When writing my latest novel, which is set during the early 1960s, I had fun cooking recipes from the Cold War years. Many were awful, which means I had to remind myself not to condescend to the past. We like to believe we’ve progressed beyond our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, which can strike us as antique and vaguely boyish. Yet people always feel modern during their lifetimes—they are modern—and when you write a work of historical fiction like Far Creek Road, you have to remind yourself of that. 

This is especially important when you’re writing about dinners of tuna casseroles, jellied salads and meatloaf moistened with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. Or worse: some of the recipes published by food writer M.F.K. Fisher in her earliest books and the magazines of the 1950s and 60s, although it’s true Fisher’s life and work were important to my research.

I wrote about Fisher last week, ending with her take on Escoffier’s Petit Pois à la Française, in which peas are cooked with lettuce, parsley and green onions. Modern online recipes for petit pois use less butter than she does—she stipulates a quarter pound—and replace her green onions with shallots. Some also use fresh mint leaves instead of parsley. But in the spirit of the times, I intended to make the peas Fisher’s way and serve them with (a nod and a wink) fish pie. 

My husband, not enjoying them: “They’re too much like all those creamed vegetables we had to eat when we were kids. We don’t eat like this anymore.” He muttered about cholesterol, even though I ended up using about a third of the butter in Fisher’s recipe.

Yet here’s the point: M.F. K. Fisher’s petit pois gave me the visceral sense of a different time. I’m often asked how writers get a feel for the world our characters live in. Of course we read piles of books and dive down too many rabbit holes online. But there’s also the sensory part. I’ve walked on the Yorkshire moors when preparing to write about Charlotte Brontë, raising my arms in the wind and stopping to smell the grass and wildflowers and the damp of the rocks beside a stream, probably the same rocks on which Brontë once sat. I’ve also backed away from a jaguar lying horizontal on a branch in the Amazon, noting the smell of the undergrowth—and of my fear—while researching a novel set in Brazil.

The pandemic lockdown was in full force as I wrote the first part of Far Creek Road, so cooking would have to do. Yet it worked. When eating Fisher’s buttery peas, I felt fully transported to a long-lost era. It’s true that we don’t eat like that anymore, and that some of it involves cholesterol.

But Fisher’s books also reminded me how greatly the pace of life has accelerated. She never gives cooking times in her recipes, partly because thermometers in older ovens were unreliable, but also because she expected women—and it was always women—to spend hours each day in the kitchen, keeping an eye on dinner as they worked slowly through their chores. (And martinis.) I found it useful to think about the different pace of life in the 60s as I wrote Far Creek Road, reminded that the prosperous housewives who read Fisher’s work could spend a languorous weekend morning cooking eggs. Imagine how that felt. No phone buzzing, no multi-tasking—and damn few opportunities to do anything else. 

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Scrambled Eggs

• 8 good fresh eggs
• ½ pint rich cream (or more)
• Salt and freshly ground pepper.
• Grated cheese, herbs, whatnot, if desired

Break eggs gently into cold iron skillet. Pour cream in, and stir quietly until the whole is blended, but no more. Never beat or whip. Heat very slowly, stirring from the middle bottom in large curds, as seldom as possible. Never let bubble. At seasoning at the last stir or two.

This takes perhaps a half hour. It cannot be hurried.

Serve on toast, when it is barely firm. If herbs or cheese or mushrooms (or chicken livers and so forth) are added it should be when the eggs are half done.

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Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher led an adventurous life, if a secretive one. She was bisexual and bi-continental, spending much of the 1930s travelling between the U.S. and Europe, having first arrived in France as a 21-year-old newly married to the poet and academic Al Fisher. As I wrote last week, Fisher was doing his PhD in Dijon, and would later teach at Smith College.

Reading further in her biographies, I learned that Mary Frances’s love affair with Europe lasted but the marriage didn’t. She later complained that she left Al Fisher because he was sexually impotent and emotionally distant. At the time, however, she explained her divorce through her speedy second marriage to artist Dillwyn Parrish. She later said that Parrish was the love of her life, although both were married when they met. Mary Frances later wrote that after his marriage ended in 1934, some years before her own, she sat down beside Parrish at the piano one day and told him she loved him. 

Parrish’s ex-wife told one of Fisher’s biographers a better story: that Mary Frances let herself into Parrish’s house one night unannounced and climbed into bed beside him. 

By the time of her second marriage, Mary Frances had begun to publish short pieces about cooking in American magazines. Not long afterward, she brought out her first book, Serve It Forth. She was about 30 as she stuttered into her career, still crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic, living alternately in California, France and Switzerland as the Second World War loomed. 

War jitters coincided with a sad downturn in Dillwyn Parrish’s health. He began suffering acute pain in his left leg, which proved to be caused by clots that eventually turned his leg gangrenous. Doctors in Switzerland were forced to amputate, and the couple returned to the U.S. so he could get further treatment. There, Parrish was eventually diagnosed with Buerger’s Disease, a nasty vascular malady that can lead to repeated bouts of gangrene and multiple amputations.

In terrible pain and facing further amputations, Dillwyn Parrish shot himself in 1941, leaving Fisher sleepwalking—especially after her much-loved younger brother killed himself soon afterward. Hers was a dramatic life. Maybe the old curse shouldn’t be, May you live in interesting times, but, May you lead an interesting life. Fisher was still only 33 when Parrish committed suicide, and living at an isolated mountain property in California where they’d hoped the clean air would improve his health. 

Broke and lost, Fisher went to Hollywood to work in film. There, she discovered that she hated screenwriting. Her solution was to stop doing it, even though she remained employed in the industry, pretending to work on projects assigned by the studio while secretly writing her books. She had several affairs, some with celebrities, and left Los Angeles when she found herself pregnant. A year later, she reappeared with a baby girl she said she’d adopted, fooling no one. The identity of the baby’s father she kept secret all her life, refusing to tell her daughter the man’s name even as she lay dying.

Joan Reardon’s aptly-named biography, Poet of the Appetites, The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher, traces Fisher’s rocky road through life—the meals she ate, cooked and wrote about, and the men and women with whom she had relationships, none of them lasting. In 1944, Fisher impetuously married for a third time, choosing a New York publisher she’d known for only a few weeks. “I accidentally got married to Donald Friede,” she wrote a friend. Friede would squander most of her money, although he also introduced her to the New York books and magazine scene, and her writing career accelerated. She had a second daughter with Friede before they divorced in 1950. 

According to Reardon, Fisher subsequently began an affair with a California drama teacher named Marietta Voorhees, whom she’d known for years. It wasn’t her first relationship with a woman–she’d had a passionate crush on a fellow student at school–although it might have been the first one consummated. Her affair with Voorhees only last a few years, after which (or maybe during which) she had an affair with influential editor Arnold Gingrich in New York. She also spent long periods of time in France, where she placed her daughters in boarding schools. Her relationship with both daughters was complicated and often distant, causing pain to all three. Gradually, Fisher began to spend most of her time in California, where she would live alone for the last years of her long life, dying as a much-lauded writer in 1992.

***

Recipes and a complicated life. Reading about M.F.K. Fisher reminded me to me to look behind the clichés of North American suburban life of the 1950s and 60s. We think of stereotypical Leave It to Beaver nuclear families, with a white-collar father, a perky housewife-mother and a couple of freckle-faced kids. The reality was, of course, far more complex, surprising and, yes, modern, and that’s something I tried to bring to life in Far Creek Road. 

One final recipe from Fisher’s wartime book, How to Cook a Wolf, since I took a picture of this one, too. (Above.)

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Baked Ham Slice

• 1 one-inch slice of ham (or thicker if you can afford it!)
• 1 sweet potato for each person
• I cup brown sugar
• 1 handful of parsley
• 2 teaspoons hot mustard
• 1 tart apple for each person
• 1 cup hot water (or cider, or white wine)

Pare the fat from the ham and mince with the chopped parsley and mustard. Spread thickly on the meat.

Slice the unpeeled apples ½ inch thick. Peel and slice the potatoes lengthwise ½ inch thick. 

Place the ham in the centre of a pan, with the apples and then the potatoes in a ring around it. Add the hot water, and sprinkle with the brown sugar.

Bake in a 325-350 degree oven, basting often.

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The woman in our local deli was bemused by my request for a one-inch thick slice of ham, but cut off a slice that came infused with rosemary and boasted only a thin crescent of fat. At home, I chopped what fat there was and mixed it with the parsley and mustard, spreading the mixture on top. After cutting up the apples and potatoes, I couldn’t bring myself to use a full cup of brown sugar, and sprinkled maybe a tablespoon on the apples before dousing the whole with white wine.

The sweet potatoes took a long time to cook, almost two hours at 325 degrees. Once again, the Ham Slice tasted mysteriously old fashioned. As we ate, watching a baseball game on TV, I imagined that we were eating it on TV trays as Walter Cronkite read the CBS Evening News. Next door, the neighbours were drinking martinis in their Mid-Century Modern living room (instead of smoking weed out back the way they usually did.) The man who always left quietly, late at night, was secretly having an affair. (Actually, I think he works in the stockroom at Loblaws.)

Despite the facts, it was a useful, transferable, write-about-able feeling.

The Ham Slice wasn’t terrible, either. 

Lesley Krueger’s new novel, Far Creek Road, is published by ECW Press. It’s available here.