M. F. K. Fisher Quotes

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.

Painting, it is true, was undergoing a series of -isms reminiscent of the whims of a pregnant woman.

Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat.

One … aspect of the case for World War II is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about daily living which is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words.

For me, a plain baked potato is the most delicious one….It is soothing and enough.

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.

It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it

Salad is roughage and a French idea.

In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, all the silent ponderings about what lies within them…it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones that can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.

Hunger is more than a problem of belly and guts, and … the satisfying of it can and must and does nourish the spirit as well as the body.

At its best, [Japanese cooking] is inextricably meshed with aesthetics, with religion, with tradition and history. It is evocative of seasonal changes, or of one’s childhood, or of a storm at sea.

… living out of sight of any shore does rich and powerfully strange things to humans.