It’s not about food at all.Īnother example from the same work, though I could easily choose another. You see it? You see the difference between Fisher and every single other food writer in her genre, her brilliance and subtlety, a critique of a society and class and feminine sexuality and the very circles in which Ozersky undoubtedly moves. You miss that icy crust between what’s cold and what’s hot, what’s old and what’s new, what’s acceptable and what’s deviant.
You miss that? You see Fisher as stultifying, dead inside, stuck on an Elderhostel tour. So I as the professor, vicariously through these youngsters, get that pleasure again and again: what is happening here? Did we miss something? What are these hot glances and melting touches and tears and intemperate bravado – all hot, hot feelings in this piece that’s supposed to be about chilled shellfish, passed on a tray by servants in white gloves? It’s the pleasure of reading. I teach it to college freshmen from time to time and they never get it because they read skimmingly and trippingly, if at all. It turns out, instead, to be about a dark, passionate, illicit underbelly of life that’s nearly Joycean in scope, one that the reader and narrator just get a glimpse of and then it’s gone again. It’s like being stuck on a bus next to somebody’s grandmother for five hours.įisher’s autobiographical The Gastronomical Me (1943) includes the one of my favorite personal essays in the entire world, a tale of Fisher’s first oyster in 1924 that’s so cold and awkward and strange and familiar to those of us who have shivered in the New Yorker unhappy WASP narrative forever and ever and ever so much it’s like a family diamond or that first icy sip of a martini in a posh bar, and yet it’s warm and messy, oozy around the edges, going bad. Fisher, I’m like, ‘OK, you’re dead inside.’ That kind of writing is so stultifying. When somebody tells me that their favourite food writer is M.F.K. It used to be that all food writers wrote the same.
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