Black Lamb

A Week in Literary History

July 3rd, 2002

American memoirist and food writer M.F.K. Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf, 1942) is born in 1908 in Albion, Mich.

M.F.K. Fisher, b. July 3, 1908, d. 1992

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher had an unmistakable voice — and an irresistible penchant for mixing her reminiscences of food and cooking with the settings and companions she enjoyed (or didn’t enjoy) them with. Astringent, straightforward and unsentimental, her prose sometimes verges on the misanthropic — the first chapter in her Alphabet for Gourmets is “A is for Eating Alone” (she’s for it) — but it’s always splendidly evocative.

Suggested Reading Food & Recollections Serve it Forth, 1937. Consider the Oyster, 1941. How to Cook a Wolf, 1942. The Gastonomical Me, 1943. Here Let Us Feast: A Book of Banquets, 1946. Not Now But Now, 1947. An Alphabet for Gourmets, 1949. A Cordiall Water, 1961. The Story of Wine in California, 1962. Map of Another Town, 1964. The Cooking of Provincial France, 1968. With Bold Knife and Fork, 1969. Among Friends, 1970. A Considerable Town, 1978. As They Were, 1982. Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: Journals and Stories, 1933-1941, 1993. Stories Sister Age, 1983. Translation The Physiology of Taste, by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1949.

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Books and Authors, A Week in Literary History | Link to this Entry