How to grow a pearl

The distribution of awareness around MFK Fisher is lopsided. It seems as though there are two types of people: those who’ve never heard of the writer and those who serially risk arrest for trespassing on the private property of her last known address. (She died in 1992.)

I’m constitutionally incapable of trespassing, but when I visit family in California, I do tend to map the driving distance between my father’s house and Fisher’s former property in the Sonoma Valley. It is 90 minutes with no traffic. But there is always traffic, and ultimately I’m content to admire photos of Fisher’s sweet adobe cottage in wine country, with its “Chinese red” walls and oleander-crowned stone arch:

So no illicit pilgrimages. But because Fisher is among the first authors who Taught Me How to Live—her pillars being fortitude, humor, courage, appetite—I get a little squirmy when I misplace my copy of An Alphabet for Gourmets or her translation of The Physiology of Taste. These books belong to the category of “texts that must remain within reach, always, in case of emergency.”

Fisher is a food writer but her ambit is all of life, as you’d expect of someone who lived through the major catastrophic events of the 20th century (she was born in 1908 and grew up in California but spent a lot of time in Europe). “I don’t know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose,” wrote W.H. Auden. If you open a page at random you might find something like this, which happens to be on the topic of rice:

Probably the simplest rice dish I have ever eaten (except for a bowl of it unadorned a few times to try to understand how I would feel if that were all for me for a few hours or even days) was served by a beautiful tall woman from India, who later died from a bee sting. Her name was Love, in English.

Well, come on. Nobody could stop reading after that introduction!

What strikes you on the page is Fisher’s absolute self-possession, worldliness, decisiveness and tenacity. Her mental library is stocked; she’ll draw upon Athenaeus and Mary Terhune; Elizabethan cookbooks and Thoreau.

And she can be spiky. She’ll start an essay with a line like, “There are two questions which can easily be asked about a potato: What is it, and Why is it?” And then, predicting a potato-lovin’ reader’s affronted grimace, she’ll allow that the above questions are, indeed, irritating, but only to an amateur. Well, now the amateur has no choice but to continue reading about potatoes! And by the end of that essay, “Let the Sky Rain Potatoes,” the angry amateur will be pacifically dreaming of baked potatoes “pinched open and bulging with mealy snowiness” or whipped with cream and butter to “bridge the deadly gap” between an entree and a salad. You always end up on her side.