OVER the years, I have built up a sizable library on food. While most of my collection consists of recipes, some of it is more anecdotal and historical.

Despite my long-standing interest in culinary matters, somehow the works of M.F.K. Fisher had escaped my attention. So when somebody presented me with the 50th anniversary edition commemorating the publication of her collected works in 1954, I immediately started delving into it. Called “The Art of Eating”, the volume pulls together the five books written over a decade from the late thirties.

Food writing generally falls into three categories. While it is mostly directed at explaining recipes and recounting gastronomic experiences (as in restaurant reviews), the third kind is more exploratory, almost philosophical. Fisher falls into a very rare sort of this last category. Whenever I write about food, I regret to say that I am far more prosaic, lacking the turn of phrase, the flight of fancy, the classical allusions that raise writing from the humdrum to the sublime. As an example, consider this quote from her first book Serve it forth’:

“Once at least in the life of every human, whether he be brute or trembling daffodil, comes a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction.

“It is, I am sure, as much a matter of spirit as of body. Everything is right; nothing jars. There is a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted into one chord of well-being...

“Occasionally, in a moment of wide-flung inebriation or the taut introspection of search for things past, a person hits upon his peak of gastronomic emotion. He remembers it with shock, almost, and with a nostalgic clarity that calls tears to his inward-looking eyes.”

Obviously, you don’t have to be a foodie to appreciate Fisher’s superb prose. Here, consider her flawless logic following her recipe for calf head:

“Why is it worse, in the end, to see an animal’s head cooked and prepared for our pleasure than a thigh or a tail or a rib? If we are going to live on other inhabitants of this world, we must not blind ourselves with illogical prejudices, but savour to the fullest the beasts we have killed.

“People who feel that a lamb’s cheek is gross and vulgar when a chop is not are like the medieval philosophers about such hair-splitting problems as how many angels could dance on the point of a pin...”

Fisher wrote over a half century ago. Going further back in time, let us consider the culinary output of Alexandre Dumas, the giant of French letters in the 19th century. Author of such famous novels as “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”, Dumas wrote over 400 books. But most of his admirers are unaware that he was a wonderful cook and wrote “Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine”. I chanced on a modern English translation in a second-hand bookshop, and found this entry for beefsteak’:

“I remember seeing the birth of beefsteak in France, after the 18th century campaign, when the English stayed in Paris for two or three years. Until then our cuisine and theirs had been just as separate as our points of view. It was therefore not without a certain trepidation that one saw a beefsteak trying to introduce itself slyly into our kitchens. Yet, we are an eclectic people and without prejudice. So, as soon as we had realized that, in spite of coming from the Greeks, it was not poisoned’, we held out our plates, and gave beefsteak its citizenship papers...”

Contemporary writing on food is not as expansive, and yet it is good to see eccentrics at work in the kitchen today. Nobody is more obsessive than Jeffery Steingarten, food editor for New York’s Vogue magazine. After a stint as a successful lawyer, he went to his first love, and to their credit, his employers have given him complete freedom to research his subjects.

In the second collection of his articles “It Must Have Been Something I Ate” (appropriately enough, the first was called “The Man Who Ate Everything”), Steingarten seeks to find how the perfect French baguette, that delicious long loaf of bread, is made:

“The true baguette is thin, between 24 to 28 centimetres long, slightly flattened, weighs nine to ten ounces, and has five or seven oblique slashes along the top surface, made just before baking, to allow the dough to expand before the crust has set. The crust itself is toasty, tight, and crackling, and the insides... are creamy “ nearly golden “ never bone white... The true baguette is made only from flour, water, and salt... Its most elusive qualities are the strong, simple sweetness of the crumb, although absolutely no sugar can be added, and a nearly paradoxical quartet of textures - around the air bubbles, the crumb is dense, moist stretchy, and extremely tender...”

Steingarten then describes an annual competition in which the best baguette in Paris is selected. He was a member of the 1998 panel of judges, and writes:

“And then the president of the jury, M. Leban, opened the identifying envelope of the greatest baguette in Paris, and possibly the world. The winner would be awarded 20,000 francs... and become the official supplier of baguettes to the Elysee Palace, residence of the president of the French Republic!

“M. Leban paused and blinked. He conferred with an aide. And then an announcement was made. The winning baker, instead of putting his name and address in the envelope, had written: Anonymous. The baker cares only for his customers.’ He had thumbed his nose at the contest, at the mayor and his deputies...”

But the appreciation and knowledge of haute cuisine was not foreign to the subcontinent not that long ago. Now, alas, it is a dying art, the victim of neglect and ignorance. Abdul Halim Sharar, in his “Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture” describes the life and culture of Lucknow in its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the section on gastronomy, Sharar informs us that in the kitchens of Nawab Shuja ud Daula, 60,000 rupees were spent every month, apart from the salaries of the staff. This would be equivalent to at least six million today. He writes thus about biryanis and pulaus:

“...But in the view of gourmets a biryani is a clumsy and ill-conceived meal in comparison with a really good pulau and for that reason the latter was more popular in Lucknow... on the occasion of a wedding [Mirza Azim-ush-Shan] invited the parents of the bride and bridegroom to a dinner at which ... seventy varieties of savoury pulaus and sweet rice dishes [were served].”

Comparing that feast with today’s push-and-shove wedding meals, one can only weep for what we have lost.