Serve It Forth

Brilliant essays, loosely written on the theme of food.

“WHEN shall we live, if not now?” asked Seneca before a table laid for his pleasure and his friends'. It is a question whose answer is almost too easily precluded. When indeed? We are alive, and now. When else live, and how more pleasantly than supping with sweet comrades?M.F.K. Fisher looks at food in history, sharing some little-known stories of the foods people found and put together to eat, stories of the way a means of sustenance turned into art.Sometimes there were big meals.“Fifty swans, a hundred and ten geese, fifty capons ‘of hie grece' and eight dozen other capons, sixty dozen hens, five herons, six kids and seven dozen rabbits (strange place here for such lively fourlegged wingless little beasts!), five dozen pullets for jelly and some eleven dozen to roast, a hundred dozen peacocks, twenty dozen cranes and curlews, and ‘wilde fowle ynogh.'”Sometimes it was the presentation.Flowers were often used thus by the Middle English, sometimes most fortunately. What could be more ludicrously lovely than a tiny crackled piglet all garlanded with lilies and wild daffodils? Or a baked swan in its feathers, with roses on its proud reptilian head?The stunning changes that resulted from Catherine de Medici's decision to bring her chefs with her from Italy to France. A sad tale of a once-magnificent waiter's last night at the helm. The story of “a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction.”If you call yourself a food reader, this and M.F.K. Fisher's other collections of essays are must-reads. And even if you are not, even if you are simply a lover of great writing, this and Fisher's other works will delight you.