M. F. K. Fisher - The Art of Eating (1954)

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War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist

M. F. K. Fisher
Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat...

M. F. K. Fisher
In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.

M. F. K. Fisher
When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

M. F. K. Fisher
When a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims. At six years old his very bowels will heave when such a dish as creamed carrots or cold tapioca appear before him.

M. F. K. Fisher
I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best....

M. F. K. Fisher
We grew beautiful salads, a dozen different kinds, and several herbs. There were shallots and onion and garlic, and I braided them into long silky ropes and hung them over rafters in the attic.

M. F. K. Fisher
Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.

M. F. K. Fisher
I cannot count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.

M. F. K. Fisher
It is easy to think of potatoes, and fortunately for men who have not much money it is easy to think of them with a certain safety. Potatoes are one of the last things to disappear, in times of war, which is probably why they should not be forgotten in times of peace.

M. F. K. Fisher
[Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

M. F. K. Fisher
But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.

M. F. K. Fisher
Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

M. F. K. Fisher
It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.

M. F. K. Fisher
No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.

M. F. K. Fisher
After rare beef and wine, when the lobes turn red, was the time to ask favours or tell bad news.

M. F. K. Fisher
Between the ages of twenty and fifty, John Doe spends some twenty thousand hours chewing and swallowing food, more than eight hundred days and nights of steady eating. The mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough.

M. F. K. Fisher
In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.

M. F. K. Fisher
I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me.

M. F. K. Fisher
It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to bursting point on anything from quail financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly.

M. F. K. Fisher
I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless....

M. F. K. Fisher
I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

M. F. K. Fisher
The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.

M. F. K. Fisher
It should always be seen, the first time, with the eyes of childhood or of love.

M. F. K. Fisher
Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine...and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.

M. F. K. Fisher