MFK Fisher/Bright Sun

 
From an isolated walk in New Mexico. My eyes are so unused so sunlight they're now sore. I've been enjoying reading my grandfather's copy of MFK Fisher's "The Gastronomical Me." The room I'm isolated in has all my mom's old cookbooks, and there's something really enjoyable about reading things from previous times, in which people obsessed with pleasure over the tangible and sensual. I've never really read Fisher at length before and it's such a deep treat. A whole delightful essay about her first oyster, which she held in her mouth while slow-dancing with an older girl...

Here's a bit of her writing from an essay on cravings (fully accessible here):

"I am a mouse among elephants now, but I can say just as surely that this minute, in a northern California valley, I can taste-smell-hear-see and then feel between my teeth the potato chips I ate slowly one November afternoon in 1936, in the bar of the Lausanne Palace. They were uneven in both thickness and color, probably made by a new apprentice in the hotel kitchen, and almost surely they smelled faintly of either chicken or fish, for that was always the case there. They were a little too salty, to encourage me to drink. They were ineffable. I am still nourished by them. That is probably why I can be so firm about not eating my way through barrels, tunnels, mountains more of them here in the land where they hang like square cellophane fruit on wire trees in all the grocery stores, to tempt me sharply every time I pass them."