Love in a Dish . . . and Other Culinary Delights by M.F.K. Fisher

July 1, 2011
Fisher dedicated her literary life to celebration of perfect taste. In this brief anthology, Zimmerman brings together a few of Fisher's short essays. They focus on very specific foods, some of which are too often taken for granted in their superficial banality. But in Fisher's hands, they take on exquisite beauty. Her oft-repeated instructions for scrambling eggs at glacial pace appear here, as does her still-hilarious sketch of her grandmother as the Nervous Stomach and her lifelong attraction to mashed potatoes with ketchup. Fisher was scarcely the first writer to connect the pleasures of food and sex, but she is among the cleverest to do so. Just one full recipe appears, one likely to attract only the most ambitious cook who is gifted enough to confront the challenges of quail in a recklessly rich sauce of cockscombs and truffles.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)