M. F. K. Fisher

American writer noted especially for her culinary works, including her standard translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste (1949).

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908–1992) wrote twenty-three books and hundreds of articles in which cuisine was virtually always her metaphor of choice. Many of her works included recipes, and she is often characterized as a food writer; this description, however, underestimates her powers as a highly creative author and a keen observer. She wrote of human hungers in the deepest sense. Fisher recognized the rich psychological, social, and cultural meaning of cuisine, identifying food, security, and love as fundamental and intertwined needs. Memorable meals eaten, rich wines and liqueurs imbibed, and the company she kept are equally important in her often highly personalized writing.

Born in Albion, Michigan, but raised in Whittier, California, from the age of four, Mary Frances Kennedy was the eldest of four children. At the age of nine she began experimenting in the kitchen and preparing meals. She wrote that food preparation brought recognition from her family, as well as proof of her own ontological being. Her father, Rex Kennedy, owned and published the local newspaper. Whittier was a conservative Quaker town, and the Kennedys, Episcopalian. Their religion prevented their complete assimilation into the community; thus, Mary Frances grew up with a perspective akin to an ethnographer: never fully part of the local culture, but with a defined role to play in it. She developed a discerning eye and used it to interpret others' lives while remaining removed from them.

At age twenty-one, the author married Alfred Young Fisher, the first of her three husbands. He received a graduate fellowship to study in France, and Mary Frances accompanied him, choosing to study art at the University of Dijon. The next three years proved formative as she became fluent in French and was introduced to regional cuisines. Although she was not to consider herself a writer for some years, she was a passionate correspondent throughout her life. Her expertise as a wordsmith was already apparent in her letters home from France (Barr et al., 1997).

Fisher's permanent home was California, but she passed numerous extended periods in France. Her writing reflects these distinct parts of the world. She also owned a home and a vineyard in Switzerland with her second husband, Dillwyn Parrish. She frequently wrote of her trans-Atlantic journeys by ocean liner and train travels within Europe. These accounts included descriptions of dining rooms and dining cars, the cuisine, its preparation, and its service. The journeys became symbolic of transitions in her life, as in one of her most compelling works, The Gastronomical Me (1943).

Fisher wrote in a broad range of genres including fiction, nonfiction, journalism, screenplay, poetry, and children's literature. Although her writing includes two novels, she excelled at essays. While many of her writings were based on events in her own life, she fictionalized these first-person narratives, transcending the boundaries of autobiography.

Fisher had a bold character; she was strikingly independent and she spun a worldly mystique around her tales. After divorcing Donald Friede, her third husband, she raised two daughters as a single parent. Her worldly panache convinced many readers that she was wealthy. In reality, her commitment to writing meant that she often struggled to make ends meet, earning less from her books than her published essays, which included a two-year series for the New Yorker, compiled afterward in With Bold Knife and Fork.

Among Fisher's greatest contributions was the translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology ofTaste. The early-nineteenth-century book of French manners is a masterpiece of droll commentary. Fisher's achievement lies not only in a masterful translation, but in her witty notations, equal to Brillat-Savarin's original, self-effacing, humorous style.

Fisher generously mentored young writers and had significant impact on Jeannette Ferrary and Anne Lamott. She was a close friend of both James Beard and Julia Child; the three visited, corresponded, and influenced one another. She advised and befriended restaurateurs including Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. Fisher favored fresh and local foods; she called them honest. Her approach had a significant impact on the evolution of California cuisine in the last quarter of the twentieth century. She passed her last years in the California wine country, and the region became the subject of some of her work.

W. H. Auden stated that had M. F. K. Fisher's subject been anything other than food, she would have been appreciated as the United States's finest twentieth-century author. Her books were widely translated and repeatedly republished. She made French cuisine and culture accessible, opening the doors of western European gastronomy to North Americans and other readers worldwide; her work reflects the sense of place she felt on two continents. Fisher received numerous literary prizes, including a lifetime achievement award from the James Beard Foundation. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.

Bibliography

Barr, Nora K., Marsha Moran, and Patrick Moran, eds. M. F. K. Fisher: A Life in Letters: Correspondence 1929–1991. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997.

Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste, or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy. Translated by M. F. K. Fisher. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997.

Fisher, M. F. K. The Art of Eating. Contains Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, An Alphabet for Gourmets. New York: 1990 [1954].

Fisher, M. F. K. Two Towns in Provence. Contains Map of Another Town and A Considerable Town. New York: Vintage, 1983.

Fisher, M. F. K. With Bold Knife and Fork. New York: Putnam, 1969.

—Susan L. F. Isaacs

Quotes:

"Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly."

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992) was a prolific and well-respected writer, writing more than 20 books during her lifetime and also publishing two volumes of journals and correspondence shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books deal primarily with food, considering it from many aspects: preparation, natural history, culture, and philosophy. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored the art of living as a secondary theme in her writing. Her style and pacing are noted elements of her short stories and essays.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Death 3 Books 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Biography

Fisher was born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Michigan on July 3, 1908. In 1911, her father, Rex Kennedy, moved the family to Whittier, California to pursue a career in journalism. Although Whittier was primarily a Quaker community at that time, Mary Frances was brought up within the Episcopal Church.

While studying at the University of California in 1929, Fisher met her first husband, Alfred Young Fisher. The couple spent the first formative years of their marriage in Europe, primarily at the University of Dijon in France. At the time, Dijon was known as one of the major culinary centers of the world and this certainly had an impact on Fisher, who later went on to become one of the great culinary writers of the twentieth century. These three years in Dijon are recounted in her later book "Long ago in France."

In 1932, the couple returned from France to a country ravaged by the Great Depression. Having lived for years as students on a fixed stipend, they were wholly unprepared for the economic situation that faced them. Al got odd jobs cleaning out houses before finally landing a teaching job at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Fisher did her part teaching a few lessons at an all-girls' school and working in a frame shop.

In addition to being an author, Fisher was an amateur sculptor working mostly in the realm of wood carving.

During the Fishers' years in California, they formed a friendship with Dillwyn "Timmy" Parrish and his wife, Gigi. Later, in 1938, Fisher was to leave Alfred for Timmy, referred to as "Chexbres" in many of her books, named after the small Swiss village on Lake Geneva close to where they had lived. The second marriage, while passionate, was short. Only a year into the marriage, Parrish lost his leg due to a circulatory disease, and in 1941 took his own life. Fisher went on to be involved in a number of other turbulent romantic relationships with men and women.

Fisher bore two daughters. Anna, whose father Fisher refused to name, was born in 1943. Mary Kennedy was born in 1946, during Fisher's marriage to Donald Friede, which lasted from 1945 to 1951.

Death

After Parrish's death, Fisher considered herself a "ghost" of a person, but went on to live a long and productive life, dying in California in 1992 at the age of 83. She had long suffered from Parkinson's disease and arthritis, but lived the last twenty years of her life in "Last House," a house built for her in one of California's vineyards. ^[1]

A full list of her works can be found at The MFK Fisher Foundation Webpage.

Books

• Serve It Forth (1937)
• Aix-en-Provence
• Consider the Oyster (1941)
• How to Cook a Wolf (1942)
• The Gastronomical Me (1943)
• Here Let Us Feast, A Book of Banquets (1946)
• Not Now but Now (1947)
• An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949)
• The Physiology of Taste [translator] (1949)
• The Art of Eating (1954)
• A Cordial Water: A Garland of Odd & Old Receipts to Assuage the Ills of Man or Beast (1961)
• The Story of Wine in California (1962)
• Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (1964)
• Recipes: The Cooking of Provincial France (1968) [reprinted in 1969 as The Cooking of Provincial France]
• With Bold Knife and Fork (1969)
• Among Friends (1971)
• A Considerable Town (1978)
• Not a Station but a Place (1979)
• As They Were (1982)
• Sister Age (1983)
• Spirits of the Valley (1985)
• Fine Preserving: M.F.K. Fisher's Annotated Edition of Catherine Plagemann's Cookbook (1986)
• Dubious Honors (1988)
• The Boss Dog: A Story of Provence (1990)
• Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (1991)
• To Begin Again: Stories and Memoirs 1908-1929 (1992)
• Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories 1933-1941 (1993)
• Last House: Reflections, Dreams and Observations 1943-1991 (1995)
• Aphorisms of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin from His Work, The Physiology of Taste (1998)
• From the Journals of M.F.K. Fisher (1999)
• Two Kitchens in Provence (1999)
• Home Cooking: An Excerpt from a Letter to Eleanor Friede, December, 1970 (2000)

References

1. ^ "M.F.K. Fisher, Writer on the Art of Food and the Taste of Living, Is Dead at 83.". New York Times. June 24, 1992. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D61338F937A15755C0A964958260. Retrieved on 2007-09-25. "M. F. K. Fisher, the writer whose artful personal essays about food created a genre, died on Monday at her home on the Bouverie Ranch in Glen Ellen, California. She was 83 years old." 

Further reading

• Barr, Norah Kennedy (1993), Foreword to Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: journals and stories, 1933-1941, M. F. K. Fisher. New York: Pantheon Books
• The M.F.K. Fisher Foundation
• A biography of M. F. K. Fisher by Janice Albert
• A biography of M. F. K. Fisher by Joan Reardon
• Ferrarry, Jeannette (1998) M. F. K. Fisher and Me : a Memoir of Food and Friendship ISBN 0-312-19442-0
• Reardon, Joan (2004) Poet of the Appetites New York : North Point Press ISBN 0-86547-562-8
• Derwin, Susan (2003), "The poetics of M. F. K. Fisher", in: Style, Fall 2003
• Green, Michelle (2003) "M. F. K. Fisher’s Sonoma -- a House Built to Feed Body and Soul", Michelle Green, in: New York Times Aug. 31, 2008

External links

• M.F.K. Fisher Papers.Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
• Short radio segment (script and audio) A Thing Shared from The Gastronomical Me at California Legacy Project.

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