The Writer Who Made Food Fun
With an unerring ear for pitch and tone and a mastery of the short-form essay, Fisher inspired multiple generations of writers who might have otherwise never bothered to think rigorously about how and what we eat, and how food can be a source of physical pleasure.
- Books about food were books about preparing food, mainly for the delectation of wage-earning husbands (The Settlement Cook Book ’s original subtitle was The Way to a Man’s Heart).
- To reread them is to grasp not only how much joy she infused into food writing but also how much pain she quietly sublimated into her work.
- “If Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk.” We’re a long way from Lizzie Black Kander.
[ Read: The woman who made America take cookbooks seriously ] For Fisher, the act of eating isn’t merely nutritive; it’s as deeply satisfying as good sex, and should be attended to with the same intensity and focus.
To call her a food writer is like calling Animal Farm a book about livestock.
- Fisher created what might be considered a fresh form: an elegant hybrid of personal essay, history, food travelogue, and memoir.
- Fisher picked up her pen, most American food writing had a whiff of Victorian fustiness about it—the pinch of the corset.
- Kander’s writing was as dry as a plate of mashed yeast: “Always heat the dishes in which warm food is served.
- She approached the subject not as an anthropologist but as a voluptuary who looked up from her plate.
- Fisher unmoored food writing from this grimly proscriptive and male-centered mode.
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