Gastronomers abroad

Along with a lovely, culinary-minded friend (and with the aid of this wonderful book) I spent my four months in Paris in search of what we called (only half-jokingly) "gastronomical adventures." These led us to creamy, fragrant, Italian gelatos; to crisp warm goat cheese served on tangles of green salad in iconic French bistros; to those heavenly, pillowy, marvelous, multicolored confections known as macarons; to the tartest, tangiest, Provençal tomates sechées (sundried tomatoes) and the crusty, fresh, French grandmother-made baguettes that accompanied them; and even to little hidden gems in our own residential neighborhood, from a tucked-away "soup boutique" to an Algerian pâtisserie famous for its honey-drenched, pistachio-studded baklava.

And people wonder why I miss it so much.

If said friend and I had had a patron saint on our quests, then M.F.K. Fisher, the early 20th-century food writer and poet-in-prose, would undoubtedly have been it. Although her writing is chiefly about food, equally as important are the people and memories associated with it, whether they are in Whittier, California (her hometown) or the south of France, where she lived and worked. In As They Were (one of many collections of her prose), she weaves these into little sensory vignettes ranging from cottage life in Provence to a hotel in Dijon that pipes wine directly into the rooms (chilled white before breakfast, bold red before bed--only in France!) to the "third or fourth best apple tart of [her] life." Her beautifully-constructed prose has a spiky edge, allowing her to avoid the kind of goopy sentimentalism that often plagues these sorts of memoirs. And it is carefree, worrying very little about tomorrow or yesterday, but always living very decidedly in the present, and living well indeed: the biggest concern is where the next gastronomical adventure will take place.