M.F.K. Fisher

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992) was an American food writer. She was the founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. Over her lifetime, she wrote 27 books, including a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin. 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."

Fisher was born Mary Frances Kennedy on July 3, 1908, at 202 Irwin Avenue, Albion, Michigan. I… was delivered at home by "Doc" George Hafford, a man to whom my parents, Rex and Edith Kennedy, were devoted. Rex was then one of the volunteer firemen, and since I was born in a heatwave, he persuaded his pals to come several times and spray the walls of the house. My father, Rex, was sure I would be born on July 4, and he wanted to name me Independencia. My mother Edith was firmly against this completely un-Irish notion and induced Doc Hafford to hurry things up a bit, in common pity.

Rex was a co-owner (with his brother Walter) 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. 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 a 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 ("Al"). She attended Occidental College for one year; however, she married Al on September 5, 1929, and moved with him to Dijon, France.

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:

We indulged in a voluptuous riot of things like marshmallows in hot chocolate, thin pastry under the Tuesday hash, and rare roast beef on Sunday instead of a boiled hen. Mother ate all she wanted of cream of fresh mushroom soup; Father served a local wine, red-ink he called it, with the steak; we ate grilled sweetbreads and skewered kidneys with a daring dash of sherry on them.

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."