A Taste of the Hand-Made Life

Today's chefs and food writers have found a huge popular audience. But writers like Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher delight me far more than their contemporary apprentices. That's mostly because, although they shared a fascination with food, Child and Fisher lived unique, hand-made lives built one original decision at a time.

Julia Child's biography is nicely detailed in her books and in the film "Julie and Julia". What enchants me about her life is the way she allowed a passion for French cooking to drive her other career decisions. By following her impulse to master French cuisine -- and share that expertise with an American audience -- she created a whole genre of culinary writing which has stood the test of time. Julia also lived an incredibly satisfying life without yielding to pressure to dilute her ideas on how to cook, write, or live. Even in TV shows made at the end of her life, Julia Child bubbled with enthusiasm and authentic charm.

M.F.K. Fisher also fashioned a writing career around the love of eating. But unlike Chef Child, she focused on the way food binds families and people together. Her writing reflects a glimmering literary sensibility that lures you into a meal by way of innuendo and luscious metaphor. Here is a paragraph Fisher wrote about her first childhood meal in a restaurant: "There was no mention of milk to drink but instead we lifted the tall goblets of forbidden ice water waveringly to our lips, and looked up over them at the pink rose nodding in a silver vase between us and the world. There may have been other things to eat, but the chafing-dish chicken is all my sister and I can remember now, and of course the wonderful waiter who kept on remembering us too, after that first hushed luncheon." By the end of this piece, you feel like you've not only eaten a lovely meal, but traveled back to misty, mythical meals from your own childhood.

Like Julia Child, MFK Fisher began to write about food in an era when expectations about women's lives did not include roaming the globe, eating odd foods, and writing about the experience. Fisher had several husbands. She left the first one and the second died of a rare disease. Even with two young daughters to raise, she continued to seek ways to keep travelling and maintain her unique career as a gastronomic writer. Today her essays on food set the gold standard by which we might judge all Cooking Channel poseurs.

Although I love to cook and sample great food, the food writing business is an extraordinarily difficult one to enter. At last year's conference of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, editors at a food writing workshop told writers that it is nearly impossible to get a cook book published if you don't already have a cooking show. Imagine how Julia Child or M.F.K. Fisher would have reacted to that message! Perhaps we'd never have learned how to make a proper Boeuf Bourguignon or savor Fisher-style meals of mussels steamed on fresh seaweed over hot coals. On second thought, considering the obstacles they faced in their day, maybe they would have gone ahead and self-published their writing, hoping a hungry audience would find them one day.