Tyler Scott has published her stories and essays since the early 1980s. She lives in a small town in Southside Virginia. This article was originally published in the St. Croix Review.
In the mid-1980s I moved to Charleston, South Carolina because of its beauty, history, and to be near my family. By then, I had been publishing a lot of articles, mostly features, so I went to the newspaper The Post and Courier and asked for a job. They had no openings. Instead, the editor asked me if I would like to write food articles. “But I am not a very good cook,” I replied, and he said that I could write and interview people and that’s all I needed.
Thus began my food writing career. I wrote profiles of great cooks: Of a country woman who still loved to prepare meals on a woodstove, of a chef who had served time for drug dealing, and of hairdressers, retired military personnel, and society ladies. I interviewed all races and all walks of life. I wrote Gourmet magazine style articles on yams, okra, hushpuppies. Once I even interviewed sturgeon fisherman in Darien, Georgia, for The Washington Post. I remember complaining about the heat to one of them men, and he observed, “Keeps the Yankees away.”
During this chapter of my writing life, I turned to the food writer M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992) for inspiration. She published 27 books over the course of her life. Her more famous ones include Consider the Oyster, How to cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, not to mention a translation of Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste. What makes her writing so unique is she incorporated, like a reporter, not only the food, but also details on culture, history, society, nature, her personal life, and family, all with a deft touch of humor from time to time. In her day any of the top newspapers would have hired her as an investigative reporter.
With such direct, graspable writing, she appeals to our senses as well. I find when I read Fisher, it jogs my own memories of growing up, family meals, favorite times, and favorite recipes.
Good food writing is as much about the people as about the food.
When you write about a prolific author, there is a lot of material to choose from. Since I had read many of her books, this time I read To Begin Again: Stories and Memoirs 1908-1929 and perused Here Let Us Feast, As They Were and The Art of Eating. With someone of Fisher’s talent, it doesn’t matter what you read. Everything she writes is excellent. And she is the type of gifted author that if you have her in your personal library, you will enjoy her over the years. Not only do I own her memoir, I have several of her essays in compendiums of other great writers.
On a side note, the libraries in Nottoway County, where I live in rural Virginia, had no M.F.K. Fisher in their system any more. Perhaps her death in 1992 contributed to this. Luckily, tow bibliophile friends were able to loan me their small collections of her books.
On her choice of her life’s profession and passion, she once wrote:
“I write about food because I think it can be, and often is, a mysterious, important part of turning us into something more than the beasts of the field.”
One afternoon I found some of my old articles on food in a cardboard box in a very hot attic. As I read them, I could see how I, like Fisher, tried to capture not just the food but the people and the surroundings. Often, when I interviewed these great cooks I would hear about family, politics, religion, health problems, and maybe even a little gossip. To show you how small the world is I remember sitting in a cafe once in Charleston. A homeless man was sitting near me, and we started to talk. Turns out we were both from Richmond, Virginia, and he had a nervous breakdown and wound up down South on the streets — a sad ending for a former soldier and teacher. Even though his recipes weren’t very good, I put him in the cookbook I was writing at the time so I could write about his life. Whenever I saw him, I would try and buy him a meal.
By the late 1980s, I had written a cookbook entitled It Turned Out the Stripper Could Cook which offered profiles of interesting people and their recipes, just like my articles for the Charleston newspaper. As I started to look for a publisher, a friend from Seychelles invited me to visit him in South Africa, so off I went for an interesting trip; I sold the cookbook to the publication Creative Loafing in Atlanta.
I hope this essay is a fitting tribute to the talents of M.F.K. Fisher and her influence on me. No wonder W.H. Auden once said, “She was the best writer in America.”
