Fisher, M.F.K. (1908–1992)

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Fisher, M.F.K. (1908–1992)

American writer and gastronome who was one of her century's great prose stylists. Name variations: Mary Frances Parrish (1939–41); (joint pseudonym with Dillwyn Parrish) Victoria Berne. Born Mary Frances Kennedy on July 3, 1908, in Albion, Michigan; died on June 22, 1992, in Glen Ellen, California; one of four children of Rex Brenton (a newspaper editor) and Edith Oliver (Holbrook) Kennedy; sister of Norah K. Barr ; attended public schools in Whittier, California, and private boarding schools in southern California; attended Illinois College, Occidental College, University of California, University of Dijon, Dijon, France; married Alfred Young Fisher, in 1929 (divorced 1938); married Dillwyn Parrish (a writer), in 1939 (died 1941); married Donald Friede (a book editor), in 1945 (divorced 1951); children: Anne (b. 1943); (third marriage) Mary Kennedy (b. 1946).

Selected writings:

Serve It Forth (1937); 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); (trans.) Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste, or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (1949); An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949); A Cordiall Water (1961); The Story of Wine in California (1962); Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (1964); The Cooking of Provincial France (1968); With Bold Knife and Fork (1969); Among Friends (1971); A Considerable Town (1978, reprinted in 1985 with Map of Another Town, as Two Towns in Provence); As They Were (1982); Sister Age (1983); Spirits of the Valley (1985); The Standing and the Waiting (1985); Dubious Honors (1988); Answer in the Affirmative and The Oldest Living Man (1989); Boss Dog (1990); Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (1991); Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journal and Stories, 1933–1945 (1993).

In a career that spanned almost six decades, M.F.K. Fisher changed the style of culinary writing in America and delighted readers with what W.H. Auden called "one of the best prose styles in America." In addition to writing over two dozen books, Fisher contributed short stories, articles, and some poems to the nation's top magazines, including Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, Gourmet, Atlantic Monthly, Wine and Food Quarterly, and House Beautiful. "I was never a food writer," she always insisted. "I just wrote about life."

Fisher was born in Albion, Michigan, the eldest of four children. She grew up in California, an Episcopalian in a Quaker community. A lonely child, she developed a love of words and of the kitchen, which became her domain on the cook's day off. She attended public school in Whittier and private boarding schools in California, then sampled several colleges before her marriage to Alfred Young Fisher in 1929. She then sailed to France with her new husband to study at the University of Dijon, where she acquired her knowledge and love of French food and culture. Returning to California in 1932, Fisher began writing articles and essays based on old cookbooks. By the time her first book, Serve It Forth (1937), was published, she had separated from her husband (they divorced in 1938) and was living in Switzerland with writer Dillwyn Parrish (a son of artist Maxfield Parrish), with whom she collaborated on a novel, Touch and Go. In 1939, when Parrish was diagnosed with a fatal disease, the couple moved back to California and married. Parrish died in 1941. In 1943, Fisher had a daughter out of wedlock, whom she claimed was adopted. Two years later, she married book editor Donald Friede, with whom she had a second daughter. The press of deadlines, the death of her mother, and Friede's business and health problems caused the end of that marriage in 1951, after which Fisher moved to the family ranch in Whittier. In 1953, following her father's death, she took the children to Aix-en-Provence, then Lugano, where they lived for five years.

In the period after her second husband's death, Fisher wrote five books that comprise the core of her gastronomic works: Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943), and An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949). The books were republished in 1954 as The Art of Eating. From her first effort, Fisher drew praise from the critics who found her writing unique and beguiling. The New York Times called Serve It Forth "a delightful book … stamped on every page with a highly individual personality." Consider the Oyster was termed "a sort of crunchy oyster cracker of a book." Particularly witty was the tongue-in-cheek How to Cook a Wolf, which came out during the World War II food shortages and offered ways to keep the proverbial wolf from the door. Among the unorthodox recipe suggestions was an exotically prepared meal of weeds.

Fisher's first novel, Not Now But NOW (1947), the story about Jenny, a harlot of a girl, was equally well received. "Like her other works, Not Now But NOW defies the ordinary rules of structure and direction," writes Rose Feld . "And like them it demands attention and

respect as the product of a richly civilized and fearless mind." Fisher's vast output included a translation of Brillat-Savarin's 1925 classic Physiology of Taste (1949), of which she was particularly proud, and a small book of folk cures and superstitions called A Cordiall Water (1961), which she wrote during the five years she lived in France with her daughters. During the 1960s, she wrote articles under exclusive contract to The New Yorker, including a series about her Whittier childhood, republished as Among Friends (1971).

Although interest in the author flagged for a time, she enjoyed a revival in the 1980s, at which time her popularity rivaled that of her earlier career. Just before her death in 1992, Fisher was the subject of a short film in which she reminisced about her career and her three marriages.

sources:

Current Biography 1948. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1948.

Green, Carol Hurd, and Mary Grimley Mason, eds. American Women Writers. NY: Continuum, 1994.

Toth, Emily. "Food is Love," in Belles Lettres, Summer 1995, p. 11.

collections:

The papers of M.F.K. Fisher are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.

related media:

"M.F.K. Fisher: Writer with a Bite" (color, 28 min.), conversations with the author with excerpts from her writings, produced by Kathi Wheater , distributed by Cinema Guild, New York, 1992.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia