become yourself, to fall in love and back out again (and back one more time), to be a woman, to travel, to survive a spouse, even what it means to live in a world on the brink of war (the memoir covers her life from 1912–1941). And other things besides, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. And along the way, she has plenty to say about the food.

      I loved the book. I've also found myself quite a bit hungrier as I've read it, of course. :) That part's not going to go away. I read it for an online book group, alongside Ruth Reichl's Garlic & Sapphires (which I also enjoyed, though not as much as this one).
    • 4/5
      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.