Gastronomic Trio Simply Delicious

"In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us," wrote M.F.K. Fisher in the first of her books on cooking and eating, Serve it Forth, "We are ignorant of flavour. We are as a nation taste-blind."

That was in 1937. Since then, this country has begun to look beyond Fannie Farmer and meatloaf; cook books and gourmet shops have proliferated; chefs are in great demand. At its worst, this trend has spawned yuppie cuisine and a surfeit of goat cheese, but despite these excesses there is something to be said for eating well. And much has been said, particularly by Fisher, by California chef Alice Waters, and by my personal idol Julia Child--each of whom is paid tribute in Joan Reardon's recent book, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table.

Fisher, who died in 1992, wrote all about food--from Queen Elizabeth's breakfasts, to cooking with war rations, to her own favorite indulgences. Like Child and Waters after her, she was not particularly gourmet while growing up but tell in love with food during a stay in France. So in her writings Fisher hoped to promote the sort of "education of the palate" that she had received abroad.

She tried to address a broad audience as when she offered advice to housewives in her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf. But she herself was not the average housewife; an issue of Look magazine from that same year featured her "growing grapes on her ranch, discussing a script with a well-known actor, and revising a manuscript in a negligee with a glass of sherry in hand." Yet while Fisher was certainly refined in her tastes, she was also the palate's propagandist, urging her readers to savor buttered toast as she would sherry.

This desire to celebrate life through food and drink unites the three women in Reardon's book, through their particular tastes vary. Meanwhile their individual stories cast faint reflections of life outside the kitchen, from Fisher's Hollywood of the 1940's to Child's "02138 zip code set" in '60s Cambridge, to Waters' present-day Berkeley.

The glimmer of history is strongest in Reardon's portrait of Waters, proprietor of the Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse. In the 60's, as part of Berkeley's student radical movement, she cooked for her fellow activists and published recipes in a leftist tabloid. She opened her restaurant in 1971. A $5 meal included main dish, wine, salad, and a showing of a Marcel Pagnol film.

Though in the intervening decades Waters has tried to maintain her civic ties. Chez Panisse has gone from struggling bistro to acclaimed restaurant, where the prix-fixe meal now runs about $65. Waters has even published a series of Chez Panisse cookbooks. And while she still promotes social change, that change is now primarily culinary; after entertaining Bill Clinton in 1993, Waters wrote to him: "We can mobilize a small army of restaurateurs across the country who share a common belief that the choices we make about what we eat can transform our society." Guerilla restaurateurs?

The youngest of the three women in Reardon's book. Waters is featured last, her story playing dessert as Fisher's did hors d'ocuvre. But the entree, naturally, is Reardon's portrait of Julia Child, the six foot tall throaty-voiced diva who brought bouillabaise to thousands of living rooms. Julia--who in college wanted to be either a novelist or a professional basketball player and liked to perform tom-tom dances, who sought during WWII to be trained as a spy and was eventually posted to Ceylon, who finally turned to cooking--Julia dominates the book.

Whether writing cookbooks or appearing in her famous television show, Child strove to spread her zeal for preparing food. Across the country "Julia-watchers" saw her in the kitchen, infectiously enthusiastic, her flour-drenched hands reaching for the inevitable glass of red wine. Through her happy, expert engagement in the practice of cooking--in stuffing sausage casings by hand, in halving a winter squash with mallet and cleaver--she made food preparation appealing, and even enticing. In her book The Way to Cook she introduces "A Fast Saute of Beef for Two" as "something to keep in mind for a rather important and intimate occasion....[W]hen you are an informal twosome, why not prepare the whole meal while having meaningful conversations and aperitifs together in the kitchen?"

For all three women, it is not just the food that appeals; it is the shared meal, the meaningful conversation, the good wine. Perhaps at times they sound a bit precious or snobbish, these women with their negligees and aperitifs, but Fisher, Child, and Waters have all promoted everyday eating as sensuous and delightful, as a necessary celebration.

Their common devotion to "the pleasures of the table" pervades Reardon's book--itself a satisfying read, and in its spirit an antidote to the taste-blind dining hall.