'M' is for M.F.K.

APRIL THIS YEAR is bearing out its reputation. Our tax money goes to the government's coffers just as we mark the anniversary of our embroilment in Iraq with increased bloodshed and no end in sight; in Rwanda, 10 years have passed since its exceptionally swift and unimpeded genocide. Angst is in the air, though alloyed by the sweet scents of wisteria and night-blooming jasmine. Mostly, I want to escape to a Greek island and sling ouzo – two for me, one for the customer. Trite, perhaps, but time-honored, as escapist fantasies go.

Lying on the floor one recent night drinking beer, for lack of ouzo, and perusing my Lonely Planet guide to Greece (Mykonos? No, how about the alien moonscapes of Nisyros? ...), I'm jarred from my reverie by the shrilling phone. "I have an advance copy of M.F.K. Fisher's The Art of Eating," the voice on the line announced. "Not sure if she's a writer who interests you, but it's yours if you want it." Suddenly, things felt just a little bit better in my world. I quit humming the tune to "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" and switched to "California." Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908-92) was, after all, a fellow Californian. Grew up in Whittier, attended the University of California, died a grande dame of gastronomy in Glen Ellen (though she also spent a good deal of her adult life in France). The Art of Eating, hefty at more than 700 pages, is the anthology of merely her first five volumes of gastronomical writings, up to 1954, when it was first published. The stories and essays of these five volumes embrace musings on stews, snails, and potatoes; a perfect morning with tangerines in Strasbourg; statistics on cooks incarcerated in San Quentin; tidbits of gastronomic history from ancient Rome to wartime France ... This year's Art of Eating is a 50th-anniversary edition. At least that's one anniversary to celebrate.

I suspect it was Katherine who introduced me to M.F.K. Fisher. Her parents' venerable wood-shingle Berkeley house was snug with books, from '70s smut paperbacks to rhododendron manuals. Probably, I first read "With Bold Knife and Fork" stretched out with her on an orange corduroy couch basking in sunlight filtering into the glassed-in porch; with forays to the backyard to get blueberries, or raspberries, or little, pungent strawberries that are but distant and much tastier relations of what we buy in stores. I can't imagine a better way to meet Fisher's writing; or a better way to spend an afternoon, for that matter.

These days I'm lucky to clear off a space on the table for my bowl of Annie's macaroni and cheese while I simultaneously dig into An Alphabet for Gourmets (A, appropriately, "is for dining Alone") or How to Cook a Wolf, Fisher's musings and suggestions, first published in 1942, on eating well during lean and scary times. How to Cook a Wolf begins as though it should have been written today: "In spite of all the talk and study about our next years and what lies within them ... it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones which can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces." But I'm not much concerned with convincing you, dear reader, of the contemporary relevance of Fisher's writing. We're up to our ears in contemporary relevance as it is.

The Art of Eating is an omnibus for us aesthete escapists, for those who want to revel in eating (and writing about eating) as an art, not a science of carb-calculation, or yet another form of labor, as in the waiter's query "Are you still working on that?" Ugh. Certainly, serviceable knowledge abounds in Fisher's writing, such as this tip (from a chapter titled "The Social Status of a Vegetable"): "As the steak disappeared, I watched [Mrs. Davidson's] long old ear-lobes pinken. I remembered what an endocrinologist had told me once, that after rare beef and wine, when the lobes turned red, was the time to ask favours or tell bad news." Also to be enjoyed are quite a number of exquisitely related recipes, including one for California's gold rush-era bastard omelette, the Hangtown fry, in Consider the Oyster, a text that is something of a love poem in prose to that mollusk.

Fisher is a philosopher, a historian, and one opinionated person. Foremost, she's a storyteller. In this time of being bombarded by stomach-curdling information about the results of our national eating habits, it's a respite, almost a guilty treat, simply to enjoy good stories about the pleasures, the prejudices, the peculiarities of people and eating. If L is for Literature in the gourmet's alphabet, April is for The Art of Eating in this gourmand's calendar.