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summer of 2002 and asked if I could write a food column appropriate to the first anniversary of 9/11 for the Style Supplement of the
Times Magazine.
New York was still in pain from the attack, and Billy did not have to explain that his readers needed encouragement rather than another batch of recipes for autumn vegetables or turkey stuffing for the fall holidays.
    I was intrigued by this assignment, and as I wonderedhow to approach it, I remembered that the late food writer M. F. K. Fisher had in her twenties written bravely about food during a similarly grim period, midway through the 1930s in Europe, when the so-called civilized world was working itself up once again into a paroxysm of self-destruction and she was caught in the gathering chaos. So I thought it might interest readers of the
Times
on the first anniversary of 9/11 to learn how Fisher confronted her own world as it prepared to destroy itself. The volume called
The Gastronomical Me,
in which she collected her culinary reminiscences during these years, is preceded by this little prayer borrowed from a man named J. T. Pettee: “Pray for peace and grace and spiritual food, for wisdom and guidance, for all these are good, but don’t forget the potatoes.”
    In 1936, Fisher was living in Dijon. She had tired of her professor husband and dreaded the prospect of afternoons back in the United States in a brown satin dress nibbling marshmallow salad with other faculty wives. She had, moreover, fallen head over heels in love with a man named Dillwyn Parrish, an American writer and artist. In her book she discreetly calls him Chexbres, Basque for “goat,” revealing his actual identity only much later, in a memoir toward the end of her life. From Dijon they came to earth in Vevey, where they rebuilt an old farmhouse, from whose terrace they had a clear view across Lake Geneva to the mountains. But “when the terrace was too cool or breezy we set a longFrench table in front of the open French windows and if the Lake seemed too wide and the Alps too high we could look into the great mirror opposite and make them more remote, less questioning of us.” This is the essential Fisher, for whom the Alps must accommodate her when she and her lover sit down to lunch.
    Their house had red tile floors, gardens, and good food. “In the summer there were always a lot of people: Vevey was on the road to almost any place in Europe and Le Paquis was such a pleasant little stop,” she wrote, referring to their house. “Sometimes there were complications, political, national, religious, even racial but in general we managed to segregate the more violent prejudices. Once Chexbres had taken three socialists who were on their way to join the Spanish Loyalists to Cully for filet of perch while I served supper at Le Paquis to several charming but rabid Fascists from Rome, one of them a priest and all of them convinced that Communists were their personal as well as national enemies.”
    But it is not the twittering fascists who hold the reader’s attention: it is the unseen Loyalist volunteers eating perch with Chexbres on their way to fight and perhaps be killed by fascists in Spain, a prospect that Fisher leaves to the reader’s imagination. Earlier in that terrible year of Depression and war, she, her mother, and Chexbres had returned to Europe on the German vessel
Hansa,
“a tidy, plump little ship.” “There was something comfortable about her, and at the same time subtly coarse and vulgar,” an ugliness that was “part ofwhat is happening now in the world … while men stunt their souls,” Fisher wrote presciently in 1937, when few could yet grasp the unspeakable ugliness to come even as the men stood up in the ship’s dining room “and lifted their glasses to the picture of Hitler at one end of the room.” At night in her “clean and cozy” stateroom with “light shining on the cherry-satin feather-puff and the gleaming sheets,” she would lock the door against evil