Saturday, July 3, 2010

The Gastronomical Me: Remembering M.F.K. Fisher

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do. They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. 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."
~ M.F. K. Fisher


In the past couple of years, Julia Child has been a name on everyone's lips-her cookbooks, her TV show, her unabashed love of butter. Today is the birthday of another light of the culinary world-M.F.K. Fisher.

M.F.K. (Mary Frances Kennedy) Fisher (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992) was a writer & gourmet, a contemporary of Julia Child who also lived in France with her husband as a young married-in her case in Dijon, then "the gastronomical capital of the world". Fisher wrote more than twenty books, beginning with Serve It Forth (included in the collection The Art of Eating) in 1937. "Serve It Forth was was so unlike other 'women' writers on the subject of cooking that many critics thought it was written by a man," according to Lori Gama's Gastronomic Memoirs. "Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the 'arts of life' and explored the art of living as a secondary theme in her writing," according to Wikipedia. For more books by & about M.F.K. Fisher, check the library catalog.

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