# M. F. K. Fisher

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher Parrish Friede (née Mary Frances Kennedy, published primarily as M. F. K. Fisher, but also as Mary Frances Parrish, Victoria Bern, and Victoria Berne; July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992) was a prolific American author of books on food and cooking combined with autobiographical memoirs. She also wrote essays, short stories, screenplays, travelogues, and three novels. She translated Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût and contributed to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Gourmet. From 1942 to 1944 she worked for Paramount Studios and was a gagwriter for Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour.

## Quotes

* Most of us, unhappily, shudder and ache and rumble as secretly as possible, seeming to feel disgrace in what is but one of the common phenomena of age: the general slowing of all physical processes. For years we hide or ignore our bodily protests and hasten our own dyspeptic doom by trying to eat and drink as we did when we were twenty. When we are past fifty, especially if we have kept up this pathetic pose of youth-at-table, we begin to grow fat. It is then that the blindest of us should beware. Unfortunately, however, we are too used to seeing other people turn heavy in their fifties: we accept paunches and double chins as a necessary part of growing old. Instead, we should realize this final protest of an overstuffed system, and ease our body's last years by lightening its burden. We should eat sparingly.
** Serve It Forth. North Point Press. 2002. p. 9. ISBN 0865473692. (pbk reprint of 1989 edition; 1st edition, 1937, Harper & Brothers)
* We lived for almost three years in Dijon, which the Burgundians called without any quibble and with only half-hearted contradictions "the gastronomic capital of the world." ... ... We ate terrines of pâté ten years old under their tight crusts of mildewed butter. 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. In village kitchens we ate hot leek-soup with white wine and snippets of salt pork in it.
** "The Gastronomical Me". Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 353–574. ISBN 0-7645-4261-3. (quote from p. 427; 1st edition of The Gastronomical Me published in 1943)
* Food for the soul is a part of all religion, as ancient savages know when they roast a tiger's heart for their god, as Christians know when they partake of Body and Blood as the mystical feast of Holy Communion. That is why there can be an equal significance in a sumptuous banquet for five thousand heroes, with the king sitting on his iron throne and minstrels singing above the sound of gnawed bones and clinking cups, or in a piece of dry bread eaten alone by a man lifting his eyes unto the hills. That is why, to my mind, there can be nothing irreverent or illogical about putting together in one collection of feasts such apparently disparate things as St. Luke's story of the Last Supper and Lewis Carroll's tea-part for Alice in Wonderland, the fish fry for the Lord God in His green pastures and Trimalchio's gluttonous orgy in decadent Rome.
** "The Book and the Flea by M. F. K. Fisher". Here Let Us Feast: A Book of Banquets. Berkeley, California: Catapult. 2018. pp. xv–xvii. ISBN 9781640090835. (quote from pp. xv–xvi; 1st edition, 1946, Viking Press; anthology compiled and edited by M. F. K. Fisher; 2018 introduction by Betty Fussell)
* B is for Bachelors ... and the wonderful dinners they pull out of their cupboards with such dining aplomb and kitchen chaos. Their approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman.
** An Alphabet for Gourmets. North Point Press. 1989. p. 11. ISBN 0-86547-391-9. (pbk reprint of 1st edition, 1949, Viking Press)
* I made this translation by myself, and can therefore thank none for it but perhaps my first teacher, who helped me learn to read. I have put it into the simplest words I know, since I feel that it is a singularly straightforward and unornamented piece of prose to have been written in a flowery literary period.
** "The Translator's Preface". The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy with Recipes by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Alfred A. Knopf. 2009. pp. lvi–lvii. ISBN 0307593835. (quote from p. lvi; 1st edition of translation, 1949; translated from the 1825 French original by M.F.K. Fisher; 2009 introduction by Bill Buford)
* Fortunately, good and premium wines are at the command of almost anyone in America who wants to drink them. Also, they are almost always dependable—a far cry from the old idea that "gentlemen" had their own wine cellars and their resultant giddy high life, and that the rest of the world lived on beer and skittles.
** The Story of Wine in California. University of California Press. 1962. p. 118. (125 pages; photographs by Max Yavno; introduction by Maynard Amerine)
* We went away, away ... in this case to the Cours Mirabeau, where we consumed sherbets and vermouth-gins according to our natures, and as returned amateurs seemed to grow like water-flowers under the greening buds of the plane trees, in the flowing tides of that street.
** Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence. Little, Brown and Company. 1964. p. 15. (See Aix-en-Provence.)
* ... When I am alone and perhaps a little low, it is good to heat a can of cream of tomato and some milk or water, pour them into a warmed bowl with a sprinkle of cinnamon in it, and go to bed with it.
** With Bold Knife and Fork. Southmark. 1996. p. 46. (1st edition, 1969, Putnam)
* I never set out to be a writer. I write compulsively. I am like a drug addict. I can't help it. I do what pleases me.
** as quoted by Molly O’Neill, (February 28, 1990)"Pungent Wisdom From A Kitchen Olympian". The New York Times. (interview with M. F. K. Fisher in Glenn Ellen, California)
* The first taste of bread, that day: chunks, chopped from loaves four feet long stacked at the end of the dining car like skis, and it was the best bread I had ever eaten and I knew that forever, as of that noontime, I would be intolerant of the packaged puffy stuff called bread at home.
** Last House: Reflections, Dreams, and Observations 1943-1991. Pantheon Books. 1995. p. 255. ISBN 0679439080.

## Quotes about M. F. K. Fisher

* WH Auden’s famous observation on the writer MFK Fisher – “I do not know of anyone in the States who writes better prose” – has been pressed into service on the cover of this reprint of Fisher’s most beloved book The Gastronomical Me (1943). The power of the puff lies in the fact that Auden wasn’t praising another poet or even a novelist but a food writer, a species conceived at that time as a domestic science teacher with a fail-safe recipe for meatloaf. Implicit in Auden’s praise was the suggestion that Fisher should be removed from this category and set alongside Hemingway or Faulkner as a literary practitioner in her own right. These days we would get around the whole vexed business by saying that Fisher’s hybrid of culinary and memoir writing falls into the category of the personal essay, the kind of thing that has launched a thousand blogs and become a staple of the New Yorker’s annual food issue. The only hitch with this is that Fisher – or, to be formal, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher – was on record as hating the idea of the personal essay. To the proud daughter of a California newspaper man, the term signalled self-importance and, worse, over-writing. Fisher prided herself on never doing more than one draft which, if true, means she was a genius. Here she is on the food she encountered in Burgundy as a newlywed in the 1930s ...
** Kathryn Hughes, (25 May 2017)"The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher; review – a food writing classic". The Guardian.
* … Mrs. Fisher herself believes that strolling is a lost art these days, but in fact she is the perfect rambler. A Considerable Town is one long ramble. It rambles through the city, its monuments, its quays, its shops and its cafes, but more important, it rambles through the author's mind and memory—she has known Marseille since 1932, and seems to have forgotten nothing. … Mrs. Fisher loves ships, docks and harbors. She likes fresh fish with dry white local wine at lunchtime. She has a susceptible fondness for rogues and vagabonds, and a Dickensian taste for the scramble, the rasp, the blarney and even the petty pretensions of city life. Nobody can describe the sound of bells or the feel of churches better than Mrs. Fisher, and surely nobody in the history of gastronomy has more exactly defined the pleasures of eating.
** Jan Morris, (June 4, 1978)"Marseille Ramble (review of A Considerable Town by M. F. K. Fisher)". The New York Times.

## External links

* Encyclopedic article on M. F. K. Fisher on Wikipedia
* Contributions from M. F. K. Fisher. The New York.