M. F. K. Fisher

M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992), American author noted for her artful writing about food, travel, and culture, and for creating a new literary genre, the food essay. Unlike other food experts who restricted their writing to descriptions of particular dishes, restaurants, or cuisines, Fisher used her savory reminiscences of food as metaphors to explore deeper philosophical and personal subjects. “The world seems more real,” she asserted in How to Cook a Wolf (1942), in the presence of a “pungent and hearty stew.” During a writing career that spanned six decades, Fisher wrote 15 books of essays as well as hundreds of published stories, an acclaimed book translation, dozens of travelogues, a children's book, a novel, and a screenplay. Her elegant prose was celebrated by critics, including poet W.H. Auden, who in 1963 hailed her as 'America's greatest writer.'

Born in Albion, Michigan, Mary Francis Kennedy and her family soon moved to Whittier, California. She developed a love for cooking and writing at an early age. In An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949), Fisher recounts the adventure of making curried eggs for herself and her younger sister. She added lavish amounts of curry because of her “sensual need for more spice, more excitement, than Grandmother would allow us in our daily food.” The eggs were inedible, but her passion for cooking was confirmed. She attended Illinois College, Occidental College, and the University of California at Los Angeles, though she never received a degree from any of these institutions.

In 1929 she married and moved to Dijon, France. Fisher often wrote that her three years in Dijon critically influenced her knowledge of food and culture. She returned to California in 1932 and published her first book, Serve it Forth (1937), five years later. Over the following three decades, Fisher lived and wrote in California, France, and Switzerland. In 1971 she returned to the United States for good, moving into a house in Glen Ellen, California, in the Napa Valley, where she continued to write and host visiting authors and food lovers.

The best of Fisher's essays weave together recipes, outspoken opinions on food and cooking, and recollections about her travels with thoughts on love, self-discovery, and life experiences. She particularly delighted in offering readers a wide range of recipes, from the practical to the exotic to the historical; for example, a 17th-century recipe for “herring-pye.” Serve it Forth, An Alphabet for Gourmets, Consider the Oyster (1941), and The Gastronomical Me (1943) are among her most celebrated collections. In these and many other works, Fisher's writing was noted for its narrative skill, wry wit, evocative descriptions of foreign lands, and sensuous descriptions of food. Through her essays, many Americans were introduced to the art of French cooking. Fisher's enthusiastic writing also helped her readers cultivate a heightened appreciation of entertaining, living well, and most of all, enjoying the pleasures of the table.

Among her other literary achievements, Fisher completed a definitive English translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste (Physiologie du Goût 1826; translated 1949), an influential 19th-century book on gastronomy. She published hundreds of stories and essays in The New Yorker and other popular American magazines. In 1971 Fisher wrote Among Friends, an account of her Episcopalian upbringing in the predominantly Quaker town of Whittier. She also penned a discourse on folk medicine called A Cordial Water (1961), and a meditation on growing older, Sister Age (1983), and she created an important volume on provincial French cooking with fellow chef and food writer Julia Child.

Fisher received lifetime achievement awards from the James Beard Foundation and the American Institute of Wine and Food and was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.