A witty, idiosyncratic guided tour through culinaria past and present by the inimitable M.F.K. Fisher.

In Serve It Forth, her first book, M.F.K. Fisher is already in full bloom. She travels the byways and tables of history with her unique literary vision, laying bare the peculiarities, profundities, and absurdities of the eating (and thinking) life. She makes an equal feast of the sybaritic Roman diet and its decadent excesses as she does of the slow progress of the snail as it makes its arduous way from garden to escargot. Serve It Forth is an occasion for celebrating food in all its many hues and guises, under the guidance of our greatest modern food writer and philosopher.