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Summary: Such a tasty book!
Review: "Raspberries Romanoff:" Chill the fresh raspberries, and then whip some cream with sugar and kirsch. Stir with the raspberries and chill again. Serve it forth in tall crystal flutes.Now, isn't that easy? Isn't that tasty, just reading about it? And, most important, while reading this recipe you instinctively realize that the freshness of the raspberries and the cream are of critical importance. There are many other joys in this compendium of M. F. K. Fisher's best five books. Another one which rests in my memory is "The Best Peas I Have Ever Eaten" -- literally an ode of love to fresh green peas, plucked from the garden, shucked on the spot, and instantly cooked. But it is also an ode of love to her family and friends who helped her make this feast. In short, this is a book which enhances life, which makes life more worth living, and which should be at least looked at by anyone who loves good writing and good information about life. Highest possible recommendation!
Rating:
Summary: Such a tasty book!
Review: "Raspberries Romanoff:" Chill the fresh raspberries, and then whip some cream with sugar and kirsch. Stir with the raspberries and chill again. Serve it forth in tall crystal flutes. Now, isn't that easy? Isn't that tasty, just reading about it? And, most important, while reading this recipe you instinctively realize that the freshness of the raspberries and the cream are of critical importance. There are many other joys in this compendium of M. F. K. Fisher's best five books. Another one which rests in my memory is "The Best Peas I Have Ever Eaten" -- literally an ode of love to fresh green peas, plucked from the garden, shucked on the spot, and instantly cooked. But it is also an ode of love to her family and friends who helped her make this feast. In short, this is a book which enhances life, which makes life more worth living, and which should be at least looked at by anyone who loves good writing and good information about life. Highest possible recommendation!
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Summary: An essential volume for anyone with an interest in food.
Review: "The Art of Eating" is actually an omnibus edition of five works by MFK Fischer, originally published separately. These are "Consider the Oyster," "Serve It Forth," "How to Cook a Wolf," "The Gastronomical Me" and "An Alphabet for Gourmets." The book succeeds marvelously on different levels: first, Fischer was an exceedingly knowledgable and experienced cook and eater. As such, her essays are good reads just for the wealth of information they contain on all facets of cookery and dining. Second, and more importantly, she was a woman of enormous humanity; a quality that informs each of the works in this volume. Her ability to crystalize in words the underlying cultural and emotional associations of food, cooking and the dining experience is probably unmatched by any other food writer since. Again and again, she manages quite deftly to use simple anecdotes from her life to illustrate the deep attachments we all have with the food we eat and how we eat it. Her delivery of these insights is seldom heavy-handed; often, she manages to delight the reader by use of unexpected but well-grounded conclusions. One would need to explore the culinary writings of poets and novelists to find her equal on the subject.
There are drawbacks to the work, however. By gathering five different books into a single volume, a certain amount of repetition of some of her material becomes apparent. This is, of course, more the fault of the editor than of Fischer herself. No, Fischer's faults lie perhaps in a certain over-emphasis on the "sensitivity" of herself and her loved ones as contrasted with the rest of us Ya-hoos, and that she wrote before the emergence of American regional cuisine as a force in cookery, so that she sometimes denigrates things we feel more kindly toward today.
In all, though, The Art of Eating is a book that no serious cook or diner can afford to do without
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Summary: Yum
Review: A delicious and lyrical book. Best read with a piece of good cheese and some wine, or perhaps some good ripe fruit close to hand.
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Summary: Best culinary book ever!
Review: A wonderful book! Unappreciated. Mary Francis shows us that eating is life and life is eating, or at least, the good life is good eating. One of American's best writers, the now deceased MFK Fisher deserves to be read in her finest. This book collects 3 of her previous collections of essays, many originally published in the New Yorker. If you don't like this book, you don't like good eating and good writing about it.
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Summary: Top Shelf
Review: For anyone who absolutely loves food; the preparation, the consumption, the discription...... this book is a must. You can feel the joy she derives from her craft, both with food and with words. This book is such a wonderful collection of her best that it is a real treat to pick it up at anytime and enjoy a few pages. It has longer pieces that will just captivate you as well as short quick reads. Like a delicious meal this book is to be savoured. This is a timeless piece of work that continues to bring a smile to all.
Rating:
Summary: Top Shelf
Review: For anyone who absolutely loves food; the preparation, the consumption, the discription...... this book is a must. You can feel the joy she derives from her craft, both with food and with words. This book is such a wonderful collection of her best that it is a real treat to pick it up at anytime and enjoy a few pages. It has longer pieces that will just captivate you as well as short quick reads. Like a delicious meal this book is to be savoured. This is a timeless piece of work that continues to bring a smile to all.
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Summary: Thank heavens, "Art of Eating" is back in print
Review: For some inexplicable reason, the brilliant writing of M.F.K.Fisher was out of print, or hard to obtain for a while. Her prose is possibly some of the best writing from the 20th Century, so the difficulty in getting her books was rather puzzling. If you read anyone who writes about cuisine, they always refer to M.F.K. Fisher as some kind of luminary. In "The Art of Eating", there is every opportunity to examine why her writing is held in such high esteem. This book is a compilation of her most famous works "Consider the Oyster," "Serve It Forth," "How to Cook a Wolf," "The Gastronomical Me" and "An Alphabet for Gourmets." Each is quite different. "How to Cook a Wolf" is about cooking in times of want, in this case, World War II, but the book really becomes semi-autobiographical and talks about her young days in Dijon, where she was the wife of a student at the University. If you haven't read M.F.K. Fisher, this is probably the best book to start with--it combines memoir with culinary musings; advice on scrambled eggs with her own ideas about health and nutrition. If you then can't get enough of Fisher, I recommend, "The Measure of Her Powers" which is much more autobiographical and utterly fascinating. I actually read Fisher more for her memoirs. Her fascination with food and cooking is to me about life and art,--the French view of food not as something merely to fill the belly, but as an art form and a craft.
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Summary: Transcendant - a Gourmet's Fantasy Book Come True!
Review: I don't dare try to compete with Ms Fisher's ability to spin stories about food and travel and life - no one can match her. This book had me fooling with oysters, taught me to always take the back roads in Europe and to never judge a restaurant by it's facade. That it is sublime to eat alone, that I can doctor my airline food. That food is more then nourishment of body, it is nourishment of soul. I kept a well worn copy with my cookbooks for divine inspiration
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Summary: Needs more stars!
Review: I found this book in a stack of books on sale outside of a Harvard Square book shop, selling for $1.00 in hardcover when I was a poor student. I think that I bought it mainly because it was a thick fat book and the paper quality was was so good. A few hours later I opened it to peruse while sitting in Hamburger Cottage and have never looked at food, human appetites, memories, and other hungers the same. Fisher is now a cult figure but, back then, was barely still in print. Just try reading only a few pages of her writing. If you're a poor student, read the chapter about how to keep the wolf from the door, written during the Great Depression in America people had to work hard to keep their spirits up and did it...even in style.
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