M. F. K. Fisher's "Two Kitchens in Provence"

Illustration from M. F. K. Fisher's "Once a Tramp, Always ..."

This week I’ve been enjoying “Sunday Reading: Culinary Journeys,” a collection of food pieces from the newyorker.com archive. It includes a wonderful essay by M. F. K. Fisher titled “Once a Tramp, Always …” (September 7, 1968), containing, among other delectable morsels, a description of Fisher eating caviar at the Café de la Paix:

I was perhaps twenty-three when I first ate almost enough caviar—not to mention any caviar at all that I can now remember. It was one of the best, brightest days of my whole life with my parents, and lunching in the quiet back room at the Café de la Paix was only a part of the luminous whole. My mother ate fresh foie gras, sternly forbidden to her liver, but she loved the cathedral at Strasbourg enough to risk almost any kind of attack, and this truffled slab was so plainly the best of her lifetime that we all agreed it could do her nothing but good, which it did. My father and I ate caviar, probably Sevruga, with green-black smallish beads and a superb challenge of flavor for the iced grassy vodka we used to cleanse our happy palates. We ate three portions apiece, tacitly knowing it could never happen again that anything would be quite so mysteriously perfect in both time and space. The headwaiter sensed all this, which is, of course, why he was world-known, and the portions got larger, and at our third blissful command he simply put the tin in its ice bowl upon our table. It was a regal gesture, like being tapped on the shoulder with a sword. We bowed, served ourselves exactly as he would have done, grain for grain, and had no need for any more. It was reward enough to sit in the almost empty room, chaste rococo in the slanting June sunlight, with the generous tub of pure delight between us, Mother purring there, the vodka seeping slyly through our veins, and real wood strawberries to come, to make us feel like children again and not near-gods. That was a fine introduction to what I hope is a reasonably long life of such occasional bliss.

My favorite Fisher piece is “Two Kitchens in Provence” (The New Yorker, August 27, 1966; included in her great 1982 collection As They Were). It's an account of her experience in two different Provençal kitchens. Here’s a taste:

The sink was faced with the same red tiles as the old stove and the floor – the rough glazed squares of red and pink and ochre clay that comes from the soil of Provence, the clay that makes the roofs there glow and burn even in the moonlight. They were cool in summer, warm and comforting in winter, and easy to clean, and altogether so pleasing that the prospect of ever having to walk about on another surface was painful to me.

And another: 

The Place Richelme et aux Herbes is small, and shaded by very tall and noble plane trees, which in summer sift down such green light as I have seldom seen. Perhaps some fortunate fish have known it, but for human beings it is rare to float at the bottom of the deeps and yet breathe with rapture the smells of all living things spead out to sell in the pure, filtered moving air.

And another:

The fruits and vegetables of Provence are dying as they grow – literally leaping from the ancient soil, so filled with natural richness and bacilli and fungi that they seem a kind of summing up of whatever they are. A tomato there, for instance, is the essence of all tomatoes, of tomato-ness, the way a fragment of a Greek frieze is not a horse but horse itself.

And this marvelous one-hundred-and-fifty-seven-word sentence:

With the mistral surging and leaning against the windows and the chestnut trees and the red poppies in the meadows, and the spiritual food a part of the whole, we would eat at breakfast canned grapefruit juice, large bowls of café au lait with brown sugar, slices of Dijon gingerbread with sweet butter and Alpine honey; at noontime whole new potatoes boiled in their jackets in a big pot of carrots-onions-sausgage, which we’d eat later, sweet butter, mild cheese, and a bowl of green olives and little radishes; then for supper the vegetable broth, with the sausage cut in thin rings, the whole new carrots and onions drained and tossed with a little butter and chopped parsley and celery tops from the farmer’s garden, and a bowl of three cans mixed together of peaches-pears-pineapple, all with hot, delicious, somewhat charcoalish toast made on one of those flat grill things our parents used at least forty years ago.

Fisher lived and wrote by her senses. She was the quintessential carnal writer. Her “Two Kitchens in Provence” is pure, sensuous pleasure.