Serve It Forth

by M. F. K. Fisher

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865473690
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/18/2002
Series:	Art of Eating
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908-1992) is the author of sixteen books of essays and reminiscences, many of which have become American classics. Her books include The Gastronomical Me and How to Cook a Wolf. In 1991, she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Table of Contents

	To Begin	3
	When a Man Is Small	6
	Greek Honey and the Hon-Zo: 300 B.C.-100 A.D. Egypt, the Orient, and Greece	12
	The Curious Nose	19
	Let the Sky Rain Potatoes	25
	Borderland	30
	Garum: 100 A.D.-400 A.D. Rome	33
	Fifty Million Snails	40
	Meals for Me	47
	Dark Ages and the Men of God: 1000 A.D.-1400 A.D. Europe	53
	I Arise Resigned	55
	In Sinistra Parte, Johannus Baptista: 1100 A.D.-1450 A.D. England	62
	Pity the Blind in Palate	68
	A Pigges Pettie Toes: Elizabethan England	72
	The Standing and the Waiting	76
	Catherine's Lonesome Cooks: 1533 A.D.-1810 A.D. France	89
	Two Birds Without a Branch	95
	The Pale Yellow Glove	99
	The Brothers	106
	Set Piece for a Fishing Party: 1810 A.D.-1900 A.D. France	108
	On Dining Alone	114
	Sing of Dinner in a Dish	119
	Shell Shock and Richard the Third: 1900 A.D.-Europe and America	127
	The Social Status of a Vegetable	133
	Cesar	140
	To End	147

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher