It’s the birthday of M.F.K. Fisher

It’s the birthday of M.F.K. Fisher (1908) (books by this author), born Mary Frances

Kennedy in Albion, Michigan. She’s the mother of the “food essay” and always viewed 
cuisine as a metaphor for culture. She grew up in Whittier, California, and met her 
future husband, Alfred Young Fisher, at the University of Southern California in 1929. 
They spent the first three years of their marriage in Dijon, France, and she referred to 
that period as the “shaking and making years in [her] life.”

She found an Elizabethan cookbook at her public library, and was inspired to try her hand 
at food writing. Her first book, Serve It Forth (1937), was full of sensual, evocative 
prose and some critics assumed a man had written it. Her 1941 book, How to Cook a Wolf, 
was addressed to Americans and Europeans dealing with rationing and food shortages during 
World War II. In it she wrote, “When the wolf is at the door one should invite him in and 
have him for dinner.” It has a few recipes, but it mostly contains meditations on the 
role of meals in relationships, and on sharing limited resources with spiritual 
abundance. Her chapter titles include “How to Distribute Your Virtue,” “How to Greet the 
Spring,” “How to Be Cheerful Through Starving,” and “How to Have a Sleek Pelt.”

Author Anne Lamott wrote the introduction to an edition of Fisher’s letters. “Hers was a 
face anyone would naturally want in the kitchen, a combination of fresh peach and aged 
potato,” Lamott wrote. “You could see the weight and warmth and softness of her 
cheeks—the tender part a mother would cup in her hands—now grown so old.”

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