communion of more
than our bodies when bread is
broken and wine drunk
In the foreword to The Gastronomical Me Mrs. Fisher explains her purpose: “It seems to me,” she says, “that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other. . .
There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.
And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?”
From Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher by M. F. K Fisher, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Miss, 1992.
According to Wikipedia, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher Parrish Friede (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992), writing as M.F.K. Fisher, was an American food writer. She was a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. Over her lifetime she wrote 27 books, among them Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943) and a translation of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the “arts of life” and explored this in her writing. W. H. Auden once remarked, “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”
I don’t remember who but somewhere I read the writing of someone who wrote along the lines that if you enjoy eating, you should enjoy reading about eating.
If you enjoy reading about eating you will enjoy reading MFK Fisher.
But, like reading travel books about places I will never see, Ms. Fisher writes of meals and foods I will never eat .
But I can serve good food and good wine and enjoy the communion she writes of in the here and now.
No Haiku For You 