THE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT. Signed Broadside

Sonoma, California: Cadmus Editions, 1982. 1st Edition. Soft cover. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Signed by Author. First Edition, Limited to 100 Numbered Copies Signed by M. F. K. Fisher. 15 in. x 22 in. A fine copy designed and printed from handset type on Rives BFK, Gutenberg Laid and Mohawk Superfine by Judyl Mudfoot at Mudborn Press. Calligraphy by Pamela Gardella. An excerpt from M. F. K. Fisher's engaging, A Cordiall Water: A Garland Of Odd And Old Receipts To Assuage The Ills Of Man And Beast, collecting age-old folk remedies, "a perfect combination of superstition, instinct, and primitive knowledge", with autobiographical anecdotes from the author's life in California, Provence, Mexico and Switzerland. From the broadside: "The first advice is from the Journal kept by a London apothecary, in Shakespeare's time. The second is from a handbill thrust at me in Aix-en-Provence in about 1970, by a tall man dressed in rough thick clothes. It was night. Down the side street from which he darted now and then with his bunch of flimsy broad-sides I could hear the quavering of a dismal hymn. It sounded strange in the dark, sung perhaps by five or six ancient women, and its Weyleyan measures were doubly foreign in that Catholic town where Campra had been born and where schoolboys whistled phrases from the Jerusalem Psalter as unconsciously as they did from the latest rock-and-roll. But the handbill was no more strange to me than the other old recipe for both spoke of incantation, and mystery, and age-less faith: the essentials of healing