Food, Sex, Language: The Lost Lovers and Later Words of M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David

American culinary memoirist M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992) and British cookbook author Elizabeth David (1913-1992) expressed an aesthetics pleasure that foregrounds eating as a powerful source of creativity. For these women, food encouraged a sensory engagement with the environment and a physical receptivity toward pleasure which, in turn, engendered their creative aesthetic. Fisher wrote about food as a medium through which hungers, emotional as well as physical, could be nourished and fulfilled. She articulated female desires and the pleasures inherent in feed them well. David approached food as a medium for self-expression and understood that harnessing food's expressive potential requires intense physical engagement. Her writing conveys an aesthetic firmly grounded the body and its pleasure, an aesthetic redolent with sensual imagery that captures the gastronomic rhythms, aromas, and flavors of a given land.

Each author explicitly connects her drive to write about food with erotic intimacy in her personal correspondence, consciously linking eating, sex, and writing in a way that foregrounds intimacy as a powerful source of creativity. During mid-life, however, Fisher and David temporarily lost their inspiration to write about food. Fisher divorced her third husband in 1951. She did not write her next book until 1961. David did not write a cookbook for seven years after losing her lover and suffering a stroke, events that left her physically and emotionally numb. With her romantic inspiration gone, each woman sought and found another creative muse, learning to savor pleasure in the incorporation and expression of language; reading and writing about food enabled them to access and recreate former pleasures. Learning to taste these memories on their mind's plate, they nourished creativity from within, finding a pleasure in language that inspired them to write once again. An examination of the aesthetic shift between their earlier and later writing thus demonstrates how language that stimulates the mind's palate can trigger memories of erotic pleasure, which, in turn, nourish creativity; it also illuminates how the functions of food, sex, and language are mutually constructed by one another.

Fisher and David worked to dissolve the parameters that kept nineteenth- and twentieth-century women food writers bound to the home kitchen. They did so by voicing an erotic pleasure in food that was nourished, in large part, by their travels. By celebrating their undomesticated pleasures and fashioning them into an aesthetic form, Fisher and David expanded the British and American food writing tradition to include a space for female desire. The importance of embodied pleasure to Fisher and David's growth as writers helped initiate a shift in American and British attitudes toward eating that continues to inspire countless writers, chefs, and restaurateurs alike. Fisher links gastronomy with wisdom, a gesture that encouraged a sea change in the way generations of Americans think and write about food. This change slowly gathered momentum among culinary professionals, taking discernible shape in the "minds and feelings" of James Beard, for whom Fisher's words instilled "a desire to love better and live more fully" and in the philosophy of Alice Waters, whose restaurant Chez Panisse helped spread the cult of "California cuisine" (Art of Eating xix). Inspired byFisher's message that "there is a communion of more than our bodies, when bread is broken and wine drunk," contemporary memoirs such as Judith Moore's Never Eat Your Heart Out (1997) and Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone (1998) and Comfort Me With Apples (2001) explore erotic pleasure as a conduit for wisdom about the self and the self in relation to others (Gastronomical Me x).

Fisher published her first book, Serve It Forth (1937), at the age of twenty-nine. Three more books followed in quick succession: Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), and The Gastronomical Me (1943). During these years, Fisher pioneered a form of memoir in which food serves as a structural metaphor for female identity and informs an aesthetic appreciation of female desire. Food not only functioned as a medium through which Fisher communed with others, but also as a metaphor through which shaped this psychological union into an aesthetic form.

Fisher often wrote about the pleasures of eating as an implicit metaphor for emotional and physical intimacy; the most evocative gastronomic moments in Fisher's memoirs often occurred when she was intimately involved with a lover. Honeymooning with her first husband, Al Fisher, in Paris, Fisher dined on "hot chocolate and the rich croissants" for break She describes them as "the most delicious things, there in bed with the flowing past me and pigeons wheeling around the gray Palace man that I had ever eaten. They were really the first thing I had tasted since we were married... tasted to remember. They were part of the warmth and excitement of that hotel room, with Paris waiting" (48). Fisher also memorializes the meal that she and Al ate to celebrate their first evening in apartment in Dijon and to mark their one-month anniversary. That evening, as Fisher recalls

we ate the biggest, as well as the most exciting, meal that either of us had ever had. . . . Everything that was brought to the table was so new, so wonderfully cooked that what might have been with sated palates a gluttonous orgy was, for our fresh ignorance, a constant refreshment. . . . [W]e felt as if we had seen the far shores of another world. We were drunk with the land breeze that blew from it, and the sure knowledge that it lay waiting for us (GM 58-59).

The meal along with the emotions it stirs (here wonder and fulfillment) speak not only to the satisfaction of a hunger for food but also to the delight of being in love. Quite often the quality of the dishes Fisher recalls eating during a given period directly reflects the intensity of her romantic passion —the more in love she felt, the more likely she was to encounter an unforgettably tasty dish. She explains: "when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied... and it is all one" (GM ix).

While Fisher's prose style continues to influence writers as much as her gastronomic philosophy inspires chefs and restaurateurs, David's cookbooks and journalism are often credited with radically changing the British table as well as the British appetite. David's role as culinary muse to British and American chefs reaches back to the publication of her first book, Mediterranean Food, in 1950. Published while the British food supply was still under ration following World War II, The Book of Mediterranean Food is filled with ingredients and proportions that the British living in a war-ravaged England could only imagine: duck stuffed with foie gras; goose braised in red wine and cognac; stuffing for a whole roast sheep; pomegranate seeds sprinkled with lemon juice, rose water, and sugar; fruit salad; luscious orange creams, custards, and cakes. David fed the British imagination with lush descriptions of ingredients unobtainable on her native shores. She went on to write four more cookbooks devoted to foreign cuisines—French Country Cooking (1951), Italian Food (1954), Summer Cooking (1955), and French Provincial Cooking (1960).

After ten years spent capturing the flavor of the Mediterranean table, David turned her attention toward home in an attempt to revive England's rich culinary tradition, a tradition first stifled by Victorian strictures against physical pleasure and later silenced by the alimentary deprivation of two world wars. Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970), English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), and Harvest of the Cold Months (published posthumously in 1994) helped cement David's reputation as a pathbreaking culinary figure, a reputation that continues unabated to this day.

The merit of David's writing stems, in large part, from its evocative depiction of sensory impressions. David's sensuous nature enabled her to distill the essence of a region by describing the ingredients it produces. Mediterranean tomatoes "are huge, sweet, fleshy, richly red," while the scent of a Spanish tangerine is "piercing," its flavor "sharp" (Mediterranean Food 95). A particular tree on the Italian island Anacapri grows figs with skin that "cracks gently as it is picked, disclosing a rose madder flesh which is sweet with a dry aftertaste" (Italian Food 261), while "one particular tree in a garden on the Greek island of Euboea" grows "figs with fine skins of a most brilliant green, the fruit itself of a deep rich purple, with more body, less honey sweet, but with a more intense flavour than figs anywhere in the world" (IF 261). The candied walnuts of Turin resemble "nuggets of onyx, sugar dusted" (IF 200). They are "soft as fresh plums or damsons would be, sweet of course, a little crunchy with their dusting of sugar, and with that haunting scent and taste of cloves" (IF 292). In the Venetian market "the cabbages are cobalt blue, the beetroots deep rose, the lettuces clear pure green, sharp as glass" (IF 109).

In The Gastronomical Me, Fisher recounts her alimentary and sexual awakening and charts the development of her belief that how one handles, prepares, and eats food is inextricably linked to how one approaches life. This belief was honed, in large part, during time spent in France and Switzerland, where Fisher passed what she considered the best years of her first and second marriages. She began living with the man who would become her second husband, Dillwyn Parrish, in 1937.[1] The couple settled briefly for a time in Switzerland, where they began an idyll that Fisher recalls as the best part of her life.[2] They lived off the land, growing, harvesting, cooking, and eating their meals. Fisher recounts working with "the oldest soil either of us had ever touched. . . . [I]t seemed almost bursting with life. . . . We grew beautiful salads, a dozen different kinds, and several herbs. There were shallots and onion and garlic. ... In one of the cellars we stored cabbages and apples and tomatoes and other things on slatted shelves, or in bins. And all the time we ate what we were growing" (152-53). She and Parrish lived in harmony with the land, practicing a life firmly grounded in the soil, as well as in the flesh. This communion with the land echoed Fisher and Parrish's symbiotic rapport, one in which the couple "not only made love but Talked almost steadily for almost the ten years [they] knew each other" (Life in Letters 110-11). Fisher felt "beautiful, witty, truly loved . . . the most fortunate of all women, past sea change and with her hungers fed" (GM 189).

Fisher's self-described "bliss" with Parrish was brutally interrupted by the amputation of one of Parrish's legs, which had become gangrenous following an embolism that traveled from his calf to his pelvis. He was eventually diagnosed with a terminal circulatory disease, which left him incapacitated with pain. Parrish's death in 1941 marked the beginning of a twelve-year period during which Fisher would lose most of her closest loved ones—her husband and brother each committed suicide, and both her parents died. She married and divorced her last husband, Donald Friede, who spent much of their marriage in and out of mental hospitals. Experiencing such tragedy, Fisher found herself unable to write, confessing to her psychiatrist that "writing for me was (is?) a form of making love. I have nobody to make love to" (Life in Letters 22). Here Fisher figures writing as a form of communion that echoes her gastronomic philosophy in its emphasis on intimacy. Because Fisher envisioned eating, as well as writing, as a form of communion arising from embodied pleasures, her worldview was challenged by the loss of appetite she experienced after the death of her loved ones.

From 1950 to 1955, Fisher was unable to write. When she began to write again toward the end of this five-year period, she did so, assured, however, that she would "never write as casually, easily, nonchalantly again" (Letters 147). This ease did return temporarily, however, in 1957, when she found herself "alive and nourished by an active and very satisfying actuality of man-woman love" (Letters 158).[3] She explained in a letter to a friend that "[b]eing in love again has loosened my tight dry muscles, and I am writing easily" (Letters 159). The romance did not last long, however, and twelve years would pass between An Alphabet for Gourmets and her next book, A Cordiall Water, subtitled A Garland of Odd and Old Receipts to Assuage the Ills of Man and Beast. The radical shift from gastronomy to curatives suggests that, no longer able to write as a form of making love, Fisher began to write as a form of healing.[4]

Fisher's next substantial project, Map of Another Town (1964), provides a blueprint for the writing process as a means of working through emotional trauma. The memoir, which recounts Fisher's year-long sojourn in Provence with her daughters, was her first since The Gastronomical Me written over twenty years before. Fisher's earlier memoirs recount those years in her life before she had lost many of the people she loved, a time when she felt "the most fortunate of all women, past sea change and with her hungers fed." Map of Another Town examines her "self-inflicted development as a ghost" (63).

Driven abroad by the need to recuperate from twelve years of devastating loss that left her "scarred," "almost disintegrating," Fisher reflects on the journey: "I was alone in Europe for the first time in my life really; always before I had been the companion of someone well loved.... Now I was single, with two small daughters, and a world war and some private battles had come between the two women of myself, so that I felt fumbling and occasionally even frightened" (59). Rather than nourishing herself with food, as she does in The Gastronomical Me, Fisher practices the art of disappearance, a feat "that takes practice. ... It is mainly a question of withdrawing to the vanishing point from the consciousness of the people one is with" (10).[5] The woman Fisher depicts in Map of Another Town contrasts dramatically with the woman who connects with and participates in foreign cultures in Fisher's more gastronomically-grounded works. These "two women"—one driven toward connection and the other toward disappearance—capture the dialectic between feeding well and self-denial, between agency and its repression. They also capture the struggle between the emotional ends of eating—well-being and pleasure versus disgust and fear. Whereas Fisher's early works celebrate an appetite for food and for love, Map of Another Town articulates the feeling of disintegration and fear that both arises from and feeds her loss of appetite.

One of the few dining scenes included in the memoir finds Fisher eating what "seemed the longest meal I had ever endured. . . . [I]ts rich tedious courses bit like acid inside me, metamorphosed by anger and ennui. . . . All this was good for me. It made me accustom myself to acceptance of my slow evolution as an invisible thing, a ghost" (67-68). This scene provides a polar reflection of Fisher's time abroad recounted in The Gastronomical Me. Rather than nourishing intimacy and pleasure, dining becomes a  corrosive against which Fisher must shield herself by "withdrawing to the vanishing point from the consciousness" of those around her.  

That Fisher's memoirs written about her travels abroad in the company of her first two husbands center around the intimate pleasures of eating while Map of Another Town finds her a self-described ghost attests to the disembodiment and disintegration that accompanies mourning; her lack of appetite within the memoir indicates a psychological disengagement with her body and with the surrounding world.[6] Fisher's shift away from gastronomy also indicates that she found a drive to create memoir that replaced her drive to write as a "form of making love"; she wrote as a form of grieving. Articulating the psychological wounds that haunted her journey to France in 1954 enabled Fisher to work through her grief. Fisher's return to gastronomy in her next memoir indicates that she successfully restored her appetite for life as well as for food writing.[7]

One of Fisher's most celebratory endeavors With Bold Knife and Fork (1969) demonstrates that Fisher succeeded in reconstituting her "disinte- grating" self, albeit in an altered form; the ghostly woman who haunts Map of Another Town has become embodied once again and is able to celebrate the physical pleasures of preparing and eating her favorite recipes. Fisher lauds her "sensual and voluptuous gastronomical favorites-of-a-lifetime" and urges her readers "with bold knife and fork, eat well of forbidden fruits!" (135). The most notable change between Fisher's earlier food writing and With Bold Knife and Fork lies in her increasing reliance on the food writing of others and the writing process itself to nourish her hungers. The memoir shows Fisher nourishing herself with words, relying on language to recall the memory of former pleasures. Commentary on American and French cookbooks and gastronomic literature abound. Fisher also reflects on the power of memory to nourish both physical and psychological hungers; she had mastered the skill of feeding the body through the intellect so well that she could "savor" the "strange familiarity" of "flavors once met in early days" on what she calls her "mind's palate" (100-101). This reference to the "mind's palate" echoes a passage from The Gastronomical Me in which Fisher recalls eating a peach pie with her father and sister. The moment from her childhood was marked by a feeling of communion, the memory of which remained imprinted on her "heart's palate, succulent, secret, delicious" (8). A striking change marks the difference between the earlier and the later passages—a shift in the source of nourishment. Fisher once fed her creativity with embodied pleasures, nourishing her mind with her body. In later years Fisher nourished creativity by savoring her favorite foods and food writing on her mind's palate, feeding her body with memories of former pleasures.

Like Fisher's first books, Elizabeth David's early works were nourished by intense physical pleasure and were formed by her travels abroad. At the age of twenty-one, David set sail for the Mediterranean with her lover Charles Gibson Cowan.

While the couple traveled through the inner locks and coastline of France, England went to war; in the summer of 1940 the couple was arrested off the coast of Sicily under suspicion that they were spying for the British government. After a nineteen-day internment, they escaped Italy and traveled to Greece, where they lived for ten months before German troops landed in Athens. The couple fled to Egypt where they parted ways. David landed a job with the Ministry of Information in Alexandria, enjoying an active love life before making her one attempt at marriage. Her husband, the British officer Tony David, was assigned a station in India shortly after their betrothal. David soon joined Tony in New Delhi, but after six months she returned alone to England in the summer of 1946.[8] David began writing her first book, Mediterranean Food, shortly after her return.

Her next four book projects took her regularly to France and Italy, where she often set up house for extended periods of time in order to collect the knowledge and skill articulated in her cookbooks. David not only found pleasure in eating Mediterranean dishes on their native shores, but also found enjoyment in cooking these dishes in England.

Returning home after each of her journeys, she spent hours each day in the kitchen working to recreate the delectable dishes she encountered on her travels. Such cooking clarified her memory. She describes the effect in French Provincial Cooking: "Here in London it is an effort of will to believe in the existence of such a place [as Provence]. But now and again the vision of golden tiles on a round southern roof, or of some warm, stony, herb-scented hillside will rise out of my kitchen pot with the smell of a piece of orange peel scenting a beef stew" (18-19). That the "smell of orange peel scenting a beef stew" could trigger the delightful vision of a Provençal afternoon attests to the fact that David successfully integrated "the French attitude of mind towards" food into her own. She attained a knowledge of French regional dishes as a cultural expression of a bond between a land and its people. This knowledge was housed in her body, so to speak, and traveled back with her to England, where it could be accessed each time she recreated a French regional dish.

David dedicated French Provincial Cooking to Peter Higgins, a man with whom she first became sexually involved in 1949, the year before Mediterranean Food was published. The couple carried on a tumultuous, sporadic affair that lasted fourteen years. Although each of them took other lovers during this period, David developed a strong attachment to Higgins over the course of their affair. David's feelings had grown intense enough by 1960 that she dedicated French Provincial Cooking "To P. H. With Love." Within three years, however, Higgins had become seriously involved with another woman, whom he would eventually marry. Upon learning of their relationship, David went into what her biographer Artemis Cooper describes as a "rage, flinging herself about and hurling things across the room" (Cooper 225). David's fury over what she considered Higgins' betrayal, compounded by long working hours and a weakness for brandy, contributed to a mild stroke. David recovered quickly, but her ability to taste was permanently damaged.[9] Although she returned to work almost immediately writing magazine articles, she did not write another cookbook for seven years.

David confessed in anger to Higgins: "I dedicated [French Provincial Cooking] to you because it was you who provided the conflict and stress which, for such as I, alone make writing possible. For that matter, for better or worse, it was you who were responsible for all my books, right from the beginning. ... It is not, you know, my illness which has stopped me writing. It is the ending of a . . . prolonged torment" (Cooper 234). Although David's passion for Higgins could hardly have been the sole source of inspiration for all her books—she began writing Mediterranean Food, for example, years before she became seriously involved with Higgins—the letter indicates how strongly David relied on romantic inspiration for her creativity. Linking her passion for Higgins (whether love, lust, or fury) to her drive to write, David connects sex, passion, and food writing in much the same way as Fisher.

The dual blow struck by the hemorrhage and Higgins' withdrawal led to David's physical and psychological disengagement; she could no longer immerse herself in another culture to the extent required to write a cookbook on foreign cuisine. She did, however, open a cookery store, Elizabeth David, Ltd. Through the store, David resuscitated her passion for foreign cuisines and channeled it into procuring the best of European cookery equipment; she also continued to write engaging magazine articles. Increasingly, however, she turned to books rather than to travel for her "tasting" knowledge and to inspire the many articles she wrote during this time. She also relied heavily on memory to sample the flavors her tongue could no longer taste. David's eventual return to cookbook writing was inspired, in large part, by her love of language, a passion that replaced Higgins as her muse. Just as Fisher had done before her, David, having lost her lover, found inspiration in the words of her favorite food writers.

After twenty years writing books about Mediterranean, French, and Italian cooking, David wrote Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. This cookbook marked a shift in her focus from foreign to British cuisine. David augmented her natural eye for the most alluring and magical traits of Mediterranean cuisine with the wit and wisdom of her favorite authors, including Hilda Leyel and Eliza Acton. Referring to her stroke in 1963, David states "House-bound after a temporarily incapacitating illness during the early nineteen-sixties, I enjoyed my compulsory leisure re-reading old favourites in my cookery library. . . . Among the authors who came out as sturdy survivors were, predictably, Marcel Boulestin and more surprisingly, Mrs Leyel of Culpeper House fame" (15). This rereading triggered a "moment of comprehension which sparked off a train of thought, an idea. The train of thought has crystallized in [Spices], still incomplete, still not more than a glance into the English preoccupation with the spices and scents, the fruit, the flavourings, the sauces and condiments of the orient, near and far" (20).

David pays tribute to Leyel's influence on her own career by recalling her initial response to the "imagination catching" quality of her Gentle Art of Cookery, musing that Leyel's "'Arabian way of cooking red mullet' sounded irresistible, so much so that even if you barely knew whether a red mullet was a bird, a flower or a fish you very quickly set about finding out" (19). David also drew creative inspiration from Eliza Acton, who wrote Modern Cookery for Private Families before British sauces became "the laughing stock of Europe" (75). Explaining the need to return to earlier authors, David states: "Somewhere along the line we began to confuse good plain cooking with plain bad cooking. At this stage our English melted-butter sauce became . . . billstickers' paste, and on this basis . . . perfectly respectable sauces fell toppling to their ruin. To restore them, we need to go back, far back.... (75). David takes her readers back to 1845, recalling the recipes of Acton's Modern Cookery.

The English kitchen, which she had spurned furiously in her youth, became a logical focus for David's considerable energy. With her capacity to taste compromised, she could no longer depend on her body to register the unfamiliar flavors encountered during travel. Instead, she needed to rely on her memory of flavors previously tasted as well as those authors she found most evocative and inspiring; Leyel's writing evoked the heady spices that flavored the "magical" dishes David had imbibed so readily in Egypt thirty years earlier. David also drew recipes from cookbooks ranging from Robert May's Accomplisht Cook (1660) to Sir Harry Luke's Tenth Muse (1954), relying more heavily on outside sources than she had for any of her previous endeavors.

David devoted her next seven years to research on English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), the last cookbook she completed before her death. This work departs markedly from her previous books in its girth and its weight in scholarship. David had conducted painstaking research for Italian Food, French Provincial Cooking, and Spices, Salts and Aromatics, ending each of these projects with an exhaustive bibliography. Never before, however, had she devoted herself completely to such a narrow focus. Mediterranean Food provided a captivating sketch of a vast region; English Bread and Yeast Cookery offered an exhaustive, unsurpassable reference. No longer writing about exotic ingredients tasted on distant shores, David dove increasingly into the past for her material. She did so with passion and skill.

David also relied increasingly on intellectual, rather than physical, stimulation to feed her drive to write. Strikingly, her final book project, the posthumously published Harvest of Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices, returns to the Middle East, inspired as it was by David's research on "early ice-cream recipes and the links between Levantine sherbets and the sorbets and ices of Europe" (Harvest vii). Harvest provides an exhaustive historical reference, showcasing that David, like Fisher, learned to nourish creativity through her mind's palate in later years.

By restoring their creative inspiration with the words of their favorite food writers, Fisher and David nourished themselves with language much as they had previously fed on the sensual pleasures of eating and sex. Their ability to transform a passion for erotic pleasure into a love affair with words illustrates the power of eating and language to mutually construct one another. Bridging the realm of gastronomy and literature in a way that foregrounds the importance of literary scholarship to the field of food studies, their writing illustrates just one way in which food studies can broaden and deepen our understanding of the embodied pleasures expressed in women's writing.

NOTES

[1]Initially Fisher and her first husband, Al, lived with Dillwyn Parrish in Switzerland. As Parrish and Fisher's passion for one another became increasingly obvious, Al left the couple to return to the United States.

[2] After his death in 1941, Fisher wrote that "Dillwyn was life for me. Life is sex, and sex life." (Life in Letters 85). And although Fisher was eventually remarried and divorced and had many subsequent lovers, she states in an interview conducted forty years after Parrish's death that "if he had lived, I'm sure we'd still be together. He was the love of my life" (Lazar 64).

[3] According to Fisher's biographer, Joan Reardon, the man–woman love Fisher refers to was in actuality a woman–woman love; from 1957 to 1960, Fisher carried on an affair with Marietta Voorhees.

[4]A Cordiall Water was followed by a work solicited by the Wine Institute, The Story of Wine in California. This endeavor, which had been ongoing for eleven years, brought Fisher little satisfaction in its final form; she classified it as one of "those "heavy vulgar meaningless 'gift' books" and expressed regret that her "name [was] on it" (Letters 183).

[5] In "M. F. K. Fisher and the Embodiment of Desire," Julie Campbell quotes this passage, concluding that "[t]his ability to assess a moment, by being in it but not necesarily part of it, and to withdraw from it at will, suggests that Fisher has achieved the foreigner's 'self-confidence of being, of being able to settle within the self with a smooth, opaque certainty' which Kristeva compares to 'an oyster shut under the flooding tide or the expressionless joy of warm stones'" (200). In contrast, I argue that, when examined alongside her eating pleasures, Fisher's 'ghostly' presence in Map of Another Town indicates a troubling disembodiment that attests to disabling psychological pain.

[6] Significantly, the other memoir in which Fisher recounts her travels to France while single, A Considerable Town (1970), is also relatively sparse on alimentary anecdotes, clearly falling into the travel writing.

[7]Although Cooking of Provincial France came out in 1968, it has not been included in the discussion of Fisher's motives as a writer because, like The Story of Wine in California, it was solicited and constricted by an outside source. Commissioned by Time-Life, The Cooking of Provincial France—whose contributors included Elizabeth David and Julia Child—was so heavily edited that Fisher attempted at one point to have her name withdrawn from the project. She found the end result "one more status-symbol of quasi-literacy" (Life in Letters 244).

[8] David did not officially file for divorce until 1958. In the intervening years, she lived on and off with her husband, although she dated the ending of their relationship as occurring in 1949.

[9]While both of David's biographers, Cooper and Chaney, mention her loss of taste, specifically citing her inability to taste salt, the extent to which this impairment extended to the other taste receptors remains vague in their accounting.

Works Cited

Acton, Eliza. Modern Cookery for Private Families. 1845. Lewes, East Sussex: Southover, 1993.

Campbell, Julie D. "M.F.K. Fisher and the Embodiment of Desire: A Study in Autobiography and Food as Metaphor." Biography 20.2 (1997): 181-202.

Cooper, Artemis. Writing at the Kitchen Table : The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David. New York: Ecco. 1999.

David, Elizabeth. English Bread and Yeast Cookery. London: Penguin, 1977.

——. French Country Cooking. 1951. Elizabeth David Classics. New York: Knopf, 1980.

——. French Provincial Cooking. 1960. New York: Penguin, 1999.

——. Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices. Ed. Jill Norman.

1994. New York: Viking, 1995.

——. Italian Food. 1954. New York: Smithmark, 1996.

——. Spices , Salts, and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. 1970. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

Fisher, M. F. K. An Alphabet for Gourmets. 1949. The Macmillan, 1990. 573-744.

——. A Cordiall Water. 1961. San Francsico: North Point, 1981.

——. The Gastronomical Me. 1943. New York: North Point, 1998.

——. How to Cook a Wolf. 1942. The Art of Eating. New York: Macmillan, 1990. 185–350.

——. A Life in Letters. Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997.

——. Map of Another Town. 1964. Two Towns in Provence: Map of Another Town and A Considerable Town. New York: Vintage, 1983

——. Serve it Forth. 1937. The Art of Earing. New York: Macmillan, 1990. 3–121.

——. With Bold Knife and Fork. New York: Paragon Books, 1969.

Lazar, David, ed. Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1992.

Leyel, Hilda and Olga Hartley. The Gentle Art of Cookery Windus, 1983.

Reardon, Joan. Poet of the Appetites. New York: North Point, 2004.

Published in CEA Critic, Vol. 69, pp. 14–24