M. F. K. Fisher

Based on Wikipedia: M. F. K. Fisher

W. H. Auden, one of the twentieth century's most celebrated poets, once declared: "I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose." He wasn't talking about Hemingway. He wasn't talking about Fitzgerald or Faulkner. He was talking about a woman who wrote about oysters, about the proper way to eat a tangerine, about the transformative power of a well-made soup.

Her name was M. F. K. Fisher, and she spent her life proving that writing about food was not a lesser art. In her hands, a meditation on how to cook during wartime rationing became literature. A remembrance of eating snails in Dijon became philosophy.

Born Too Early for the Fourth of July

Mary Frances Kennedy came into the world on July 3, 1908, in Albion, Michigan, during a brutal heatwave. Her father Rex, a newspaper man with a flair for the dramatic, had desperately wanted her born on Independence Day so he could name her Independencia. Her mother Edith, possessed of considerably more sense, convinced the family doctor to speed things along. The child would be named Mary Frances, and she would grow up to write under her initials—M. F. K. Fisher—a name that gave nothing away about gender and everything away about a certain steely elegance.

Rex Kennedy was a volunteer fireman who persuaded his fellow firefighters to spray down the walls of their house to keep his laboring wife cool. He was also co-owner and editor of the local newspaper, the Albion Evening Recorder. But small-town Michigan couldn't hold him. In 1911, when Mary Frances was three, Rex sold his stake in the paper to his brother and moved the family west, chasing a dream of owning a citrus grove in California.

The Kennedys bounced around for a year. They stayed with relatives in Washington State. They traveled down the coast to Ventura, where Rex nearly bought an orange grove but backed out after discovering the soil was bad. He briefly owned a newspaper in Oxnard, then worked for a paper in San Diego. Finally, in 1912, he purchased a controlling interest in the Whittier News and planted his family in Whittier, California—a quiet Quaker community that would shape Mary Frances in ways both obvious and subtle.

The Tyranny of Grandmother Holbrook

Fisher's relationship with food began, as so many formative relationships do, in opposition.

Her maternal grandmother Holbrook lived with the family until her death in 1920, and she cast a long culinary shadow. Grandmother Holbrook was a Campbellite—a member of the Churches of Christ movement that emphasized biblical literalism and personal austerity. She believed firmly in overcooked, bland food. She was also a devoted follower of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the health reformer who ran the famous Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan and invented corn flakes as part of his mission to create foods that would suppress what he considered unhealthy urges.

Kellogg's dietary philosophy was essentially anti-pleasure. Food should be bland, easy to digest, and devoid of stimulation. Meat was suspect. Spices were dangerous. Flavor itself was morally questionable.

But when Grandmother Holbrook left for her religious conventions, something magical happened in the Kennedy household. The children were allowed marshmallows in their hot chocolate. There was thin pastry under the Tuesday hash. Rare roast beef appeared on Sunday instead of boiled hen. Mother ate all the cream of fresh mushroom soup she wanted. Father served local red wine—"red-ink," he called it—with the steak. The family devoured grilled sweetbreads and skewered kidneys with a daring dash of sherry.

Fisher's earliest memory of taste was "the grayish-pink fuzz my grandmother skimmed from a spitting kettle of strawberry jam." It's a sensory memory so specific, so visceral, that you can almost taste it yourself. This was her gift as a writer: she could make you taste what she tasted, decades after the fact, across the unbridgeable gulf between her experience and yours.

Aunt Gwen and the Education of the Palate

If Grandmother Holbrook represented everything food should not be, "Aunt" Gwen represented its opposite.

Gwen wasn't actually family. She was the daughter of the Nettleships, whom Fisher described as "a strange family of English medical missionaries who preferred tents to houses." The Nettleships maintained an encampment on Laguna Beach, and young Mary Frances would camp out there with Gwen, learning to cook in ways that would have horrified Grandmother Holbrook.

They steamed mussels on fresh seaweed over hot coals. They caught and fried rock bass. They skinned and cooked eel. They made fried egg sandwiches to carry on hikes. This was cooking stripped of pretension, cooking connected directly to the land and sea, cooking as adventure.

Fisher later wrote of her meals with Gwen and Gwen's brothers: "I decided at the age of nine that one of the best ways to grow up is to eat and talk quietly with good people." This sentence contains the seed of everything she would later become. For Fisher, food was never just about food. It was about connection, about conversation, about the people gathered around the table. Eating well was, as she would later put it, just one of the "arts of life."

An Indifferent Student, A Passionate Reader

Mary Frances loved to read but could not be bothered with formal education. She started writing poetry at five. Her father, recognizing her talent, used her as a stringer on his newspaper, where she would draft as many as fifteen stories a day. But school was another matter entirely.

She was, by her own admission, an indifferent student who often skipped classes. Her parents tried various approaches: they enrolled her at The Bishop's School in La Jolla at sixteen, then transferred her to the Harker School for Girls in Palo Alto. She graduated from Harker in 1927, attended Illinois College for a single semester, then took summer classes at UCLA just to accumulate enough credits to transfer to Occidental College.

At Occidental, she met a young man named Alfred Fisher. Everyone called him Al.

She attended Occidental for exactly one year. Then, on September 5, 1929, less than two months before the stock market crash that would usher in the Great Depression, she married Al and sailed with him to France.

Dijon: The Making of a Food Writer

The Fishers settled in Dijon, the ancient capital of Burgundy, a region synonymous with wine and mustard and some of the finest cooking in France. Al was pursuing his doctorate at the University of Dijon's Faculté des Lettres. When he wasn't in class, he worked on an epic poem called The Ghosts in the Underblows, a biblical work he envisioned as analogous to James Joyce's Ulysses. He had finished twelve books of what he expected would eventually comprise sixty.

Mary Frances enrolled in night classes at the École des Beaux-Arts, studying painting and sculpture for three years. But her real education was happening at the dinner table.

They rented two rooms at 14 Rue du Petit-Potet from the Ollangnier family. There was no kitchen. No private bathroom. But Madame Ollangnier, despite being "extremely penurious and stingy," served good food. Mary Frances remembered big salads made at the table, deep-fried Jerusalem artichokes, and "reject cheese" that was always good.

To celebrate their three-month anniversary, Al and Mary Frances went to Aux Trois Faisans, a restaurant that would become central to her culinary education. There, a sommelier named Charles introduced her to fine wine, teaching her to taste with intention and attention.

The young couple ate their way through Dijon. Fisher later described it with the kind of prose that made Auden's praise seem understated:

We ate terrines of pâté ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed fat. We tied napkins under our chins and splashed in great odorous bowls of écrevisses à la nage. We addled our palates with snipes hung so long they fell from their hooks, to be roasted then on cushions of toast softened with the paste of their rotted innards and fine brandy.

This is not food writing as we typically encounter it—no reassuring recipes, no approachable weeknight dinners. This is food writing as sensory overload, as transgression, as a kind of ecstatic surrender to pleasure. The snipes "hung so long they fell from their hooks" would horrify modern food safety inspectors. That was precisely the point.

Lawrence Clark Powell and the Pensione

In 1930, a young man named Lawrence Clark Powell arrived in Dijon at Mary Frances's suggestion. Powell had met her through her sister at Occidental College. He moved into the attic above the Fishers and became a lifelong friend.

Years later, Powell would recall the food at their pensione with something approaching religious awe:

Oh my god, how was the food? Jim it was heavenly! Madame Rigoulet was a great cook, and her husband was a great cook of omelets so he always did the omelet. And the food just floated through the air. You reached up in the air and drew it down—marvelous food.

"You reached up in the air and drew it down." There's something almost mystical about that description, and it captures something essential about how Fisher and her circle experienced food. It wasn't fuel. It wasn't even just pleasure. It was something transcendent, something that connected the physical act of eating to something larger and more luminous.

Her First Kitchen

In 1931, the Fishers moved to their own apartment above a pastry shop at 26 Rue Monge. For the first time in her married life, Mary Frances had a kitchen.

It measured five feet by three feet and contained a two-burner hotplate. That was it.

Most people would see this as a limitation. Fisher saw it as a challenge. In that tiny space, she began developing what she called her "personal cuisine," with the goal of "cooking meals that would 'shake [her guests] from their routines, not only of meat-potatoes-gravy, but of thought, of behavior.'"

This is a remarkable ambition. She wasn't just trying to feed people well. She was trying to transform them, to use food as a medium for changing how they thought and how they acted. In The Gastronomical Me, she described one such meal:

There in Dijon, the cauliflowers were very small and succulent, grown in that ancient soil. I separated the flowerlets and dropped them in boiling water for just a few minutes. Then I drained them and put them in a wide shallow casserole, and covered them with heavy cream, and a thick sprinkling of freshly grated Gruyère, the nice rubbery kind that didn't come from Switzerland at all, but from the Jura. It was called râpé in the market, and was grated while you watched, in a soft cloudy pile, onto your piece of paper.

Notice what she's doing here. She's not giving you a recipe in the conventional sense. She's giving you an experience. The cauliflowers are "small and succulent, grown in that ancient soil." The Gruyère is "the nice rubbery kind" from the Jura, not Switzerland. It was grated while you watched, falling in "a soft cloudy pile." You can see it. You can almost taste it.

The Marriage Begins to Fail

After Al received his doctorate, the Fishers moved briefly to Strasbourg, where Mary Frances became depressed from loneliness and cold. Unable to afford better accommodations, they decamped to a tiny French fishing village called Le Cros-de-Cagnes.

Lawrence Powell visited them there for six weeks and observed that Al was growing more introspective. He had stopped work on his epic poem. He was trying to write novels instead. He didn't want to return to America, where he knew the Depression had devastated the job market. But he couldn't see a way to stay in France either.

Eventually, the money ran out. The Fishers sailed home on the Feltre out of Marseille.

Back in California, they moved in with Mary Frances's family at "The Ranch." Later they moved to the Laguna cabin her father had bought from the Nettleships. Al spent two years searching for a teaching position before finally landing one at Occidental College. Mary Frances began writing in earnest, publishing her first piece—"Pacific Village," a fictional account of life in Laguna Beach—in the February 1935 issue of Westways magazine.

In 1933, new neighbors arrived: Dillwyn Parrish and his wife Gigi. The couples became fast friends.

Then Dillwyn divorced Gigi in 1934, and Mary Frances found herself falling in love with him.

Dillwyn Parrish

The story of how Mary Frances and Dillwyn came together depends on who's telling it. In Mary Frances's version, she sat next to him at the piano one day and simply told him she loved him. Gigi, interviewed years later by Fisher's biographer Joan Reardon, told a different story: Dillwyn said that one night after he had dined alone with Mary Frances, she let herself into his house later and slipped into his bed.

Either way, by 1935, with Al's knowledge and permission, Mary Frances traveled to Europe with Dillwyn and his mother. The Parrishes had money. They sailed on the luxury liner Hansa. In Europe, they spent four days in Paris and traveled through Provence, Languedoc, and the French Riviera. Mary Frances revisited Dijon and ate with Dillwyn at Aux Trois Faisans, where she was recognized and served by her old friend, the waiter Charles.

She later wrote a piece about their visit—"The Standing and the Waiting"—which would become the centerpiece of her first book, Serve It Forth.

Upon returning to America, Mary Frances told Al about her developing relationship with Dillwyn. Then, in 1936, Dillwyn invited the Fishers—both of them—to join him in creating an artists' colony at Le Paquis, a two-story stone house he had bought with his sister north of Vevey, Switzerland.

Astonishingly, Al agreed.

Le Paquis

"Le Paquis" means "the grazing ground" in French. The house sat on a sloping meadow on the north shore of Lake Geneva, looking across to the snowcapped Alps. It was, by all accounts, extraordinarily beautiful.

The three of them—Mary Frances, Al, and Dillwyn—lived there together in an arrangement that must have been as uncomfortable as it was inevitable. Mary Frances threw herself into the garden:

We grew beautiful salads, a dozen different kinds, and several herbs. There were shallots and onion and garlic, and I braided them into long silky ropes and hung them over rafters in the attic.

In mid-1937, the arrangement finally ended. Al traveled to Austria and then returned to the States, where he began a distinguished career as a teacher and poet at Smith College. Mary Frances stayed with Dillwyn.

In a letter to Lawrence Powell dated December 2, 1938, Mary Frances explained her side of the breakup. She wrote that Al was afraid of physical love, that he was sexually impotent in their marriage. Moreover, he was an intellectual loner who was emotionally estranged from her. She had not left him for another man, she insisted. She had left him because he could not satisfy her emotional and physical needs.

In 1938, she returned home briefly to tell her parents in person about her separation and pending divorce.

The First Book and Its Aftermath

Meanwhile, something remarkable was happening with Mary Frances's writing. She had been researching old cookery books at the Los Angeles Public Library and writing short pieces on gastronomy. Dillwyn's sister Anne showed them to her publisher at Harper's, who expressed interest.

Those pieces became Serve It Forth, published in 1937 to largely glowing reviews in Harper's Monthly, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. Fisher was disappointed in the book's meager sales—she needed the money—but critically, at least, she had arrived.

During this same period, she and Dillwyn co-wrote a light romance called Touch and Go under the pseudonym Victoria Berne. They alternated chapters. It was published by Harper and Brothers in 1939.

Then disaster struck.

In September 1938, no longer able to afford Le Paquis, Fisher and Dillwyn moved to Bern. After only two days there, Dillwyn suffered severe cramping in his left leg. He was hospitalized and underwent two surgeries to remove blood clots. Gangrene set in. His left leg had to be amputated.

Dillwyn was in considerable pain, and his doctors couldn't give him a clear diagnosis. With the onset of World War II making Europe increasingly dangerous, and Dillwyn desperately needing medical care, the couple faced an uncertain future.

The Art of Living

In 1991, the year before she died, the New York Times editorial board wrote about Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher in terms usually reserved for philosophers and statesmen:

Calling M. F. K. Fisher, who has just been elected to the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, a food writer is a lot like calling Mozart a tunesmith. At the same time that she is celebrating, say, oysters (which lead, she says, 'a dreadful but exciting life') or the scent of orange segments drying on a radiator, she is also celebrating life and loneliness, sense and sensibility.

Over her lifetime, Fisher wrote twenty-seven books. Consider the Oyster, published in 1941, is exactly what its title suggests: a meditation on the oyster in all its complexity, from its biology to its place in human culture to the best ways to prepare it. How to Cook a Wolf, published in 1942, addressed the challenge of eating well during wartime rationing—a book that was immediately practical and somehow also timelessly philosophical. The Gastronomical Me, published in 1943, was her most autobiographical work, weaving together food memories and life stories in ways that were then revolutionary and remain influential today.

She also translated Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste, the foundational text of food writing, originally published in 1825. Brillat-Savarin was a French lawyer and politician who wrote about food with the kind of intellectual rigor usually reserved for subjects considered more serious. In translating his work, Fisher was claiming a lineage, positioning herself as his American heir.

She helped found the Napa Valley Wine Library, an institution dedicated to preserving the history and culture of California winemaking. She lived her final years in a house in Glen Ellen, in Sonoma County, not far from the vineyards she had helped celebrate.

What She Taught Us

Fisher's great insight was that food writing could be a way of writing about everything else. Her ostensible subjects were oysters and wolves and Dijon mustard, but her real subjects were love and loss and the passage of time. She understood that how we eat reflects how we live, that the dinner table is where families are made and unmade, that a perfectly ripe peach is a meditation on mortality.

"First we eat, then we do everything else," she wrote. It sounds simple. It isn't.

Most of us rush through our meals, treating food as fuel to power us through our real lives. Fisher spent her life arguing that eating well was not a distraction from real life but an essential component of it. The meal was not a pause between significant moments. The meal was itself significant.

She arrived at this understanding early. At nine years old, eating with Aunt Gwen and her brothers on that Laguna Beach campsite, she decided that "one of the best ways to grow up is to eat and talk quietly with good people." She spent the rest of her life elaborating on that simple truth, demonstrating through the quality of her attention that even the humblest meal deserved to be noticed, remembered, and celebrated.

In an age of fast food and faster lives, her work feels almost radical. She asks us to slow down. To taste. To notice the cauliflower grown in ancient soil, the Gruyère grated in soft cloudy piles. To recognize that how we eat is how we love, and how we love is who we are.