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Long Ago in France
The Years in Dijon
by Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher
Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher is self-absorbed and knows it. She wrote, "I was simply uninterested in any life but my own (p. 75)." Yet, when she took the time to notice, she created word pictures of people who came to life on the pages of her books. And the food the people ate can be fully imagined by the reader. In this she is an artist.
MFK Fisher was newly wed in Dijon in the early 30's. Her husband, Al Fisher, was working on his doctorate at the University. They explored the city together, especially its restaurants, cafes, and movie houses. In Chapter Four she recounted their first meal at the restuarant, Racouchot's, where she and Al
ate the biggest, as well as the most exciting, meal that either of us had ever had. . .I don't know now what we ate, but it was the sort of rich winy spiced cuisine that is typical of Burgundy, with many dark sauces and gamey meats (p. 34).
They stayed in a boarding house on rue de Petit-Potet with the Oellangnier's. She had a friendship, of sorts, with Madame Ollangnier, who ran the house. MFK Fisher described her thus:
Madame Ollangnier ate like a madwoman, crumbs falling from her mouth, her cheeks bulging, her eyes glistening and darting about the plates and cups and her hands tearing at chunks of cheese and crusts of bread. Occasionally she stopped long enough to put a tiny bite between the wet delicate lips of her little terrier, Tango, who sat silently on her knees through every meal (p. 12).
Mary Francis and Al belonged to the Club Alpin of Dijon, which explored the local region and ate regional specialities. She wrote:
Al and I were probably the youngest in the club by some thirty years, but more than once pure bravado was all that kept us from tumbling right into the nearest ditch in a digestive coma. . . Once, Monsieur Vaillant, the retired advocate cried, 'My God and double-zut!! This is infamous! Here we are within ten minutes' delightful promenade from one of the great, the great, great pastry makers of all time! . . .She made her fantaisies for my dear mother's First Communion. They came in a wooden trunk, packed in layers of silk-paper and dead leaves to survive the trip. Stop the tour!' Monsieur Vaillant would snort (p. 48).
The adventures with the Club Alpin are found in Chapter 5.
MFK Fisher was humbled in retrospect by the opportunities she cast away: the tarts uneaten, the invitations rejected. She remembered, with regret, when the next owner of the boarding house, Madame Rigoulot,
offered to teach me what she knew about cookery and I thanked her and said no. My God, how could I have been so stupid? I cringe and shiver to think of sitting there in the stuffy clumsy little room and saying it and of her good accepting smile, her continued benevolence to me, great Saxon inept lout that I was (p. 128).
She regretted not having taken her studies seriously when education meant so much to others - students and teachers alike. Mary Francis attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts to learn drawing and sculture. As she walked home from school with Tango, the terrier, she saw that
The bakers were all working under the sidewalks. Sometimes, the head of a young baker would pop up, usually with two pink cheeks, flour in his hair, flour in his eyelashes, having a cigarette outside the bakery. . .The ovens were roaring and the flour was flying (p. 66).
It was not until her third year in Dijon that Mary Francis had her own kitchen and cooked for herself and her husband. She described the cauliflower casserole she made with "small succulent cauliflowers, grown in that ancient soil (p. 150)."
This book is too small, too chatty, too gossipy, too much a journal. But it comes alive in the small stories of the pastries, of the dinners, of the cooks. And I watched with compassion as she came to an understanding of herself as a ghost in her own life, a young, intelligent American woman passing by the kitchens, the gardens, the classrooms, looking in, observing, but not partaking.
And then, suddenly, on Christmas eve, right after Al was awarded his doctorate, they left Dijon on a late train. Their life moved on. This book was ended.
But then, I read the opening page again and learned that this "work first appeared in slightly different form in Serve it Forth and The Gastronomical Me." If you would like to know the adventures of Mary Frances and Al after they boarded that train in Dijon, read The Gastronomical Me, originally published in 1943 by Duell, Sloan & Peace and republished in 1989 by North Point Press.
Copyright©1999 Mary Jo Kelly Wilhelm
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