‘Her writing makes your mouth water.’ — Financial Times

‘Unique among the classics of gastronomic writing . . . a book about adult loss, survival, and love.’ — New York Review of Books

A classic of food writing that redefined the genre, The Gastronomical Me is a memoir of travel, love and loss, but above all hunger.

In 1929 M.F.K. Fisher left America for France, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time. It inspired a prolific career as a food and travel writer. In The Gastronomical Me Fisher traces the development of her appetite, from her childhood in America to her arrival in Europe, where she embarked on a whole new way of eating, drinking, and living. She recounts unforgettable meals shared with an assortment of eccentric characters, set against a backdrop of mounting pre-war tensions.

Here are meals as seductions, educations, diplomacies, and communions, in settings as diverse as a bedsit above a patisserie, a Swiss farm, and cruise liners across oceans. In prose convivial and confiding, Fisher illustrates the art of ordering well, the pleasures of dining alone, and how to eat so you always find nourishment, in both head and heart.

‘Many authors whisper, as though to a diary, or chat, as though to a friend, but Fisher communicates with the heady directness of a lover.’ — Bee Wilson, author of The Way We Eat Now

‘She is not just a great food writer. She is a great writer, full stop.’ — Rachel Cooke, Observer

‘The greatest food writer who has ever lived.’ — Simon Schama

‘Poet of the appetites.’ — John Updike

‘I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.’ — W.H. Auden

M.F. K. Fisher

Books