cover image M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table

M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table

Joan Reardon. Harmony, $25 (302pp) ISBN 978-0-517-57748-6

In this interesting but uneven book, Reardon (Oysters: A Culinary Celebration) profiles three women who decisively changed the way Americans think about food: M.F.K. Fisher, whose wide-ranging curiosity about cuisine and cooking was given rein in idiosyncratic, elegant prose; Julia Child, who brought academic rigor and a beguiling lack of pretention to her authoritative cookbooks and various television series; and Alice Waters, whose influential Berkeley, Calif., restaurant, Chez Panisse, emphasized the pleasures of fresh, simply prepared, organic food served at its peak. (``Once you taste a tomato in the summer, you won't eat a tomato in the winter.'') The three portraits overlap a bit awkwardly, and revelations of private triumphs and crises-Fisher's health problems; Julia Child's anguished decision to place her husband, Paul, in a nursing home; Waters's romantic entanglements-seem intrusive, given Reardon's prevailing emphasis on the professional lives of these women. (Oct.)