Quotes by M.F.K. Fisher

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.

There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

Perhaps they should feel this safe sand blow away so that their heads are uncovered for a time, so that they will have to taste not only the solid honesty of my red borscht, but the new flavor of the changing world.

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

put Rachel facing the door, in a faint subtle effort to make her know that if he had only had enough money and had managed to finish the thesis, he might well have asked her to be his hostess and share her life with him.

Inwardly, though, she was blown empty by a giant breath, and while they stood waiting for Mr. Henshaw to tie up the Clara she knew that she would never be the same poor, ignorant woman of an hour ago. She would be poor, all right, and she would be ignorant and she would be a woman, but never in the same ways.

I let myself exist mainly through my children... [but] I could not even guess at the lives my children led.

I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert the reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and wars fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.

I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless....

...after rare beef and wine, when the lobes turn red, was the time to ask favours or tell bad news.

Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken.

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight...[Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the worlds sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour ofmeditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

First we eat, then we do everything else.

I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.

There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.

Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years theyve lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat - and drink! - with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.

You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is likefeathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!