In the past my creative nonfiction class has been an immersive project in times and places important to students’ lives—memoir, but with an emphasis on looking outward more than in, probing and delineating all those inner sureties that might otherwise be expressed in assertions: “Kimmy is a bad, bad person” becomes instead, “Kimmy, my first-year roommate, sat hoggishly on my beanbag chair in front of my plasma TV, her face twisting with inexplicable rage, eyebrows writhing like two conger eels, and snapped childishly over her shoulder, ‘If you two are going to do it on my bed, would you wait until I’ve left for work, please?’”

Students put me on the list of teachers rated excellent for that class, but I haven’t been satisfied with it, if only because it became the occasion for one student to get liquored up and take the train to interview an ex-boyfriend, whom she’d hurt badly, and draw fresh blood. I’m due to teach it again this semester but at this late hour have started thinking of changing it to be on food writing instead. I suppose a student might get liquored up and take the train to tell mom that her beef stew is always greasy, but somebody needs to after all.

There are any number of approaches to such a class, from journalism to memoirs to recent political and cultural histories of food. Too often food writing is hollow or lifeless, mere timetables, or namedropping guest lists. But the best, going back at least to that of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the Montaigne of food, is both thoughtful and evocative.

As Lawrence R. Schehr and Allen S. Weiss write in French Food: On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture,

The kind of culinary commentary practiced by Brillat-Savarin and generations of his disciples places gastronomy within the larger intellectual and social universe. For Grimod de la Reynière and Carême, the culinary text was chiefly instrumental, a means to the primary end of producing or consuming what anthropologists term the ‘food event [ugh],’ that is, the dish or the meal. For Brillat-Savarin, the text was its own end, a status hardly altered by the few recipes included in the work. The often noted stylistic qualities of the Physiology of Taste —the anecdotal mode, the witty tone, the language play—give this work an almost palpable literary aura.

Some literary writers, such as A.J. Liebling in Between Meals, make food the focus; others, such as Maupassant in his short story “Boule de Suif,” use it as backdrop and motif. The very best, such as Isak Dinesen in “Babette’s Feast,” treat it as a human need as soulful as love.

The temptations of the form are inherent in its function: Mastication is a private act, even when done in public, and food writing can easily become onanistic. The worst of the memoirish genre is set eternally in the bronze glow of the setting sun of a distant land, the prose purple and flowery, so that reading the mess is like eating pasta al forno soaked in lavender perfume. Many travel and dining mags are full of this sort of stuff, which in our home is called food porn.

M.F.K. Fisher, born 100 years ago, is known as a food writer, but she said she wrote of hunger, and she’s the most literary of them all. (It's her translation of Brillat-Savarin I linked to above.) The New York Times wrote, “In a properly run culture, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher would be recognized as one of the great writers this country has produced in this century….” I use her essays even in fiction classes. For Christmas I got the 50th-anniversary edition of her The Art of Eating, a 740-page collection of several earlier books including Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, and How to Cook A Wolf.

It’s this last one, written in 1942, that provides an interesting nonfiction form I might call The Recipe, which got me thinking about how to restructure my nonfiction course. The book was written when wartime shortages had compounded the problems of the Depression, and Fisher offers sensible advice in each chapter about how to make do, provide nutrition, and even enjoy oneself at table. Along the way she illuminates her times. For true emergencies, the essay “How to Stay Alive” ponders what’s needed spiritually and nutritionally to survive on what was a few cents a day in her time. It includes a recipe for making a slumgullion of “ground whole-grain cereal,” a tiny amount of cheap meat, and loads of vegetables (“wilted and withered things a day old maybe…[or] the big coarse ugly ones”), stewed three or more hours.

“I know, from some experience,” she says, “[that it] holds enough vitamins and minerals and so on and so forth to keep a professional strong-man or a dancer or even a college professor in good health and equable spirits. The main trouble with it, as with any enforced and completely simple diet, is its monotony. It must be considered, then, as a means to an end, like ethyl gasoline, which can never give much esthetic satisfaction to its purchaser or the automobile it is meant for but is almost certain to make that automobile run smoothly.”

All this sounds more applicable with each morning’s news.

Each chapter of How to Cook a Wolf contains recipes, a self-imposition on form, like rhyme in poems, that Fisher doesn’t usually choose for her work. In the introduction to Serve It Forth (1937) she says, “Recipes in my book will be there like birds in a tree—if there is a comfortable branch.” That’s good advice for any writer hoping to do more than fit some house style of editing. But the obligation to include a recipe does interesting things, including forcing her seemingly to stop one story and start anew before the end of every piece, but it's a trick. Really she just continues in another mode, since her recipes are also full of commentary, explication and metaphor. On baking bread: “From there on, when you first assemble the ingredients, the dance begins. It is one that should be rehearsed a few times, probably, but I know that it can be done with astonishing if somewhat frenzied smoothness the first time.”

To the degree that writing imitates organic forms, jaggedness or an absence of straight lines is as necessary as symmetry, balance and functionality. Fisher’s work always has these virtues, its most literary quality apart from her perfect pitch. Her essays start where she needs them to, end often suddenly, and are as inevitable as they are unexpected. Her use of the recipe is a variation on this skill. If I do have my nonfiction class write about food, I’ll go heavy on Fisher in the reading and ask students at least once to extend comfortable branches for a few birds to nest in their trees.