Archives

The Promise of Apple Blossoms

May 6, 2013 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Spring, when she sashays in, always takes my breath away. Such vivid raiments cover her, so radiant that Joseph with his coat of many colors could only turn green with envy. The eye hardly knows where to light, much as a honey bee – turned loose in a field of daisies – darts from one nectar-filled delight to another, drunk on the experience. Apple trees always draw me close. I suppose it has to do with the apple tree that […]

Categories: Apples, Art, Food writing, Photography, Poetry • Tags: Apple blossoms, Apples, Art, Food writing, Haiti, Kenscoff, M. F. K. Fisher, Meditations, Photography, Still life, Susan Branch

Parsleyed Ham and Kitchen Breezes: The Letters of M. F. K. Fisher and Julia Child

June 22, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Today is the 20th anniversary of M.F.K. Fisher’s death, so in tribute and at the request of her friend Leo Racicot, I am reposting this, something I wrote last year after attending Barbara Wheaton’s “Reading Historic Cookbooks” seminar at Harvard. Sometimes words, both spoken and written, take on terrible power. Use the wrong word and, at the sound, someone’s heart may crash to the bottom of their chest. Whisper another word and the soul flies straight up to heaven, if […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Libraries, Lit & Food, Methods, Pork • Tags: Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Cooking of Provincial France, Jambon Persillé, Julia Child, La Pitchoune, M. F. K. Fisher, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Michael Field, Schlesinger Library, Simone Beck

The Dame* with a Pot and a Pen

June 18, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

She’s a little bit like liver, you see. You either hate her or love her. Elizabeth David, according to this blog post from The Dabbler in the U.K., deserves a lot more kudos than she’s getting: I confess to having fallen just a little in love with David since I first discovered her books a few years ago. She was wilful, adventurous, determined and uncompromising. But for more than anything, I love her for significantly improving the quality of my […]

Categories: Cookbooks, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Food writing, France, French Cooking • Tags: Cooking of Provincial France, Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking, Haiti, M. F. K. Fisher, Order of the British Empire, The Dabbler

The [Fatal] Flaw*: What’s Wrong with [Food] Writing Now

June 8, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Writing is not about the “me,” it’s about the “not me.” This is always true, even in personal essay and memoir. ~~ Michael Ruhlman Something seems wrong these days with food writing in America. And, to be honest, not just food writing. What is the problem? You’re probably getting ready to hit DELETE. But hold on, hold on, please. The other day, trying to come to grips with some rather negative feelings about being a writer and the way the […]

Categories: Books, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food writing • Tags: Confessions of Nat Turner, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong, Kate Christensen, M. F. K. Fisher, Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison, William Styron

When it Comes to Writing, Define Your Terms

June 5, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. ~~ M. F. K. Fisher With every story ever told, there’s usually a beginning, at least in an ideal world. The reader progresses toward a soft plump middle, where the real action occurs, like a jelly doughnut harboring cherry filling. And, if the author is a considerate sort, the ending makes sense, too, recalling the finale of any satisfying meal. That’s the definition of writing, […]

Categories: Cooking, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food Columns, Food writing • Tags: Adam Gopnik, Elizabeth David, Gourmet, Joseph Wechsberg, Ludwig Bemelmans, M. F. K. Fisher, New Yorker, Ruth Reichl

Culinary Memoirs: What’s the Point?

May 29, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

They usually start by describing a kitchen from that vast desert common to all of us: memory. Filled with nostalgia, and sometimes not a little anger, culinary memoirs tend to hover around the memoirist’s stomach, in what I would call extreme navel-gazing. What is culinary memoir? And why are there so many of them springing up like mushrooms on a wet spring morning (over 250 published since Ruth Reichl’s 1999 Tender at the Bone)? And – more to the point […]

Categories: Book Reviews, Books, Cooking, Critic's Corner • Tags: Art of Eating, Autobiography, bildungsroman, Cuisine, Culinary memoir, Della Lutes, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Julia Watson, Julie & Julia, M. F. K. Fisher, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Memoir, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Ruth Reichl, Serve It Forth, Sidonie Smith, St. Augustine, Tender at the Bone, The Country Kitchen, The Feasts of Autolycus, The Physiology of Taste

Becoming a Writer

May 23, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

It’s funny how things work out. You pick up a book in a bookstore or a friend presses you to read something, “Hey, I KNOW you’ll love this.” You read the words on the page and suddenly you’re soaring above your bedroom ceiling, your sorryass childhood forgotten, your past mistakes and your current cares evaporate, like rain splashing on a steaming hot summer sidewalk. You learn about a larger world when writers release their words into the Universe. As I […]

Categories: Bibliographies, Books, Editorials, Food writing • Tags: Food writing, M. F. K. Fisher, Writing

Pilgrymes, Passing to and Fro: Chaucer Got it Right

May 16, 2012 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Springtime stirs up feelings of wanderlust in me, banishing the tiresome plague of cabin fever. I want to throw a fresh toothbrush and a fat book into my backpack and take off. I want to go on pilgrimage. To begin again: that’s the meaning of pilgrimage, which – let’s face it – is what travel is all about. Leaving behind old ways, the interminable rut, filthy habits, worn-out relationships, the stultifying everyday sameness of routine, breaking out of the box, […]

Categories: Spain • Tags: Camino de Santiago, Cantebury Tales, Dillwyn Parrish, Geoffrey Chaucer, M. F. K. Fisher, Martin Sheen, Phil Cousineau, Pilgrimages, Shirley MacLaine, Spain, The Way, Way of St. James

Aix-en-Provence, and the Questions of Exile

October 24, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I have been reading food writer MFK Fisher’s book about Aix-en-Provence – Map of Another Town (1964) – written about her time here in the 1950s. She spoke of the incredible loneliness she felt, the sense of being an “outlander,” her very word. In other words, she addressed the question of exile. She lived near where I sit tonight. For a while anyway, she rented a room at 17 rue Cardinale, with the unforgettable Madame Lanes. She detailed her thoughts and […]

Categories: Cooking, France, French Cooking • Tags: Aix-en-Provence, Benedictines, France, M. F. K. Fisher, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur

Dining Alone – Not the Loneliest Number that You’ll Ever Do: Just Ask Louis XIV

May 27, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

King Louis XIV did it. M. F. K. Fisher did it. The faceless man in Edward Hopper’s painting, “Nighthawks,” did it. Mr. Bean did it, too. And so did I. Daring to eat alone in public probably ranks as one of the few acts that cause normally confident people to quiver a little. It dredges up memories of being the new kid at school, faced with walking into the cafeteria and eating all by your lonesome. So public, so humiliating, […]

Categories: Chefs, Fish, Food writing, France, French Cooking, Menus, Spain, Spanish cooking, Wine • Tags: Alphabet for Gourmets, Brian Edwards, Desmond Morris, Edward Hopper, El Jaleo, Elaine Sciolino, José Andrés, Louis XIV of France, M. F. K. Fisher, Scrofula, Washington DC

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Elizabeth Robins Pennell

September 9, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A Victorian M. F. K. Fisher? Maybe. Certainly M. F. K. Fisher knew of Elizabeth Pennell, for she says in An Alphabet for Gourmets, under “A is for Dining Alone,” There is always the cheering prospect of a quiet or giddy or warmly somber or lightly notable meal with “One,” as Elizabeth Robins Pennell refers to him or her in The Feasts of Autolycus. “One sits at your side feasting in silent sympathy,” this lady wrote at the end of […]

Categories: Food writing, French Cooking • Tags: Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Feasts of Autolycus, Food writing, France, French Cooking, M. F. K. Fisher

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: M. F. K. FISHER

August 30, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Anyone who reveres food and eats oysters, who yearns for security and longs for love, and who seeks out experiences and thinks much must discover M. F. K. Fisher. Just who was M. F. K. Fisher and why did James Beard, that gentle giant of the food world, call her a national treasure? And why did John Updike refer to her as “the poet of the appetites”?

Categories: Apples, Beef, Bibliographies, Desserts, Food Columns, French Cooking, Recipes, Salads • Tags: Cooks, Desserts, Food, Food writing, France, French Cooking, M. F. K. Fisher

Suffering — Sometimes it’s Just About Food and Sometimes Not

June 4, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival. ~~ Winston Churchill ~~ Suffering? Why on earth write about suffering on a food blog, especially one ostensibly about cookbooks and their history? Aren’t food blogs supposed to be full of fun-but-complex recipes that you can make in 1 minute, creating the illusion that you’ve cooked all day? Well, sometimes no. Food is more than beautiful people living it up in a glossy magazine or […]

Categories: Food writing, Lit & Food • Tags: Albert Camus, Frida Kahlo, M. F. K. Fisher, Pablo Picasso, Suffering

Pass the Nostalgia, and Nix the Organics

April 14, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

I’ll be blunt: I like my food with a heaping handful of nostalgic romanticism. Yes, there are those who claim that the present food landscape sparkles with the dreamy hue reminiscent of rose-colored glasses, that the perfume of nostalgia permeates too much of present-day “discourse” on food. And then there’s the flip side of that discourse — I hate that word, so pompous, nay, plump with the moral sensitivities of a Cotton Matheresque preacher — the self-righteous guilt-producers crusading to […]

Categories: Books, Cookbooks, Critic's Corner, Editorials, Food writing, Paintings • Tags: Alice Waters, Cooking, M. F. K. Fisher, Michael Pollan, Organics, Tangerines

Snowbound … The Poetry, The Food, The Reality

February 8, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems now here to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Snow Storm. As the snow falls outside, I […]

Categories: American Cooking, Apples, Cakes, Cooking, Films, Lit & Food, Poetry, Spices • Tags: Apples, Cake, Donner Party, Donner Pass, Elizabeth David, John Greenleaf Whittier, M. F. K. Fisher, Madeleine Kamman, Madeleine Kamman’s Savoie, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Roy Andries de Groot, Snow, Snowbound, Spice Cake, The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth, Winter

Cooking: The Theory, with a Little Help from Chimps

March 3, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are. ~~ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin ~~ As Alice Arndt said in Culinary Biographies, “The names of the most famous cooks of their day, the most influential writers and thinkers, the most fashionable restaurateurs, often bring blank looks when mentioned today.” Just the other day, Jeanette Ferrary commented on the ASFS listserv that many young food writers today do not know about M. F. K. Fisher . And yet […]

Categories: Africa, French Cooking, Homo Erectus, Homo Habilis • Tags: Anthropology, Cooking, Homo Erectus, Homo Habilis, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, M. F. K. Fisher, Richard Wrangham

Cooking with Wolves (Or, Keeping the Wolf Away from the Door)

December 31, 2008 by Cynthia Bertelsen

There’s a whining at the threshold, There’s a scratching at the floor. To work! To work! In Heaven’s name! The wolf is at the door! ~~~C. P. S. Gilman As the recession, aka depression, of 2009 knocks on the door, a wolf-skin draped ever so wolfishly across its flanks, it’s time for a new generation to look to la cucina povera and other belt-tightening culinary lessons from the past. Prosperity for the many is a relative newcomer in the jousting […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cookbooks • Tags: Cheap Eats, Cooking, Cooks, Economy in Eating, Food, Home Cooking, James Beard, M. F. K. Fisher

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life