M. F. K. Fisher

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher Parrish Friede, writing as M.F.K. Fisher, was an American food writer. She was a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. Over her lifetime she wrote 27 books, among them Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me and a translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored this in her writing. W. H. Auden once remarked, "I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose." In 1991 the New York Times editorial board went so far as to say, "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 or the scent of orange segments drying on a radiator, she is also celebrating life and loneliness, sense and sensibility."

Early life

Fisher was born Mary Frances Kennedy on July 3, 1908, at 202 Irwin Avenue, Albion, Michigan. She told Albion City Historian Frank Passic:
Rex was a co-owner and editor of the Albion Evening Recorder newspaper.
In 1911, Rex sold his interest in the paper to his brother, and moved the family to the West Coast, where he hoped to buy a fruit or citrus orchard. The family spent some time in Washington with relatives, and then traveled down the coast to Ventura, California, where Rex nearly purchased an orange grove, but backed out after discovering soil problems. He next purchased and briefly owned the Oxnard Courier in Oxnard, California. From there he traveled to San Diego and worked for a local newspaper. In 1912 he purchased a controlling interest in the Whittier News and moved the family to Whittier, California. Rex initially purchased a house at 115 Painter Avenue. In 1919, he purchased a large white house outside the city limits on South Painter Avenue. The house sat on thirteen acres, with an orange grove; it was referred to by the family as "The Ranch." Although Whittier was primarily a Quaker community at that time, Mary Frances was brought up within the Episcopal Church.
Mary Frances enjoyed reading as a child, and began writing poetry at the age of five. The Kennedys had a vast home library, and her mother provided her access to many other books. Later, her father used her as stringer on his paper, and she would draft as many as fifteen stories a day.
Mary Frances received a formal education; however, she was an indifferent student who often skipped classes throughout her academic career. At the age of sixteen, her parents enrolled her in a private school: The Bishop's School in La Jolla, California. After one year there, she transferred to the Harker School for Girls in Palo Alto, California, adjacent to Stanford University; she graduated from Harker in 1927. Upon graduation, she attended Illinois College, but left after only one semester, In 1928, she enrolled in summer school at UCLA in order to obtain enough credits to transfer to Occidental College. While there, she met her future first husband: Alfred Fisher. She attended Occidental College for one year; however, she married Al on September 5, 1929, and moved with him to Dijon, France.

Career

Food became an early passion in her life. Her earliest memory of taste was "the grayish-pink fuzz my grandmother skimmed from a spitting kettle of strawberry jam". Her maternal grandmother Holbrook lived with them until her death in 1920. During that period, Holbrook was a source of tension in the household. She was a stern, rather joyless person, and a Campbellite who firmly believed in overcooked, bland food. She was also a follower of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's dietary restrictions at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Fisher would later write that during her grandmother's absences at religious conventions:
An early food influence was "Aunt" Gwen. Aunt Gwen was not family, but the daughter of friends — the Nettleship family — "a strange family of English medical missionaries who preferred tents to houses." The Nettleships had an encampment on Laguna Beach, and Mary Frances would camp out there with Gwen. Rex would later buy the campsite and a cabin that had been built on it. Mary Frances recalled cooking outdoors with Gwen: steaming mussels on fresh seaweed over hot coals; catching and frying rock bass; skinning and cooking eel; and, making fried egg sandwiches to carry on hikes. Mary Frances 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." Mary Frances liked to cook meals in the kitchen at home, and "easily fell into the role of the cook's helper."

Dijon

In September 1929, newlyweds Mary Frances and Al sailed on the RMS Berengaria to Cherbourg, France. They traveled to Paris for a brief stay, before continuing south to Dijon. They initially found a rental at 14 Rue du Petit-Potet in a home owned by the Ollangnier family. The lodgings consisted of two rooms, with no kitchen, and no separate bathroom. Al attended the Faculté des Lettres at the University of Dijon where he was working on his doctorate; when not in class, he worked on his epic poem, The Ghosts in the Underblows. The poem was based on the Bible and was analogous to James Joyce's Ulysses. By 1931, Fisher had finished the first twelve books of the poem, which he ultimately expected to contain sixty books. Mary Frances attended night classes at the École des Beaux-Arts where she spent three years studying painting and sculpture. The Ollangniers served good food at home, although Madame Ollangnier was "extremely penurious and stingy." 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 the Aux Trois Faisans restaurant — their first of many visits. There, Mary Frances received her education in fine wine from a sommelier named Charles. The Fishers visited all the restaurants in town, where in Mary Frances's words:
In 1930, Lawrence Clark Powell came to Dijon to obtain his doctorate at the University of Burgundy. He came at Mary Frances's suggestion. Powell had become acquainted with Mary Frances when her sister was attending Occidental College, and roomed with Powell's girlfriend. Powell moved into the attic above the Fishers and became lifelong friends with Mary Frances. He described the food at the Fishers' pensione: In 1931, Mary Frances and Al moved to their own apartment, above a pastry shop at 26 Rue Monge. It was Mary Frances's first kitchen. It was only five feet by three feet and contained a two-burner hotplate. Despite the kitchen's limitations, or perhaps because of it, Mary Frances began developing her own personal cuisine, with the goal of "cooking meals that would 'shake from their routines, not only of meat-potatoes-gravy, but of thought, of behavior.'" In The Gastronomical Me she describes one such meal:
After Al was awarded his doctorate, they moved briefly to Strasbourg, France, where Al continued to study and write. Mary Frances became depressed from loneliness and being cooped up in a cold, dank apartment. Unable to afford better accommodations, the Fishers next moved to a tiny French fishing village, Le Cros-de-Cagnes. Powell visited with them there for six weeks and observed that Al was growing more introspective. He had stopped work on his poem, was trying to write novels and did not want to return to the States where he knew job prospects were poor. He could not, however, see a way to stay in France. After running out of funds, the Fishers returned to California, sailing on the Feltre out of Marseille.

California

Back in California, Al and Mary Frances initially moved in with Mary Frances's family at "The Ranch". They later moved into the Laguna cabin. This was during the Great Depression and work was hard to find. Al spent two years looking for a teaching position until he found one at Occidental College. Mary Frances began writing and she published her first piece — "Pacific Village" — in the February 1935 issue of Westways magazine. The article was a fictional account of life in Laguna Beach. In 1934, Lawrence Powell moved to Laguna with his wife Fay. In 1933, Dillwyn Parrish and his wife Gigi moved next door to them, and they rapidly became friends.
When Al began teaching at Occidental, the Fishers initially moved to Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, where the Parrishes helped them paint and fix up an older house they had rented. Unfortunately the home was sold shortly thereafter, and the Fishers had to move to another rented house in Highland Park. Mary Frances worked part-time in a card shop and researched old cookery books at the Los Angeles Public Library. She began writing short pieces on gastronomy. Parrish's sister Anne showed them to her publisher at Harpers who expressed an interest in them. The pieces were later to become her first book: Serve It Forth. Mary Frances next began work on a novel she never finished; it was based on the founding of Whittier.
During this period, Mary Frances's marriage with Al was beginning to fail. After Parrish divorced Gigi in 1934, Mary Frances found herself falling in love with him. In Mary's words, she one day sat next to Parrish at the piano and told him she loved him. Mary Frances's biographer Joan Reardon, however, interviewed Gigi who told a different story. She stated that Parrish told her that one night after he had dined alone with Mary Frances, she later let herself into his house and slipped into bed with him. In 1935, with Al's permission, Mary Frances traveled to Europe with Parrish and his mother. The Parrishes had money, and they sailed on the luxury liner Hansa. While in Europe, they spent four days in Paris, and traveled through Provence, Languedoc, and the French Riviera. Mary Frances also revisited Dijon and ate with Parrish at Aux Trois Faisans where she was recognized and served by her old friend, the waiter Charles. She later wrote a piece on their visit — "The Standing and the Waiting" — which was to become the centerpiece of Serve It Forth. Upon her return from Europe, Mary Frances informed Al of her developing relationship with Parrish. In 1936, Dillwyn invited the Fishers to join him in creating an artists' colony at Le Paquis — a two-story stone house that Parrish had bought with his sister north of Vevey, Switzerland. Notwithstanding the clear threat to his marriage, Al agreed.