FOOD MAKES THE WOMAN
Sheridan, Mary
Food Makes The Woman THE GASTRONOMICAL ME, by M. F. K. Fisher. Duell, Sloan and Pearce. $2.5.0. Reviewed by Mary Sheridan TO MARY FRANCES KENNEDY FISHER, food is complex nourishment—nourishment...
...Fisher and her book are highly sophisticated fare...
...And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love...
...It does not have the gayety of Serve It Forth, or Consider the Oyster, or How to Cook a Wolf...
...It is more worldly...
...So, as she indicates, she writes about food in a unique autobiography, and through her gastronomical experiences writes a little about war and a lot about love...
...Reviewed by Mary Sheridan TO MARY FRANCES KENNEDY FISHER, food is complex nourishment—nourishment for the human spirit as well as the body: "We must eat," she writes in the introduction to this unusual book...
...It is an unusual book for specialized palates, and a book written in exquisite and limpid prose...
...If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment...
...There is a comm-nion of more than our bodies . when bread is broken and wine drunk...
...Mrs...
...and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity...
...From her first sensuous awareness of food in her California girlhood, she takes the measure of her powers in terms of her first oyster, of the food—and liquids—she has partaken in innumerable ocean crossings, in her early married years in France, in Switzerland and Italy after her divorce, and in Baltimore and California and Mexico after Chexbres' death...
...I was repelled by the smug self-esteem which she reveals in describing her conduct, alone, in a plane or a restaurant or a hotel...
...Yet that same sensory acuteness makes her able to impart, in a few oblique scenes on shipboard, in a French cafe, and on an Italian train, the decadence of pre-war Europe...
...She has nourished her life, as well as her body, on too exclusive a diet of sensual satisfactions...
...There is sadness and weariness in The Gastronomical Me...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 51
