Serve It Forth Book

Not the knock-me-off-my-feet tour de force I had been led to believe I would experience with MFK Fisher. Perhaps, this being her first outing, she had not found her voice yet, although I find that hard to believe because she is nothing in this book if not self-assured. I think the mix of topics she writes about has to be the issue, because her style seems fully present. There were many essays about food history, but they, for the most part, bordered on fiction, as they tended to gloss over any real events and lacked any sense of having been researched. On the other hand, the essays about her own personal experiences were the highlight, and every now and then you can feel yourself in the time and place she describes, whether it's in an old favorite restaurant with an old favorite waiter, or outside catching snails.

This book struck me more as evidence of how far the food world has come in the past century. It seems obvious that the height of food culture in her day has come and gone in ours. Fusion and experimentation has replaced French haute cuisine as the apex of culinary mastery, and the variety of fresh ingredients available today has put a cover of dust over the old classics. In any case, the book was short, well-written, and there were enough real moments of human experience in Serve It Forth to not put me off reading another of her books.