Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking (2013)
The Gastronomical Me is a 1943 food memoir by M. F. K. Fisher, following Consider the Oyster and How to Cook a Wolf. The book is an essay collection covering subjects from "her childhood to her life in France, the beginning of World War II, the dissolution of her first marriage, [to] the death of her second husband" and "marked Fisher's emergence as one of the great voices of her time". In 1989, the New York Review of Books called it "her masterpiece" and the "most vivid and sustained of her books, a self-portrait through food spanning the years 1912 to a harrowing visit to Mexico in 1941. Each memory is presented separately, in the form of a self-contained story, with food as its sensual catalyst." Fisher wrote the book from a boarding house in Altadena, California, in northeastern Los Angeles County, where she had isolated herself because she was "recently widowed—her terminally ill husband [Dillwyn Parrish] had shot himself—Fisher was heavily pregnant by a man she never named. The war which she had seen coming in Europe had now finally arrived in America and was consuming the nation's young men. As Wilson rightly points out, The Gastronomical Me makes you shiver at its deep…
- Published
- 2013
- Pages
- 338
