Discovered Gold

Not too long ago, a book was checked in at my library that caught my eye: Provence, 1970, an account of a fateful meeting many culinary greats of America at the time, people who had shaped the way America now viewed their food- among them James Beard and Julia Child. The author of the book is the great-nephew of M.F.K. Fisher, a woman I had never heard of, but who largely provides the source and point of view of this meeting.

Intrigued by what sounded to be a very interesting person, I sought out her work, requesting the collection of her books: The Art of Eating. What I got was a biblically thick tome of a woman's musings on food, on cuisine, on history, on life in the pursuit of gastronomy. It's a remarkably flippant way to put it, but as I read it I'm beginning to start to consider her the John the Baptist to Julia Child's Jesus. A contemporary as much as a herald of the change that was coming to America's kitchens. She writes with the florid prose and vocabulary of someone who genuinely loves the English language almost as much as she loves the topic she's writing about.

More interestingly, though, I realized last night what she really was: the very first food blogger. That's all these works are. A collection of very well written blog posts. And I'm truly loving them. It's proving to be a book that feels essential in a personal library, not just something to be checked out, read, and discarded. Fantastic.