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Rating: 
Summary: A Reader's Feast
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A ghost is born in Dijon
Review: M.F.K. Fisher wrote some of the best prose in English--and this memoir is interesting because it documents her arrival and stay in Dijon as a student in the 20's. While some of the chapters were published later, in edited form, in other collections by Fisher, this book is valuable because it deals only with Fisher's time in Dijon. There is more detail about her stay with the Ollangniers, the French family who rented a room to Fisher and her husband Al while he worked on his doctorate. Fisher talks more about the students, professors and her daily life as she becomes, as she put it, a ghost. Perhaps by "ghost", Fisher meant that she knew, at that time, she would always leave a bit of her spirit forever in France. Her days in Dijon formed her as the writer she became, so if you are a Fisher fan, this is required reading.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best from America's 1st literary foodie
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best from America's 1st literary foodie
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent - 'the art of eating' & how to live one's life
Review: 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 ...)
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Memoir and Writing, but not her best
Review: `Long Ago in France' by premier American food writer M.F.K. Fisher was one of her last autobiographical memoirs of life in France. She may not have invented the `American in Europe' memoir exemplified by Peter Mayle's `My Year in Provence' and Frances Mayes `Under the Tuscan Sun', but she certainly helped define the genre with this work as well as `Map of Another Town', `A Considerable Town', and parts of many of her other autobiographical works such as `The Gastronomical Me'.
The events in this book, covering much of the first three years of Ms. Fisher's life with her first husband, Al Fisher, spent in a private boarding house in Dijon while hubby Fisher was completing his doctoral dissertation at the University in Dijon. The period of this book occupies a scant seven pages in `Poet of the Appetites', the biography of Ms. Fisher by Joan Reardon, yet the original book reveals practically nothing about the life of husband and wife Fisher. It certainly does not give any clue to why they ended up in Dijon, since their original intention was to study at the more prestigious university in Strasbourg.
This is the first complete work of M.F.K. Fisher's I have read and I feel just a little disappointment. The word pictures of living and eating in Dijon are certainly illuminating, but there is practically none of the humor you find in the books from Mayles and Mayes. There is also less of the scintillating writing I have sampled in some of her more famous pieces. By the author's own admission, much of this material is also a reworking of material from earlier published works as much as it is new stuff mined from her journals of this period.
The most obvious omission is a sense of the troubling times in which these events take place. The three years covered in the narrative are from 1929 through 1931, yet there is virtually no mention of the great depression as it affects Dijon, let alone how it affects the writer and her husband. Oddly, the same is true of Fisher's life as described by her biographer. Fisher's father was the editor, publisher, and owner of a small newspaper in California who did much to subsidize the student life of the young Fishers and of Mary Frances through several difficult years between marriages. Yet, there is practically no mention of this in the writings by and about Fisher.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Ms. Fisher's life and the influences on her writing, as she is easily, in the twentieth century American culinary world, the Wittgenstein to Julia Child's Einstein. That is the much lesser known theorist of culinary desire matched with the incomparable practitioner of culinary technique, both of whom got their inspiration from the food and cooking of France.
Yet, compared to similar works by probably less talented writers, this book is just a bit flat and dusty, befitting its recollections of events over sixty years before in the author's life. The stories of life are illuminating. The stories of people are a little empty, as all characters other than Mary Frances herself are long gone from the stage.
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