M.F.K. Fisher Dinner and Reading by Anne Zimmerman (from An Extravagant Hunger), Wednesday, April 13, Woodward's Garden

I think that eating and sleeping and making love...

are so much entwined - M.F.K. Fisher

I mean, of course Fisher is etched into me.  How not for anyone even tangentially moved by food?  I read her way before I flirted with my first oyster; impulsively chose the long haul of cooking school; before it even occurred to me that cooking might be a prayer that could carry me.  She may have sparked it all.  M.F.K. Fisher tenaciously read hunger as inseparable from other desires in all of her work, so that to eat was never, ever just to fuel up. Which always struck me as both right and radical, too, in a culture more and more invested in our choosing soul sucking prepackaged.  She called food out as one of the great madnesses, and she was wildly formative.

So how perfect that Celia Sack of glorious Omnivore Books hooked me with Anne Zimmerman (through twitter!), who will read at our restaurant from her beautiful new An Extravagant Hunger (a book that digs into Fisher's lifelong hungers).  And she'll do it alongside a 3-course Fisher meal.  Celia has also kindly offered to supply the book for sale at the dinner.

So I'm pouring through all my M.F.K. again for dishes (and my she's a world).  Will post the menu as soon as it takes shape.  


And a word of wolfy wisdom:


When you think you can stand no more of the wolf's snuffing under the door, and keening softly on cold nights, throw discretion into the laundry bag, put candles on the table, and for your own good if not the pleasure of an admiring audience make one or another of the recipes in this chapter. - M.F.K Fisher/How to Cook a Wolf


Oh, we'll make some of the recipes, all right.  And, of course, there might be an oyster somewhere too...


At Woodward's Garden, Wednesday, April 13, 6pm, $45 per person, 3-courses (does not include wine, tax or tip). (415) 621-7122. 


See, too, Omnivore Book's newsletter.