M.f.k. fisher books in order
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M. F. K. Fisher
American food writer
M. F. K. Fisher | |
|---|---|
| Born | Mary Frances Kennedy (1908-07-03)July 3, 1908 Albion, Michigan, U.S. |
| Died | June 22, 1992(1992-06-22) (aged 83) Glen Ellen, California, U.S. |
| Pen name | Victoria Berne (shared) |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Subject | Food, travel, memoir |
| Spouse | Alfred Young Fisher Dillwyn Parrish Donald Friede |
| Children | Anna, Kennedy |
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher Parrish Friede (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992), writing as M.F.K. Fisher, was an American food writer. She was a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. Over her lifetime she wrote 27 books, among them Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943) and a translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored this in her writing. W. H. Auden once remarked, "I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose."[1] In 1991 the New York Times editorial board went so far as to say, "Calling M.F.K. Fi
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M.F.K. Fisher Taught Americans How to Nourish Bodies and Souls
With our seemingly intuitive sense that good food can be about more than a full stomach, the message of How to Cook a Wolf might now appear a given. Fisher emerged, however, as a writer at a time when food wasn’t nearly so central to the national imagination. The story of cookbook author and TV personality Julia Child, one recounted in the 2009 feature film Julie & Julia and a subsequent TV series and documentary, is a potent reminder that American cuisine tended to be bland in the middle of the twentieth century. Innovators such as Child, Fisher, and chef James Beard, who all came to know one another, helped shake things up.
“America was another country in the fifties,” culinary writer Ruth Reichl has pointed out in describing the nation’s eating habits. “Spaghetti came in cans. Cheese mainly meant Velveeta. Nobody had ever heard of cappuccino. Most fancy restaurants were serving something called Continental Cuisine, and the only Chinese dish anyone knew was chop suey.”
While Child and Beard taught American
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Ruth Reichl on M.F.K. Fisher’s Lifetime of Joyous Eating
“Please don’t whisper,” whispers Mary Frances. Even reduced to the tiniest thread, her voice is imperious.
The small house in the tawny Sonoma fields is quiet. She lies propped up in a large bed in a dark room. Occasionally a beeper issues a peremptory honk, but mostly the sounds are the soft whoosh of the rural highway in front and the quiet murmur of the television in the nurse’s bedroom next door.
We both know this will be the last interview. It is 1992 and she is dying, her wasted body unable to rise from the bed, sunglasses hiding old eyes grown too weak to read. Her voice is so frail a sliver of sound that visitors are forced to bend over, an ear to her mouth, to make out the halting words. Conversation has become so exhausting that after a quarter-hour Mary Frances waves me out of her bedroom.
I stroll into the light airy space that serves as kitchen, living, and dining room. Unframed paintings by Mary Frances’s second husband, Dillwyn Parrish, ha
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