M. F. K. Fisher Quotes

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

Family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.

I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.

since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.

Sharing our meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations.

I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best.

A well-made Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.

Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak.

I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment.

There is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.

All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realization of life, whether they are rich or poor.

Central heating, French rubber goods and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man's ingenuity in transforming necessity into art, and, of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful.

In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them...it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.

In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us.

We are ignorant of flavour. We are as a nation taste-blind.

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.

Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.

There are may of us who cannot but feel dismal about the future of various cultures. Often it is hard not to agree that we are becoming culinary nitwits, dependent upon fast foods and mass kitchens and megavitamins for our basically rotten nourishment.

When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it . . . and it is all one.

Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.

Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat.

Salad is roughage and a French idea.

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.

A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet.

It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it

. . . gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hill side; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people . . . dining in a good home.

gastronomy is and always has been connected with its sister art of love.

Digestion is one of the most delicately balanced of all human and perhaps angelic functions.

Or you can broil the meat, fry the onions, stew the garlic in the red wine.

..and ask me to supper. I'll not care, really, even if your nose is a little shiny, so long as you are self-possessed and sure that wolf or no wolf, your mind is your own and your heart is another's and therefore in the right place.

In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love or very alone.

This is not that, and that is certainly not this, and at the same time an oyster stew is not stewed, and although they are made of the same things and even cooked almost the same way, an oyster soup should never be called a stew, nor stew soup.

A pleasant aperitif, as well as a good chaser for a short quick whiskey, as well again for a fine supper drink, is beer.

...I prefer not to have among my guests two people or more, of any sex, who are in the first wild tremours of love. It is better to invite them after their new passion has settled, has solidified into a quieter reciprocity of emotions. (It is also a waste of good food, to serve it to new lovers.)

A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom.

There's a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.

For me, a plain baked potato is the most delicious one....It is soothing and enough.

At present, I myself do not know of any local witches or warlocks, but there are several people who seem to have an uncanny power over food.

I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world.

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.

Talleyrand said that two things are essential in life: to give good dinners and to keep on fair terms with women. As the years pass and fires cool, it can become unimportant to stay always on fair terms either with women or one's fellows, but a wide and sensitive appreciation of fine flavours can still abide with us, to warm our hearts.

When a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims.

At six years old his very bowels will heave when such a dish as creamed carrots or cold tapioca appear before him.

I like old people when they have aged well.

And old houses with an accumulation of sweet honest living in them are good. And the timelessness that only the passing of Time itself can give to objects both inside and outside the spirit is a continuing reassurance.

There is a mistaken idea, ancient but still with us, that an overdose of anything from fornication to hot chocolate will teach restraint by the very results of its abuse.

People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.

... there can be no more shameless carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself.

One ... aspect of the case for World War II is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about daily living which is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words.

On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell.