If I should ever sit down to write a cookbook, I will pray for it to be at least a teeny-weeny bit like My life in France by Julia Child & Alex Prud’Homme and The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher. They are written by two women whose lives are inextricably bound to food.
If you remember, Meryl Streep played Julia Child brilliantly in the movie Julie and Julia. I was so smitten that I even started a short-lived food blog of my own! Then, my cookbook-collecting friend Chandrakanta, lent me her precious copy of Julia’s My Life in France to read and also insisted I buy myself Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me, which I did.
They are not recipe books. I don’t think there are any detailed recipes in them. My Life… is about Julia’s early married life in Paris, Marseille and Provence and she describes the years between 1948 to 1954 as the best in her life. She says, “They marked a crucial period of transformation in which I found my true calling, experienced an awakening of the senses, and had such fun that I hardly stopped moving long enough to catch my breath.”
In Gastronomical Me …too Fisher describes her newly married life in France, in Dijon, but not before she travels back a little more and recalls her grandmother’s cooking, meals at her boarding school and her introduction to gourmet food in a railway station restaurant and other unlikely places.
Fancy restaurants serving vile food, ugly bistros serving divine fare, meeting world famous chefs and homecooks in obscure villages, feeding friends, being fed by friends…kitchen disasters and gastronomic triumphs all bubble and boil, simmer and stew into the delicious, lip-smacking pages.
I loved that part of the book where Fisher describes a meal at a deserted mill converted into a restaurant by a Parisian chef. She wanders in there for lunch and finds she is the only one there. The chef is hidden somewhere inside, and there is a maniacal waitress who waits on her. Look how she describes her: “She wore an exalted look of a believer describing a miracle at Lourdes as she told me, in a rush, how Monsieur Paul threw chopped chives into hot sweet butter and then poured the butter off, how he added another nut of butter and a tablespoon of thick cream for each person, stirred the mixture for a few minutes over a slow fire, and then rushed it to the table. ‘So simple?’ I asked softly, watching her lighted eyes and the tender lustful lines of her strange mouth…” Fisher’s books are full of crazy foodies she meets in the unlikeliest of places. Both books make you chuckle though Fisher’s often borders on the dark and brooding.
While Julia is the bounding, big American woman embracing all things France that come on her path, Fisher is more withdrawn, given to dark spells, introspecting about her life that is not completely perfect. Yet, both lustily embrace food with Julia bringing alive smells, sights and textures with her joyful writing and Fisher rendering her descriptions almost like poetry. We cheer Julia on as she holds her own in the all-male Cordon Bleu school. We feel despondent when her cookbook project hits road blocks and then we celebrate as she finally despatches the draft of her manuscript to the publishers. And, we will good things to happen to Fisher too.
After all, the most important ingredient in any thing in life is happiness. Fisher does find happiness – in her own way.
MFK Fisher went to France in 1928-29 and Julia got there in 1948. They did actually meet. And that meeting has been chronicled in a book by Luke Barr called Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste. Luke Barr was Fisher’s grand-nephew. That is next on my menu.
