M.F.K. Fisher

It’s the birthday of M.F.K. Fisher (books by this author), born in Albion, Michigan (1908). She wrote 27 books and hundreds of articles for The New Yorker and Gourmet, and was thought one of the best prose stylists of her day.

She grew up in Whittier, California, where her father edited the Whittier News; her family was ostracized for being Episcopalian in a predominantly Quaker town.

She learned her way around the kitchen from the family’s cook.

She was asked why she didn’t write about more important things, like power or love.

She said:

“The easiest answer is to say that, like most humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it.”

- Writer's Almanac