Who was M.F.K. Fisher, and where should you start?
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992) was an American writer who used food as a way into everything else: love, hunger, travel, loneliness and the pleasure of a good meal eaten with attention. She wrote 27 books, among them Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me. Start with The Gastronomical Me (1943), her memoir told through meals, or The Art of Eating if you want five of her classic books in one volume.
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Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was born in Michigan in 1908, grew up in Whittier, California, and spent formative years in France, starting in Dijon in 1929, then later in Switzerland and Provence. According to Wikipedia's detailed biography, she believed eating well was one of the arts of life, and over her career wrote 27 books, plus a celebrated translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. The poet W. H. Auden admired her prose enormously, and when she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1991, the New York Times argued that calling her a food writer sold her short.
What makes her different
Most food writing is about food. Fisher's writing uses food to talk about people. A meal is never just a meal: it's the setting for a first love, a lonely evening in a foreign city, a quarrel, a family memory, a small act of courage. She writes about hunger in every sense.
Her style is precise, sensual and unsentimental, often funny, sometimes sharp. She is happy to tell you she ate alone and enjoyed it, or that a famous dish was disappointing. She was writing personal essays about eating long before that was a genre with a shelf in the bookshop.
The books to know
Serve It Forth (1937). Her first book: essays mixing food history, personal memory and opinion. Reviewers liked it; sales were modest.
Consider the Oyster (1941). A whole book on the history, preparation and eating of one shellfish, and a good taster of her voice.
How to Cook a Wolf (1942). Written during the Second World War, at the height of wartime food shortages, with advice on stretching ingredients and eating well when money and food are scarce. Think of the wolf at the door. It feels timely whenever budgets are tight.
The Gastronomical Me (1943). A memoir in essays, each memory a self-contained story with food at its centre, running from her childhood to her life in France and the coming of the Second World War. If you read one, read this.
An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949). Short pieces arranged from A to Z: an easy book to dip into.
The Art of Eating (1954). An omnibus that collects the five books above in a single volume, and the edition many readers end up owning.
Later, she wrote about France in Map of Another Town (1964), a memoir of Aix-en-Provence, and Long Ago in France (1991), about her years in Dijon.
Where to start
The Gastronomical Me is the best first book. Wikipedia's article on it notes that the New York Review of Books called it her masterpiece, a self-portrait through food. It covers the most ground in her life, and it shows what she can do with a single dinner. Read a chapter, put it down, and notice how differently you taste your next meal.
If you prefer short pieces, start with Consider the Oyster or the alphabet book, then move to the memoir. If you're thrifty by nature, or simply curious about cooking well on little, How to Cook a Wolf is a joy, though some of its wartime advice is very much of its time.
For a single fat volume to live with for years, buy The Art of Eating.
Who will love her
- Anyone who reads cookbooks in bed for the stories, not the recipes.
- People who enjoy personal essays and memoir.
- Travellers who remember a place by what they ate there.
- Readers of Elizabeth David, her near-contemporary across the Atlantic, who shared her impatience with nonsense and love of the Mediterranean table.
FAQ
Are there recipes in her books?
Some, but in her hands they are part of the storytelling rather than the point. Treat them as ideas and inspiration.
Is her writing dated?
Some attitudes and prices are, inevitably. The prose and the observations about people are not.
Did she write about Italy?
Her great European subject was France, particularly Burgundy and Provence, and she also lived for a time in Switzerland. Her approach to the pleasures of the table translates easily to an Italian summer.
Is there a good biography?
Biographers have written about her, but start with her own memoirs; she is her own best biographer, if not always the most reliable.
Sources
Written by the Zestasy editors. General information for curious adults, not medical, nutrition or training advice.