The year is 1987, and I'm in happy receipt of an invitation to take tea with Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, doyenne of America's scholar-cooks. I'd arrived in San Francisco on the last lap of a seven-city author-tour for my first (serious) cookbook, European Peasant Cookery, retitled for the class-concious American market as The Old World Kitchen (which sort of misses the point).
Mrs. Fisher had phoned the book’s US editor, Fran McCulloch, after hearing me on a morning radio show in San Francisco, last stop of the tour, talking about a recent visit to Aix-en-Provence, MFK’s previous stamping-ground, and the author of Two Towns in Provence would happy to revisit old haunts in spirit, if not in person.
Fran, veteran of many a demanding author - apart from the fuss I’d made over the re-titling, I’m the least of it - hires a car for the journey. It’s high summer and the Sonoma valley, mile upon mile of red earth streaked with tidy vineyards and infant olive groves, is as parched and dry as a Mediterranean hillside.
In spite of her success, Fran tells me as we drive, Mary Frances never made enough money out of her books to ensure a comfortable old age. "Every cookery-writer needs a a wealthy benefactor, or a rich husband - doesn't matter which." Point taken.
Mrs. Fisher’s benefactor, an English architect, David Pleydell-Bouverie married to an Astor and owner a ranch in the hills above the Sonoma valley, had” the good sense to value her writing and gave her carte-blanche to design her own dwelling.
The house, a handsome single-story building fronted by a porch set among flowering jacaranda trees and oleander bushes, is set just beside road.
“Let’s hope she’s expecting us,” observed Fran dryly, as we waited for the estate’s automatic gates to swing open. “You can never be sure with authors.”
She needn’t have worried.
“First left. Just follow the road.” The voice on the intercom is unmistakeably English. The owner of the voice - “I’m Mary Frances’ housekeeper” is on the porch to welcome us. She’s wearing a jam-stained apron and a beaming smile.
“Mary Frances says she’s expecting you. She had a fall and is just back from hospital. She hopes you won’t mind if she’s in bed.”
The porch leads into an open-plan living-room crammed with hand-woven rugs, battered armchairs, chintz-covered sofas and tables piled with books. Something flowery and fragrant is emitting little puffs of steam from a copper pan on the stove.
“Come right on in. Tell me all about it!"
“In you go,” says Fran.
The figure propped up on pillows at the far end of a double bed with is as tiny and bony as a baby bird, but the eyes are bright and the voice steady. Scattered over the patchwork counterpane are papers, glasses, books, heaps of documents covered in red ink.
Just above the bed is a windowed recess in which is perched a white cat with black and russet markings. "She's what they call a calico. A beauty. And she knows it."
If ut takes one to know one, Mrs. Fisher was a famous beauty in her time. Now, in her eightieth year, she’s not only in full possession of all her marbles but has that physical serenity which celebrated beauties never seem to lose.
“Come closer.” Patting the bed. “Let me take a look at you.”
Guiltily, before I obey, I tuck away my pocket sketchbook. Paper, pencil and a little box of eyeshadow is all I have to record a moment I know I'll never forget.
On go the specs. A moment’s inspection, then a nod. “You’ll do.” A pause, and a sigh. "Trouble with the eyesight. Such a bore. Means I can't write. So Stanford has sent me an enormous machine to see if one of us can make it work." She waves a hand at what looks like a pigmy battleship flattened against one wall. "It's supposed to write down everything I say. Mostly gobbledegook. Don't know if it's me or them."
"Happens to us all," I say. "Gobbledegook, I mean."
Later I re-read my own battered copy of The Art of Eating, a complenium of her three wartime books complete with audatory introduction by W.H. Auden. Mostly it's about the love of people and the romance of places - recipes scarcely get a look-in. I’d acquired my own treasured edition in 1963, the year I was married and embarked on a similarly peripatetic and uncertain way of life - a connection I’ve never forgotten.
But right now Mrs. Fisher wants to know whether the violet-seller - the old fellow who makes the rounds of customers taking their cafe-au-lait and breakfast tartine at the Deux Garçons in Aix - is still squirting his little bunches with violet perfume in secret behind the plane-tree.
Still there. Still squirting. Or maybe it's his grandson.
“And the boy with the blue bucket who sells sea-urchins in the corner of the Saturday market and offers a taste?”
Still there. No longer a boy.
"All you eat is the roes. Aphrodisiac, sure you know." She leans back on the pillows. The eyes close.
Time to go. Not quite.
"Before you go, you must taste my peach marmalade."
I recognise the fragrance that greeted us on arrival. Spread warm from the jar on a tartine with butter, the flavour is deliciously peachy and soft, but with a sudden sharpness of lemon and an edge of bitterness from, I assume, a precise number of kernels, crushed.
“How was it?” asks Fran as we drive away. The marmalade, you mean? Complex, subtle and perfectly balanced, as is only to be expected of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher.
Mrs. Fisher's Peach Marmalade
"There is probably no better smell than the forthright cloud that fills a room, a memory, as the bubbles in the jam pot rise darker from the bottom. Stir! Stir fast!"
Enough to fill about 3 jams-jars
1k (2 lb) peaches - about 8
500G (1 lb) granulated sugar
The juice of 2 lemons
1. Scald and peel the peaches, cut them in half and remove the stones. Crack 5 of these, extract the kernels and stew them in a little water in a small pan for 5 minutes, until tender; then skin and chop.
2. Put the peaches and kernels in a large saucepan and bring slowly to boiling point, mashing the peaches with a potato masher as they heat. By time the mixture boils, the peaches should be really mushy. Stir in the sugar and the lemon juice and cook rapidly for 10 minutes, stirring all the time - it may look juicy enough, but it can easily stick and burn. Turn down the heat and cook slowly for about another 5 minutes. It should be ready by now, but maybe you'd better put a test spoonful on a cold saucer in the refrigerator just to be sure of the set.
3. Pour the jam into clean scalded jars and seal it down. Ready immediately. Not a good keeper - but there’ll probably be no need to put longevity to the test.
This is just brilliant, E! You capture the whole place, the house, the countryside, the spacious kitchen, the sharp but fragile old lady in bed. I had my own visitation (one can only call it that) at about the same time. I wish I could remember what we ate but I was so enraptured with the person I forgot to note it down. A mutual acquaintance (of yours and mine, I mean, he shall remain nameless) always referred to "going up to see Mary Frawntzes," as if the world would know whom he meant. I prefer your reference, quite simply to Mrs. Fisher.
I love this! Can’t wait to make it.