BOOK REVIEW : A Newlywed Learns About Life--From the Appetizer to Desserts : LONG AGO IN FRANCE: The Years in Dijon <i> by M.F.K. Fisher</i> , Prentice Hall Press, $17.95, 192 pages

I fell under the spell of M.F.K. Fisher when, at 16, I came across a copy of “How to Cook a Wolf” in the stacks of the Culver City public library.

No reader of “food books,” then or now, I found myself enchanted by her lilting style, her clear and true vision, her common sense, and--above all--her notion of the world as a place of beauty and bounty, if only you know how to find it.

All of these qualities shine out from the pages of Fisher’s latest book, “Long Ago in France,” a brief memoir of her early years in Dijon.

These vignettes capture her first encounters with France as a young newlywed--”an angel-guided idiot”--with a vast but untutored appetite for life. Her husband was a graduate student; she took classes at the Ecole de Beaux Arts, but all of Dijon was her university:

“It was there, I now understand, that I started to grow up, to study, to make love, to eat and drink, to be me and not what I was expected to be,” Fisher writes. “It was there that I learned it is blessed to receive, as well as that every human being, no matter how base, is worthy of my respect and even my envy because he knows something that I may never be old or wise or kind or tender enough to know.”

The scenes and characters in “Long Ago in France,” some of which have been published and collected elsewhere, are vivid, colorful, novelesque. The archbishop who lived next door wore shoes with crosses incised on the soles “so that every time he stepped he left their imprint.”

Her instructor at Beaux Arts was a sculptor too diminutive to wield a mallet and chisel on marble, so he specialized in the sculpting of medals--”gold buttons to pin on national heroes.”

And we are allowed a moment of profound sexual mystery when Fisher comes to the rescue of a fellow boarder--a ravishing (and, we learn, ravished) young Czech woman who has fallen in love with the ravisher himself--”her questionable Prussian acquaintance.”

Best of all is the outrageous Madame Ollangnier, the crafty and penurious landlady who provided bed and board to Fisher and served as her unwitting mentor. A genius in the kitchen and the shops, “Madame” organizes a cuckoo-watching expedition for her young charge, and argues tirelessly that “Beethoven and Bach were really French kidnapped at birth.” She refers to young Fisher, raised in California, as “my dear little North Mexican.”

Fisher would only later earn her reputation as a master of food and food writing, but here we see her as a novice. The descriptions of her first tentative experiences in French cuisine are delicately sexual in tone: “We felt beautiful . . . our hearts pounded,” she writes of her first orgiastic night at the groaning board of The Three Pheasants in the company of her husband, Al. “The first meal we had was a shy stupid one, but even if we had never gone back and never learned gradually how to order food and wine, it would still be among the important ones in my life.”

“Long Ago in France” is not really a book about cuisine--it is, after all, a book about a few particularly intense moments in a life lived fully and well.

Still, Fisher mentions in passing a few of “the thousand bilious blows” that she dealt her liver: “We ate terrines of pate 10 years old under their tight crusts of mildewed fat,” she writes. “We addled our palates with snipes hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted . . . with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy.” On Page 147, she even gives us a recipe for ratatouille .

Fisher looks back on Dijon from a distance of more than 60 years, but her vision is so acute, her voice so robust, that we see and hear only the young woman she was in 1929: “The threads of her later life are spinning themselves already,” observes Jan Morris in a brief introduction to the book, “and it is not fanciful to say that in the streets, cafes, and dining rooms of this city the Fisher way of writing is in genesis.”

It’s not necessary to revere M.F.K. Fisher, as I do, to appreciate the charm and enchantment and wisdom in “Long Ago in France.” But if you are already persuaded by “the Fisher way of writing,” this slender volume is something precious and golden.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “From the Old Marketplace” by Joseph Buloff (Harvard).