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M. F. K. Fisher

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Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992) was a prolific and well-respected author. She wrote more than 20 books during her lifetime. Two volumes of her journals and correspondence came out shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Most of her books deal 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 this in her writing.

Biography

Fisher was born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Michigan in 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. Dijon is known as one of the culinary centers of the world and this had an impact on Fisher, who went on to become one of the most outstanding culinary writers of the twentieth century. Her three years in Dijon are recounted in her 1991 book Long Ago in France. In 1932, the couple returned from France to the USA at the height of the Great Depression. Al got odd jobs like cleaning out houses before finally landing a teaching job at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Fisher taught part time at an all-girls school and also worked in a frame shop. [citation needed]

In California, the Fishers formed a friendship with Timmy Parrish and his wife Gigi. 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 went to live. This passionate marriage was short-lived. 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.[1] Fisher bore two daughters. Anna, whose father Fisher refused to name, was born in 1943. Mary was born in 1946, during Fisher's marriage to Donald Friede, which lasted from 1945 to 1951. [citation needed]

Death

After Timmy Parrish's death, Fisher considered herself a "ghost" of a person, but she continued to have a long and productive life, dying in Glen Ellen, California in 1992 at the age of 83. She had long suffered from Parkinson's disease and arthritis. She spent the last twenty years of her life in "Last House," a house built for her in a vineyard.[2]

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. ^ Joan Reardon, in her biography of M.F.K. Fisher, remarks how the account of Mary Frances' first oyster, in The Gastronomical Me (1943) she links "with her initiation into boarding school crushes and lesbian relationships." (Reardon, Poet of the Appetites, 2004, p. 28).
  2. ^ O'Neill, Molly (June 24, 1992). "M.F.K. Fisher, Writer on the Art of Food and the Taste of Living, Is Dead at 83". New York Times. Retrieved 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

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