A RECIPE FOR SNOBBERY

On March 14, The Atlantic published an excellent essay by Laura Shapiro called “When Did Following Recipes Become a Personal Failure?” Ostensibly a review of a new book by Sam Sifton, editor of The New York Times Cooking section and the champion of what he calls “no-recipe recipes,” the piece cleverly skewers the current vogue for dismissing recipes as crutches for those home cooks who are too dull-witted to improvise every meal from scratch. Shapiro notes that this type of snobbery has a long lineage and that when cookbook writers like Fannie Farmer began providing precise measurements rather than Sifton-like suggestions, it was a boon to frazzled American housewives. She writes, “That calming effect was one of the reasons why Farmer was such a success as a teacher, lecturer, and writer. Plenty of women were relieved not to be left helpless on the battlefield. Whether or not they were born with a good palate, they could measure half a teaspoon of cinnamon and be reasonably certain it was the right thing to do. Well-meaning but inspired cooks – and believe me, we have been legion since the dawn of time – long for specifics. Our least favorite phrase in the English language is season to taste.”

I’m a sucker for any well-written attempt to deflate pretentiousness and snobbery. But I was surprised to find Shapiro, at one point in the essay, employing M.F.K. Fisher in her anti-snobbery campaign:

“By the ‘60s, even M.F.K. Fisher, the goddess of American food writing who drenched her prose in sensuality and romance, declared that she couldn’t stand recipes that took liberties with the conventional format. ‘The ingredients should be listed in one column or two, rather than in a running sentence, according to the order of their use, and with the exact amount of each ingredient given before its name,’ she ruled.”

This surprised me because, years ago, I made a Herculean effort to read my way through the writings of M.F.K. Fisher – “Mary Frances” to her friends – and was almost defeated by the overwhelming snobbery on display on nearly every page of her work. Why did I persist? Because, like Joan Didion, Fisher is closely associated with Northern California and, also like Didion, many consider her a near faultless prose stylist. As a Northern Californian who loves good writing, I considered myself duty-bound to make myself as acquainted with their works as I am with the works of various well-known male writers with a connection to Northern California: Jack London, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, etc. Alas, my recollection of the work of both Fisher and Didion (whose childhood home – mansion, actually – resides about a mile away from the Sacramento home in which I am writing this piece) was that they were generally better stylists than the abovementioned men, but they were both insufferable snobs. But was I right about that? After all, it has been decades since I slogged my way through Fisher’s gastronomical musings. It was hard for me to imagine her writing something as unsnobbish as the passage quoted by Shapiro. Perhaps my resentment of the fact that Fisher (pictured below) had spent her life at least at the fringes of upper-crust society while constantly claiming to be dirt poor had colored my impression of her writing.

To find out if my long-ago assessment of Fisher had been fair, I took out my copy of The Art of Hunger this morning and began rereading all of the pages and passages that I had marked with Post-It Notes – and there were dozens and dozens of them. The Art of Hunger is a compilation of five of Fisher’s books: Serve It Forth, Consider The Oyster, How To Cook A Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet For Gourmets. After re-reading selected entries in these books I remembered why it was I grew to hate Ms. Fisher: she is a snob, a classist, a narcissist, and a thoroughly unpleasant individual, cruel, dishonest, and one of the nastiest authors I have ever spent time with.

Things get off to a bad start with the very first lines of Serve It Forth, wherein she derogates nearly every food writer who has ever come before her.

There are two kinds of books about eating: those that try to imitate Brillat-Savarin’s, and those that try not to. The first substitute whimsy for his wit, and dull reminiscences for his delightful anecdotes. The second are gross where he would be delicate, and chose blunt statistics rather than his piercing observations.

         And books about what to eat: they too are twins from one source, the first written recipes in our world. They are stodgy, matter-of-fact, covered very practically with washable cloth or gravy-colored paper, beginning with measurements and food values and ending with sections on the care of invalids – oddly enough for books so concerned with hygiene! They are usually German, or English or American.

She goes on and on, excoriating every imaginable type of book about writing excepting, of course, her own. She never gives the names of any of the books she is attacking, so it would have been impossible for the authors to have defended themselves against the charges she leveled. Even in this first page of the first book, her snobbery makes itself felt. She disdains cookbooks bound in washable cloth or gravy-colored paper. These expedients would be quite helpful for housewives who actually use their cookbooks frequently and don’t want them to become so ratty looking as to disgust anyone who finds them lying on the kitchen counter.

But the best examples of Fisher’s snobbishness and all-around unpleasantness can be found in the book titled, with her typical narcissism, The Gastronomical Me (accentuating her narcissism is the fact that just about every other chapter of this book is titled “The Measure of My Powers”). In this book, her favorite words for describing other people are: stupid, vulgar, coarse, fat, mad, and ratlike. Usually these words are reserved for people she considers her social inferiors. In the pages of The Gastronomical Me Fisher describes a man she meets onboard a ship as “a Princetonian Greek…He was unpleasant in a vague way…one night when we were dancing I dismissed him with faint repugnance and no regret from my dream-filled life.” Later she describes her Italian chauffer as “the fat shifty-looking driver.” In France, Fisher and her husband Al live for a time with a landlady who brings in extra money by giving piano lessons. Of this woman, Fisher says, “She was always late for meals, and her students were for the most part young or stupid…She ate like a mad woman, crumbs falling from her mouth, her cheeks bulging, her eyes glistening and darting about the plates and cups and her hands tearing at chunks of meat and crusts of bread…her voice [was] high and deliberately coarse, to mock her prissy husband’s Parisian affectations…Madame had a hard time keeping cooks in the house. They found it impossible to work with her, impossible to work at all. She was quite unable to trust anyone else’s intelligence, and very frank in commenting on the lack of it, always in her highest, most fish-wifish shriek.” Of the eastern European students who attend school with Al Fisher at the University of Dijon, Ms. Fisher writes, “the girls all looked much alike, thick and solemn. They walked silently about the streets, reading guidebooks, in flat broad shoes and a kind of uniform of badly tailored gray-brown suits.” Of course, Fisher being rich and a snob, looks down on anyone who can’t afford to dress as well as she can. She admits that she has only a superficial notion of what these students’ lives are like. “I had not much to do with the student body as such; my own life with Al was too absorbing and complete.” Of a young German student, Klorr, who stays in the same pension as the Fisher’s, M.F.K. writes: “…there was something about the set of his bones that made him seem slight and weak…He had a thin sneering face…He was, I think, the most rat-like human I have ever seen…he threw the napkin at me and ran again down the stairs, as silent as a rat.” Of this student’s girlfriend, Maritza, Fisher writes, “I could tell that she was lonely and envied me for being gay and happy and in love. I was almost completely uninterested in her.” This is a major theme in Fisher’s work: women are always envying her, men always wanting her, waiters and servants are always eager to do her bidding. She stays at restaurants long past their closing times, keeping busboys and waiters from going home, but they don’t mind because, well, she’s just so darn gay and amusing and happy that working people just naturally want to be around her.

Later in the book (in yet another chapter entitled “The Measure of my Powers”), we are introduced to Fisher’s new landlords, the Rigagniers. These people are so generous to the Fishers that “we ate and drank much more every month than we paid for.” With her typical disdain for menial laborers, Fisher informs us that Madame Rigagnier was helped out in the kitchen by “a series of numb orphan slaveys.” Curiously, though Madame Rigagnier is so generous towards the Fishers that she eventually faces financial ruin, Fisher describes the woman as “spoiled,” and says of both Rigagniers: “They were both so unthinking, so generous, so stupid.” (Surely no one will ever describe Ms. Fisher as generous.) Of Madame Rigagnier again, she says, “She was not at all attractive physically. She neglected her person, mainly because she gave every ounce of her time and energy to feeding us. She was so bedraggled and shiny and often smelled. And, what is even more distasteful, she was needlessly ailing. Such a state is repulsive to me. She had really violent monthly headaches which were, even to my ill-trained eye, pure bilious attacks. For three or four days she would stagger from stove to table and back again, cooking and then eating with the same concentrated fervor as always, while her eyes were almost mad with pressure, and her face was gray.” It never occurs to Fisher, a spoiled daughter of the American upper class, to refuse to accept Madame’s generosity during these periods of physical travail and insist that she get some rest. And yet it is Madame Rigagnier whom Fisher describes as “a horrible snob…a stupid woman, and an aggravating one…[with] a mind perhaps ten or eleven years old.” Of the Rigagnier’s oldest son Dede, Fisher writes, “a surly oafish boy, with thick outlines and small eyes like his father’s. He openly hated the way his mother had to work, and was the only one of the family who ever seemed to resent our presence…He was a boor…” Of the Rigagnier’s younger son Plume, Fisher says that he was “like a monkey, with the same bright inhuman gaze.” Near the end of the chapter Fisher grows nostalgic for the Rigagnier family. She says that she thinks often of the eldest daughter Doudouce “and of Plume…and of my poor stupid friend their mother…” It goes without saying that, with friends like Fisher, the Rigagnier’s hardly needed enemies.

Of the stall-keepers in one market town, Fisher writes “[they were] tough loud-mouthed people…” Fisher is always at her nastiest when describing provincial locals or working people. When hosting a dinner for some of her neighbors in Dijon, she refuses to follow the French system of providing a half dozen or so different courses. She tells her husband Al, “Let them try eating two or three things, I said, so plentiful and so interesting and so well cooked that they will be satisfied. And if they aren’t satisfied, let them stay away from our table, and our leisurely comfortable friendship at that table.

“I talked like that, and it worried Al a little, because he had been raised in a minister’s family and taught that the most courteous way to treat guests was to make them feel as if they were in their own homes.” Fisher finds this commonsense notion laughable. Her husband Al, naturally enough, seems to make a lot more friends than Fisher herself, which tends to infuriate Fisher. She is invariably nasty when describing Al’s friends. Of Jean Matruchot she writes: “He was a misanthrope…a fat Voltaire…a passionately cold man, the kind who wants to be disliked…”

Fisher almost always has good things to say about herself, however. She says that for two and a half years she and Al amazed the faculty of the University of Dijon by being so much better than any other Americans who had ever come to the University there. The faculty, she says, “watched us, and observed to their cynical amazement that we were breaking every precedent established by former American students: we stayed; we didn’t get drunk; Al actually worked hard enough to be awarded a degree, and I actually let other men alone, in spite of wearing the same color lipstick as the upper-bracket broads… ‘They really seem charming,’ people whispered about us in the discreetest drawing rooms of Dijon. ‘Lunch? A small dinner?’ Suddenly we were like catnip…the closed doors swung open, and we found ourselves drowning in a sea of Burgundy’s proudest vintages, Rheims’ sparkle, Cognac’s fire. Snails, pates, qeunelles de brochet; always a great fish in toto on a platter; venison and pheasants in a dozen rich brown odorous baths; intricate ices and well-laced beaten creams…and all of them served to the weighty tune of polite conversation, part condescending and part awed: it was too much for us.”

When the Fisher’s decide to suddenly depart Dijon on the midnight train (all that awe and hospitality on the part of the locals was beginning to wear them out), a friend of Al’s shows up to say goodbye just as the train is leaving. The friend is “Paul de Torcy, little hunchbacked Paul, who adored Al…Paul loved Al more than any of them [the Dijonaisse]…Paul hated me. Paul’s drunken father had thrown him down the chateau steps when he was little. And there he was running desperately along the platform, his great head with its sunken temples rolled back against his hump. How had he learned that we were fleeing? What suspicions hissed behind his wild pleading eyes? He was weeping, glaring up at Al, and without wanting to, God knows, we began to laugh, there in the hastening train, in our own safety and warmth. We stood in the window looking down at Paul and laughing, because his eyes, so enormous and hopeless, looked like the eyes of the planked turbot we had been served so few hours before at dinner. The turbot lay regally on its linen couch, bedecked with citrons and fresh herbs. Paul, more alive, ran crazily along the gray platform, unadorned. But their eyes, their great deep glassy eyes, were the same eyes, wild and full of a mute adoration and a terrible humility. We kept on laughing…” It seems unlikely to me that Al, who isn’t as food-obsessed as his wife, noticed any similarity between Paul’s eyes and the turbot’s dead gaze. I think Fisher is lying here. I think she was laughing alone. She probably incriminated her husband only to mitigate her own guilt.

At any rate, the train takes the couple to Strasbourg where Al finds them an apartment in a run-down section of town. A short while later, after Al has served her the best tamale pie that has ever been made, Fisher breaks down and cries uncontrollably. She can no longer stand to live in an apartment where, every day, for five minutes or so, she has to put up with the sight and sound of an elderly beggar couple tapping blindly down the cobblestone streets in front of her window. Of course she is too discreet to mention her distaste for these people directly to Al, but she bursts into hysterics and remains inconsolable until Al finally agrees to move them to a better part of town. As Fisher puts it, “Finally we counted all our money, decided we could not possibly afford to move, and next day went bag and baggage to the most expensive pensionin the city.” The Pension Eliza is, in fact, so swanky that even the Polish ambassador lives there. At last, Fisher is back in the world of the rich and pampered which is her birthright. She has a very odd notion of what it means to not be able to afford something. Again and again she cries poverty, but she never seems to have to deny herself anything she really wants – or even sort of wants.

Fisher is so rich that she is almost completely oblivious of the Depression taking place in America during the course of her world traveling. In her 2005 film Jesus Is Magic, comedian Sarah Silverman spoofs the self-absorbed cluelessness of certain rich and pampered American women by noting that September 11, 2001 was a truly tragic day for her because it was the day she discovered that her favorite chai latte drink had, like, 600 calories in it. Fisher, without Silverman’s irony, says at one point, “In 1929, the stock market crashed, and I married for the first time and traveled into a foreign land across an ocean. All those things affected me, and the voyage perhaps most.”

During the late ‘20s and early to mid-1930s Fisher crosses the Atlantic numerous times aboard ocean liners that she invariably describes as barely seaworthy rusty tubs but which I tend to believe were probably rather luxurious (most of them are small and have a very limited number of passengers, all of whom seem to be upper-class people). Fisher never has to worry about money because her wealthy family frequently sends her all she needs from their home in California. The book is filled with offhand observations such as, “…my father and mother…gave me a large letter of credit…” and “My mother, who believed in the ‘niceness’ of the Cunard line almost as firmly as she approved of The Forsyte Saga, sent me a passage to New York from Cherbourg on one of the lesser liners…” and “Near the end of that summer I went back to France, convinced to my own bitter satisfaction that I did not agree with my family about at least one thing: my mother’s theory, generously supported with tickets and traveling allowances, that it does wives and husbands good to take long vacations from each other.” And, “…Father and Mother stopped calling me unstable, scatterbrained, and profligate long enough to tuck a letter of credit [and] several trunk checks” into my hand.

Despite the fact that she doesn’t have to pay for any of her voyages, she always finds plenty to complain about: “This was back before trains were air-conditioned, of course, but we had a compartment.” “The captain [of the Feltre] was a young fat man with impersonal eyes which should have been full of light. I felt that he resented and disliked passengers…which gave me an uncomfortable sense of insecurity.” “Our cabin boy was a pale blond boy named Luigi, who shook with embarrassment when we spoke to him, and had a very strong smell.” “The captain [of the Hansa] was small and fat…and was quite candid about liking to get drunk in the bar every night.”

Naturally, even at sea Fisher can’t avoid being adored by just about everyone she meets. “I watched a beautiful girl fall into pieces in the seven days. I heard her cry out for love of me, and saw ten famous brewers on a Good Will tour to Milwaukee pour champagne between her breasts…” Another passenger, a little old lady, is described as “somewhat of a tosspot” overprotected by her late husband “to the point of imbecility…She was spoiled and foolish and boring.” Of another fellow passenger, an elderly Scottish schoolteacher, Fisher writes that she was like “a gaunt gray-faced bean-pole.” Of the steward on one voyage, Fisher writes: “He was the crankiest man I have ever met. He was dreadfully bent with arthritis, so that until we grew used to him it was active pain for us as well as him to order a bottle of beer and have him shuffle along the deck with it.” It never seems to have occurred to Fisher to spare this poor old man the agony of serving her by getting off her rich pampered ass and fetching her own damn beer.

As you can see, Fisher is particularly disgusted by fat people. After she has left Al, and she and her new lover have moved into an expensive Swiss estate, she writes about a party where an old Swiss judge “drank a special little toast to his fat wife.” And she seems positively maniacal on the subject of working-class people’s body odor. Of one restaurant busboy, she writes: “A rat-like boy darted out [of the kitchen], ducking his head and grinning shyly as he passed us. I refused to look at Chexbres [her lover du jour], for I knew that he had smelled, as I had, alas, that faint trail of bad air following after the scullion like the silver of a snail…”

Fisher is especially hard on other women and on servants. When the servants happen to be women, she is hardest of all. When Fisher was a child she spent much time at her grandmother’s house. The grandmother had a cook named Ora. We are told that the grandmother hated Ora and often refused to eat a meal that Ora had slaved over all day because she thought Ora’s food was too fancy. At every meal the grandmother belched out loud to express her disdain for Ora’s cooking. The grandmother had a hairdresser who came to the house every Saturday morning. The grandmother talked so vilely about Ora that the hairdresser refused to pass through the kitchen of the house on the way to her hair-dressing appointment. The grandmother had talked the hairdresser into hating Ora as much as the grandmother did. Fisher and her sisters loved Ora’s cooking, but their mother forbade them from offering the cook compliments, because it was unseemly for a child to speak with a mere servant. One day, according to Fisher, Ora went crazy and murdered her own mother with a kitchen knife before slashing her own wrists and throat in a successful suicide effort. Fisher doesn’t examine Ora’s motives for this terrifying behavior. She doesn’t speculate on how her own family might have been responsible for making Ora’s life so awful that a murder/suicide seemed preferable than to go on living. All Fisher tells us, after the death of “mad Ora” is that she and her sister “were depressed. The way of dying was of only passing interest to us at our ages, but our inevitable return to ordinary sensible plain food was something to regret.” That is classic Fisher: insensitive, cruel, nasty, and self-absorbed to a positively psychotic degree. Mad Ora, indeed. More like Mad Mary Frances, if you ask me.

Also described as “mad” is a young servant girl whom Fisher hires in northern Burgundy one spring. This girl tries so hard to anticipate Fisher’s every need and satisfy her every gastronomic desire, that Fisher calls her “mad” and complains that she suffers from “victimization” at the hands of a girl who is merely trying to keep her mistress happy and remain employed.

These days, Fisher is revered as a goddess (to use Shapiro’s term) among the MFA crowd and the literary elite. Which is odd, because she possessed a positively Trumpian disdain for handicapped people, working people, the uneducated and the unwashed. Also like Trump, self-regard and victimhood ooze in equal parts from practically her every utterance. Given our current cultural moment, when right-thinking (which is to say left-thinking) liberals are tripping over themselves to signal their allyship with the downtrodden, you’d think an elitist snob like Fisher would be rife for cancellation by the anti-Seussian crowd (something I am not endorsing, mind you). What’s more, Fisher herself, though sexually fluid, was hardly an ally to the LGBQT crowd of her own day. In a glowing review of a new edition of The Gastronomical Me that appeared in The Guardian in May of 2017, journalist Kathryn Hughes, wrote: 

And then there is the queerest of queer chapters, “Feminine Ending”. By now Fisher has wound up in Mexico where her younger brother, David, and his wife are living. David has become obsessed with the lead singer in a local mariachi band, a small monkeyish man with a “wild, cracked” voice who seems equally breathless for David. The moment Fisher sees Juanito she knows that he is biologically a woman. It is the second time that she has felt called on to perform such an unmasking. She tells us how, as a teenager taken to her father’s newspaper office, she pointed out that the star typesetter was not a regular guy but a cross-dressing woman. Mary Frances (the run-together Christian names by which she was always known hint at her own doubleness) is clearly drawn to the inbetween.

If you are an admirer of Fisher’s you might argue that Fisher may have been an unpleasant person but she was nonetheless a fine writer. There are plenty of male writers, such as H.L. Mencken, who were insufferable snobs, sexists, racists, anti-Semites, and so forth and whose writings are still admired. So why should we dismiss Fisher as a writer just because she had a few bad habits? Well, we shouldn’t dismiss her as a writer. Like Mencken, she was a decent but, in my opinion, highly overrated writer. But, unlike with Mencken, few reviewers ever mention her utter unpleasantness. She’s just dear sweet old Mary Francis, beloved by everyone from James Beard and Julia Child to W.H. Auden and Maya Angelou. I think this is extremely unfair and downright dishonest. The woman was an unpleasant crank and it ought to be acknowledged as publicly and as candidly as Mencken’s anti-Semitism has been.