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Serve it Forth
Hardcover. Book Very Good. Jacket Good.
Hardcover
First published June 1, 1937
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About the author
M.F.K. Fisher
85 books501 followersMary Frances Kennedy Fisher was a prolific and well-respected writer, writing more than 20 books during her lifetime and also publishing two volumes of journals and correspondence shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books deal primarily with food, considering it from many aspects: preparation, natural history, culture, and philosophy. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored the art of living as a secondary theme in her writing. Her style and pacing are noted elements of her short stories and essays.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews
December 27, 2010
PREFATORY DIGRESSION:
I was (and still am) a huge Chronicles of Narnia fan. I would re-read those suckers yearly. They are the first books where I remember wanting to eat what the characters are eating. The word "delicious" is used a lot. There's a point in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where the children are hiding with the beaver family in this little cave. Of course it's all winter outside. It goes like this:
So, the combination of having a voice described as pale (I LOVED that) and the minute description of how the delicious liquid affected the children, and the closeness of the cave combined with the coldness of the world outside meant that I conflated it all so that my personal mental conception of the word "delicious" is that of waking very early and warm in a dark cave and biting through the thinnest layer of ice possible so that it melts in your mouth and slakes your thirst.
WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THAT
M.F.K Fischer's book is delicious. Now you know exactly what I mean when I say that.
It is full of small, wonderfully-described personal stories like the one I just told. But better! Each chapter is like a little hard candy of a story that begs savoring. But I ended up crunching them all quickly. Luckily I own the book so I can go back.
I was (and still am) a huge Chronicles of Narnia fan. I would re-read those suckers yearly. They are the first books where I remember wanting to eat what the characters are eating. The word "delicious" is used a lot. There's a point in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where the children are hiding with the beaver family in this little cave. Of course it's all winter outside. It goes like this:
"'Wherever is this?'" said Peter's voice, sounding tired and pale in the darkness. (I hope you know what I mean by a voice sounding pale.)
"...[It was] just a hole in the ground but dry and earth. It was very small so that when they all lay down they were all a bundle of clothes together, and what with that and being warmed up by their long walk they were really rather snug.... Then Mrs. Beaver handed round in the dark a little flask out of which everyone drank something--it made one cough and splutter a little and stung the throat, but it also mad eyou feel deliciously warm after you'd swallowed it--and everyone went straight to sleep."
So, the combination of having a voice described as pale (I LOVED that) and the minute description of how the delicious liquid affected the children, and the closeness of the cave combined with the coldness of the world outside meant that I conflated it all so that my personal mental conception of the word "delicious" is that of waking very early and warm in a dark cave and biting through the thinnest layer of ice possible so that it melts in your mouth and slakes your thirst.
WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THAT
M.F.K Fischer's book is delicious. Now you know exactly what I mean when I say that.
It is full of small, wonderfully-described personal stories like the one I just told. But better! Each chapter is like a little hard candy of a story that begs savoring. But I ended up crunching them all quickly. Luckily I own the book so I can go back.
July 12, 2019
Worth it for "César" alone, hidden at the back of this volume, which amounts more to the feeling and form of a short story than that of an essay, as many great essays do, and is an exceedingly strange and beautiful piece of writing.
February 8, 2015
“If Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality.” May it be filled too, one might add, with fine writing like this. Serve it Forth is such a delightful read, full of surprising ideas and sentences. The chapter “The Standing and the Waiting” is quite simply one of the finest things I’ve ever read - unique, affecting, unforgettable. Five stars for that alone.
October 12, 2015
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.
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.
February 23, 2011
I have read some strange recipes in my day - Roman condiments made from the juice of rotten fish, the front half of a capon sewed to the back half of a suckling pig (lest your dinner guests get bored), mellified man - but what follows is one of the weirdest, because, WTF England?
This is for a beverage supposedly drunk in England between, say, 1100 and 1450 AD.
"To make Cock Ale," instructs one ancient recipe reprinted in 1736 in Smith's Compleat Housewife , "take ten gallons of ale and a large cock, the older the better. Parboil the cock, flea him, and stamp him in a stone mortar until his bones are broken. You must craw and gut him when you flea him. Put him into two quarts of sack, and put to it 3 pounds of raisins of the sun stoned, some blades of mace, and a few cloves.
"Put all these into a canvas bag, and a little while before you find the ale has done working, put the ale and bag together into a vessel. In a week or 9 days' time bottle it up, fill the bottles but just above the necks, and leave the same to ripen as other ale."
What?
This is for a beverage supposedly drunk in England between, say, 1100 and 1450 AD.
"To make Cock Ale," instructs one ancient recipe reprinted in 1736 in Smith's Compleat Housewife , "take ten gallons of ale and a large cock, the older the better. Parboil the cock, flea him, and stamp him in a stone mortar until his bones are broken. You must craw and gut him when you flea him. Put him into two quarts of sack, and put to it 3 pounds of raisins of the sun stoned, some blades of mace, and a few cloves.
"Put all these into a canvas bag, and a little while before you find the ale has done working, put the ale and bag together into a vessel. In a week or 9 days' time bottle it up, fill the bottles but just above the necks, and leave the same to ripen as other ale."
What?
January 3, 2018
This is not nearly as polished as Fisher's Consider the Oyster, which is my favourite of hers. This one is earlier, in fact her first published book, and it is patchy. In places she writes with a pretentious mock-scholarly tone which is nonsense. But in other places her raw talent as a writer (WH Auden apparently considered her the best writer in America) shines through. The short story, "Standing and Waiting," is absolutely singular; one of the greatest pieces of short narrative I've ever read. After reading three of her books (plus her translation of Brillat-Savarin), Fisher has moved into "collectable" for me. She's got a couple of dozen titles to her name; I imagine I'll be reviewing more of them here in months and years to come.
May 21, 2023
I read this book many years ago and am very glad to have picked it up again at this age. From the early chapter, "When a Man is Small" through 'The Standing and the Waiting", (with her memorable character Chexbres, who stayed in my memory through the intervening years) to the final chapter, "César" she proves why she is much more than a 'food writer' but truly a 'great writer'. God was she smart! Her perspective is one that stands the test of time. In this transient world that seems to ditch classicism and the eternally valuable with every post on social media platforms I found it vital and culturally broadening to read her work again.
May 29, 2017
Some lovely chapters that exemplify the charming and thoughtful prose I associate with Fisher, but also a fair few chapters that left me wanting more. I wouldn't hold this up as a great example of her talent but for any lover of her writing there are plenty of wonderful passages that make this a book worth reading
January 19, 2010
I am a little bit in love with her.
November 22, 2022
Meh. I liked Fisher's attitude toward food (and share it): keep it simple. My preference is for the one main ingredient recipe. The latest penchant for what I call "baroque cooking" is an abomination. (I made the mistake of buying Half-Baked Harvest written by one of the cool new "baroque" cooks and the piling-on of ingredients was quite awful.) But I wasn't keen on Fisher's snobby voice, or her mistaken sense of her own profundity.
January 28, 2022
"If Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and the embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality."
February 1, 2022
The more I read the more I think she's the best writer ever.
July 31, 2021
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.
“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.
January 28, 2017
I read MFK Fisher's book The Gatronomical Me, about a year ago and ~loved~ it. To me this one is more like a report done for a class, with the occasional chapter of her heartfelt, delicious writing interspersed. My library book group ended up with this title because we wanted something by her, and this was the only one in stock at our distributor's warehouse. It's not bad, it's just feels like a first book, which it is. I'll very happily go on reading her later works, and glad to have gotten this one out of the way.
August 6, 2020
MFK Fisher is celebrated as one of the greatest writers about food. As someone that likes good books and good food. This collection of observations about food hit the sweet spot for me. Fisher is a superb stylist who writes brilliantly and tartly about food and the consumers of food human beings.
Fisher clearly believed that life should be celebrated and that good food and good conversation were civilizing and splendid. I look forward to reading more of her work.
Note I also read Fisher’s Consider the Oyster a very brief tribute to oysters and the people who eat them I love oysters and order them frequently. My preference is raw oysters but Fisher has me ready to order up some oyster stew at the grand central oyster bar in NYC when the time comes.
This short read may be too precise and have too many recipes for most readers.
Fisher clearly believed that life should be celebrated and that good food and good conversation were civilizing and splendid. I look forward to reading more of her work.
Note I also read Fisher’s Consider the Oyster a very brief tribute to oysters and the people who eat them I love oysters and order them frequently. My preference is raw oysters but Fisher has me ready to order up some oyster stew at the grand central oyster bar in NYC when the time comes.
This short read may be too precise and have too many recipes for most readers.
July 4, 2022
To be honest, I'm not sure if this rating is quite fair, but my reading experience really was quite mediocre.
The writing itself is lovely, but this book is just jam-packed with historic inaccuracies. Maybe some of the inaccuracies are historic facts that were revealed after Fisher's time. But in general, I felt like this book was filled with a lot of pop culture history, such as "the Romans had special rooms they puked into between courses," that aren't really grounded in fact.
Overall, this book had some nice anecdotes surrounded by a lot of inaccurate nonsense. Yes, that feels sacrilegious to say, when Fisher is one of the preeminent food authors and I have so much respect for her. But I was really disappointed by how many inaccuracies this book contained.
The writing itself is lovely, but this book is just jam-packed with historic inaccuracies. Maybe some of the inaccuracies are historic facts that were revealed after Fisher's time. But in general, I felt like this book was filled with a lot of pop culture history, such as "the Romans had special rooms they puked into between courses," that aren't really grounded in fact.
Overall, this book had some nice anecdotes surrounded by a lot of inaccurate nonsense. Yes, that feels sacrilegious to say, when Fisher is one of the preeminent food authors and I have so much respect for her. But I was really disappointed by how many inaccuracies this book contained.
June 27, 2022
Delightful overall. Some pieces hit better than others but Fisher's voice is fantastic, winking, wry, sardonic and always just a bit holier-than-thou. My favorites were her burlesque portraits of the gastronomic excesses of the ancient Chinese or Romans, etc. Some of the character studies were great as well; particularly the final one, about a bawdy hard drinking french butcher. Taken together, the essays and stories form a a sort of manifesto for a way of appreciating gastronomy that involves much more than just the contents of one's plate.
January 1, 2020
Mary Frances is a delight! She writes not just about food but about people, intertwining stories from history with her own dinner conversations from the many tables she has dined at around the world. Her descriptions of French cuisine are especially delightful, and her unabashed, contagious *hunger* - for food, exploration, and human connection - is at the core of her charm.
February 18, 2020
Fisher is a charming writer with a brilliant way of describing her experiences, especially around food. Of course, while you read these little essays, you want to go out and try all kinds of new foods and have new food experiences. Most of us can't afford to do this, but the next best thing is reading M. F. K. Fisher's prose.
August 26, 2021
Amazing writing, full stop. Come for the food topic, stay for the incredible, stylish, hilarious writing. My favorite essay was about the potato. I found all of it fascinating, every single essay. I have an omnibus of 5 of her books and am working my way through all of them. Highly recommend, even if you don't love food writing!
April 9, 2019
A succinct yet elaborate history of gastronomy told in anecdotal stories that make you feel as if she lived through all of it. Florally descriptive without being gushy, she reminded me of a posh Colette, and I wouldn't be surprised if she is somewhere in Eve Babitz' genealogy.
June 4, 2020
Starting The Art of Eating, with the first of five of her books on food. The history is interesting and she's quite the character. I've read other books of hers so some of this will be re-readings but since I'm old, it's all new!
February 17, 2022
This book is like a perfect piece of buttered toast. Richly simple and I want a second (and ultimately fifth) piece. I had to slow down at the end because it was going too quickly. Might reread it immediately, but her next book- Consider the Oyster- arrived.
May 17, 2024
A collection of elegant short essays on matters of food, or their set-up (kitchen styles, dining set-ups, guests and their types), all absolutely wrought with Fisher's personality. Very much in line with Brillat-Savarin (whose Physiology of Taste she translated) and his final stamp: I AM.
June 11, 2017
Perfect. Smart, witty, clever, as per usual. I am tempted to say I ate this book up but I will refrain. Now, on to the next!
August 21, 2017
If you like eating and reading and haven't picked up any M.F.K. Fisher, you are doing yourself a disservice!
January 18, 2018
An unusual book---will appeal to gourmands with a real appetite for words.
June 12, 2018
I've read that this is the weakest of her books and I still really liked it. It's nice to dip in every now and again. The culinary history is particularly interesting.
February 15, 2019
MFK Fisher is one of my favorite writers, and a huge inspiration to my work as a food writer.
May 4, 2019
Delightful, if you enjoy eating and history and travel.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 88 reviews