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    M.F.K. Fisher's Provence
    M.F.K. Fisher's Provence
    M.F.K. Fisher's Provence
    Ebook111 pages31 minutes

    M.F.K. Fisher's Provence

    By M.F.K. Fisher and Aileen Ah-Tye

    2/5

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    About this ebook

    Enjoy M.F.K. Fisher's strong sense of place and deep love of Provence with this collection of rich, gorgeous photographs paired with some of Fisher's best-known essays. 

    M.F.K. Fisher’s Provence highlights Fisher’s Celtic eye for detail with a comparison of Aix-en-Provence, a university town, the site of an international music festival and the former capital of Provence, and Marseille, the port town. 

    Fisher’s description of the sights and smells belonging to an Aix bakery shop window is her Platonic ideal of a bakery shop to be found anywhere in France, for example, with its “delicately layered” scents of “fresh eggs, fresh sweet butter, grated nutmeg, vanilla beans, old kirsch and newly ground almonds.” 

    Then, there is her portrayal of the sounds of Aix’s fountains mixed with the music of Mozart during the town’s festival, leaving her bedazzled. She would return again and again to stroll the narrow streets of Aix with two young daughters who “seemed to grow like water-flowers under the greening buds of the plane trees.” 

    It is the quality of Fisher’s writing that inspired photographer Aileen Ah-Tye to look for her Provence. In a letter to Fisher, Aileen would report back from Marseille: “The eels and the prickly rascasse were exotique to my San Francisco eyes, the smells as pungent as you can get, and . . . miracle of all miracles . . . the men and women on the docks were exactly as you described them.” 

    Thus began a collaboration that illustrates Fisher’s passion for life and all its sensual pleasures that nourish the soul.

    “It’s difficult to pick out just one favorite travel book. But if I had to pick just one favorite, it wouldn’t exactly be a travel book, but rather a ‘being there’ book – and that is Two Towns in Provence by M.F.K. Fisher . . . [Reading it] was one of the turning moments in my life. She was writing about a café I’ve subsequently come to know very well in Aix-en-Provence called the Deux Garçons. I could smell it, and I could taste the little things she and her children were having at the time. And I thought, That’s where I want to be.” —Peter Mayle
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateNov 1, 2015
    ISBN9781619026674
    M.F.K. Fisher's Provence
    Author

    M.F.K. Fisher

    Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908–1992) was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. At the age of twenty-one she moved from America to France, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time, and it inspired a prolific writing career centred on a new way of thinking about food and travel. She was a regular contributor to the New Yorker, Gourmet and Vogue, and is the author of twenty-seven books of food, memoir and travel, many of which have become classics. These include Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me.

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    • 2/5
      Foodies beware: despite the title, there is much less to this book than one would think. Maybe I didn't look closely enough, but I expected this to be an anthology of Fisher's writing on Provence. Instead, this is more a collection of Aileen Ah-Tye's pictures (which, I admit, are gorgeous) that have been paired with relevant but all-too-short excerpts. This left me feeling unsatisfied -- and relieved that I'd borrowed this instead of buying it.

    Book preview

    M.F.K. Fisher's Provence - M.F.K. Fisher

    M.F.K. FISHER’S PROVENCE

    PLATE ONE — La Rotunde, Cours...

    PLATE ONE — La Rotunde, Cours Mirabeau

    Copyright © 2015 Aileen Ah-Tye

    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

    Cover design by Kelly Winton

    Interior design by Gopa & Ted2. Inc.

    Counterpoint Press

    2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

    Berkeley, CA 94710

    www.counterpointpress.com

    Distributed by Publishers Group West

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-667-4

    For John Davidson

    Contents

    Foreword

    My Map

    Aix-en-Provence

    Artful Pleasures

    Main Street

    Rose-Yellow Façades

    In the Country

    Sound of the Place

    Marseille

    Food of Artemis

    Afterword

    Acknowledgments

    FOREWORD:

    Simple Pleasures in Aix-en-Provence

    WE SHOPPED morning, noon, and night in Provence—we shopped for croissants, baguettes, newspapers, and cigarettes, for tomatoes, peaches, string beans, strawberries, eggplants, mushrooms, and lettuce. We shopped for legs of lamb and chickens, for cubes of beef for stew, and for pork sausages. We shopped for butter and milk and cheese, and for honey and cases of wine and Badoit mineral water. We shopped for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then we started over again.

    For basic provisions, we went into the village—our house was in tiny Puyricard, on the outskirts of Aix. The town had an old stone church next to the post office, three bakeries, a little Casino supermarket, a butcher, and a café with vaguely unfriendly, pastis-drinking middle-aged men, the kind that can be found in every French village. Sometimes they played pétanque.

    I never did figure out which bakery had the best croissants, and it didn’t matter, they were all good. We bought them eight or ten at a time: not too big, buttery but not overly rich, satisfyingly crunchy but still tender and elastic inside. At the newsstand we’d pick up the International Herald Tribune and L’Équipe, the sports tabloid. We got to know the mom, pop, and son who ran the supermarket and who did their best to help find what we needed, with mixed success (dried red-pepper flakes? . . . Non, came the reply, heads shaking sadly). The butcher was hip and friendly, in his thirties but his close-cropped hair already going gray. His lamb chops were incredible.

    And so it was that we developed a routine, a rhythm, a kind of easygoing daily schedule, loosely correlated to hunger and appetite. The main event was the farmers’ market in downtown Aix. On the Place Richelme, under the

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