Ageless Love

By Patricia Blake

SISTER AGE by M.F.K. Fisher 243 pages; Knopf; $12.95

In The Gastronomical Me, the 1943 book that established Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher as America's most inspired food writer, the author hinted at loftier intentions. People often asked her, she said, why she wrote about eating and drinking. In answer, she conceded that she was hungry, "like most other humans." But there was more: ''It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it, and it is all one."

Although M.F.K. Fisher continued to write books on food in the ensuing decades, she made the passage from haute cuisine to the high art of fiction. Sister Age is Fisher's 17th book and her first full-scale collection of stories. The tales are loosely connected by a single theme: getting old. In a foreword, the 74-year-old author confides that for almost half a century she has been keeping notes on the art of aging, observing the ways that people cope with the advancing years.

One of her most touching stories is situated in her home town of Whittier, Calif., and concerns a little girl's awakening to the dolor and the death of the very old. France is the scene of other tales, just as it has been the setting for much of Fisher's own adult life. The collection's finest piece, The Oldest Man, is about an American woman's visit to a stern, mountainous region called the Massif Central, where a centenarian and his septuagenarian son have their ancestral home. As always, the author's observations of local landscape, weather, architecture and gastronomical specialties (in this case, Roquefort) are as keen and winning as her insights into her characters. Most engaging is the 100-year-old Pepe, who after meals recites obscure La Fontaine fables and sings joyously while his lone tooth shines "unashamedly in his strong ancient face."

Remarkably few tears are shed in Sister Age, but those that fall linger in the memory. In Moment of Wisdom, a tired, frail old man, as "dry as a ditch weed," comes calling at the homestead outside Whittier with Bibles for sale. The twelve-year-old girl who answers the door refuses a Bible but offers a glass of water. As the old man walks away, the child is astonished to find her eyes filling up. She thinks: "If I could have given him something of mine . . . If I had next week's allowance and had not spent this week's on three Cherry Flips."

In this, as in other stories, Fisher has proved to be a true and worthy descendant of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the great 19th century French epicure whose classic The Physiology of Taste Fisher lovingly translated in 1949. "Gastronomy rules all life," he wrote. "The newborn baby's tears demand the nurse's breast, and the dying man receives, with some pleasure, the last cooling drink." --By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.