The Gastronomical Me
In 1929, a newly married M.F.K. Fisher said goodbye to a milquetoast American culinary upbringing and sailed with her husband to Dijon, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time. The Gastronomical Me is a chronicle of her passionate embrace of a whole new way of eating, drinking, and celebrating the senses. As she recounts memorable meals shared with an assortment of eccentric and fascinating characters, set against a backdrop of mounting pre-war tensions, we witness the formation not only of her taste but of her character and her prodigious talent.
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Community Reviews
Really great book. The first few chapters and the last few, especially, were absolutely wonderful. Which is not to say that it drug in the middle—it really didn't. If it had all been as good as those chapters on either end, it would have been a nearly perfect book. Still, I loved it as it was.
The book is a memoir, told almost exclusively through descriptions of food, eating, etc. In case you're not familiar with MFK Fisher, that's the kind of writing she does—it's about food, but it's about so much more. I guess you could say (and in fact she does say at several points) that she's speaking also about metaphorical hunger. True enough, but still it doesn't at all capture the work. She's talking about what it means to grow up, to become yourself, to fall in love and back out again (and back one more time), to be a woman, to travel, to survive a spouse, even what it means to live in a world on the brink of war (the memoir covers her life from 1912–1941). And other things besides, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. And along the way, she has plenty to say about the food.
I loved the book. I've also found myself quite a bit hungrier as I've read it, of course. :) That part's not going to go away. I read it for an online book group, alongside Ruth Reichl's Garlic & Sapphires (which I also enjoyed, though not as much as this one).
The book is a memoir, told almost exclusively through descriptions of food, eating, etc. In case you're not familiar with MFK Fisher, that's the kind of writing she does—it's about food, but it's about so much more. I guess you could say (and in fact she does say at several points) that she's speaking also about metaphorical hunger. True enough, but still it doesn't at all capture the work. She's talking about what it means to grow up, to become yourself, to fall in love and back out again (and back one more time), to be a woman, to travel, to survive a spouse, even what it means to live in a world on the brink of war (the memoir covers her life from 1912–1941). And other things besides, but those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. And along the way, she has plenty to say about the food.
I loved the book. I've also found myself quite a bit hungrier as I've read it, of course. :) That part's not going to go away. I read it for an online book group, alongside Ruth Reichl's Garlic & Sapphires (which I also enjoyed, though not as much as this one).
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