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Overview
In Serve It Forth, her first book, M. F. K. Fisher takes readers on an animated journey through culinary history, beginning with the honey-loving Greeks and the immoderate Romans. Fisher recalls a hunt for snails and truffles with one of the last adepts in that art and recounts how Catherine de Medici, lonely for home cooking, touched off a culinary revolution by bringing Italian chefs to France. Each essay makes clear the absolute firmness of Fisher's taste—contrarian and unique—and her skill at stirring memory and imagination into a potent brew.
This collection of entertaining anecdotes includes the abuses of the potato and how it can be dignified, social status relative to one's appreciation of vegetables, and the growth of the art of eating in ancient Greece and Rome.
Synopsis
In Serve It Forth, her first book, M. F. K. Fisher takes readers on an animated journey through culinary history, beginning with the honey-loving Greeks and the immoderate Romans. Fisher recalls a hunt for snails and truffles with one of the last adepts in that art and recounts how Catherine de Medici, lonely for home cooking, touched off a culinary revolution by bringing Italian chefs to France. Each essay makes clear the absolute firmness of Fisher's taste—contrarian and unique—and her skill at stirring memory and imagination into a potent brew.
New York Times Book Review
This is a book about food; but though food is universal, this book is unique. It is erudite and witty and experienced and young. The truth is that it is stamped on every page with a highly individualized personality. Sophisticated but not standardized, brilliant but never 'swift-moving' or 'streamlined,' perfumed and a little mocking, direct and yet almost précieuse, the style of Serve It Forth is as unusual as its material is unfamiliar and odd. -- Books of the Century; New York Times review, June 1937
Editorials
From the Publisher
"The best prose writer in America." —W.H. Auden
"She writes about food as others do about love, but rather better."—Clifton Fadiman
"Poet of the appetites."—John Updike
"A monument."—Julia Child
"One of the world's finest food writers and, in the eyes of many, the grand dame of gastronomy."—James Villas
"M.F.K. Fisher ... brings onstage a peach or a brace of quail and shows us history, cities, fantasies, memories, emotions."—Patricia Storace, The New York Review of Books
"One of my great heroes."—Jacques Pepin
"A delightful book. It is erudite and witty and experienced and young."—The New York Times Book Review