M. F. K. Fisher Quotes

It Is Hard And Perhaps Impossible For Many People To Recognize The Difference Between Innocence And Naiveté.

In Spite Of My Conviction That A Group Of Deliberately Assembled Relatives Can Be One Of The Dullest, If Not Most Dangerous, Gatherings In The World, I Am Smugly Foolhardly Enough To Have Invited All My Available Family, More Than Once, To Dine With Me.

It Must Not Simply Be Taken For Granted That A Given Set Of Ill-assorted People, For No Other Reason Than Because It Is Christmas, Will Be Joyful To Be Reunited And To Break Bread Together.

As For The House, It Is Scrubbed To The Tiniest Mousehole Before Passover, To Avoid Such Dangers As Even A Forgotten Cake Crumb Might Cause. Passover Dishes Are Probably The Most Interesting Of Any In The Jewish Cuisine Because Of The Lack Of Leaven And The Resulting Challenge To Fine Cooks.... Everything Is Doubly Rich, As If To Compensate For The Lack Of Leaven... [w]oes Are Forgotten In The Pleasures Of The Table, For If The Mosaic Laws Are Rightly Followed, No Man Need Fear True Poison In His Belly, But Only The Results Of His Own Gluttony.

Dictionaries Are Always Fun, But Not Always Reassuring.

Between The Ages Of Twenty And Fifty, John Doe Spends Some Twenty Thousand Hours Chewing And Swallowing Food, More Than Eight Hundred Days And Nights Of Steady Eating. The Mere Contemplation Of This Fact Is Upsetting Enough.

A Potato Is A Poor Thing, Poorly Treated. More Often Than Not It Is Cooked In So Unthinking And Ignorant A Manner As To Make One Feel That It Has Never Before Been Encountered In The Kitchen.

... Living Out Of Sight Of Any Shore Does Rich And Powerfully Strange Things To Humans.

... Most Bereaved Souls Crave Nourishment More Tangible Than Prayers: They Want A Steak. What Is More, They Need A Steak. Preferably They Need It Rare, Grilled, Heavily Salted, For That Way It Is Most Easily Digested, And Most Quickly Turned Into The Glandular Whip Their Tired Adrenals Cry For.

Brioches Are A Light, Pale Yellow, Faintly Sweet Kind Of Muffin With A Characteristic Blob On Top, Rather Like A Mushroom Just Pushing Crookedly Through The Ground. Once Eaten In Paris, They Never Taste As Good Anywhere Else.

War Is A Beastly Business, It Is True, But One Proof We Are Human Is Our Ability To Learn, Even From It, How Better To Exist

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.