The Gastronomical Me

Some books are just delicious. The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher is one of them. Though not a Christian writer, I have never read anyone that can describe the very Christian connection between the table and fellowship like she can. My favorite book in this 5 book anthology is The Gastronomical Me, a memoir of her early years.

She describes in beautifully vivid detail her grandmother's "violently active cannings" of summer fruit. How her grandmother, stirring the boiling fruit, "stood like a sacrificial priestess in the steam, 'skimming' into a thick white saucer, and I, sometimes permitted and more often not, put my finger into the cooling froth and licked it."

She describes visiting her great-aunt's house in the high desert of Los Angeles, with the "war-time crews of old men and loud-voiced boys picking the peaches" that would later that day be made into pies using butter cooled in a nearby stream.

And so on...into adulthood and her table gatherings in Dijon, France, and her many meals on ocean-crossing voyages. In her forward, she explains, "I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness...there is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk."

These are some thoughts I will take with me to our Saturday night feast and to the Lord's Table.