M.F.K. Fisher

More friends remember M.F.K. Fisher in many different ways. We thank them for sharing their thoughts and experiences with all of us.

It was September 1954, the first day of school at St. Helena Elementary School. I was starting 6th grade and Anne K. Friede was one of the new girls in school, starting the 5th grade.

I befriended Anne in the schoolyard and was delighted to find out she had moved to a house up the road from my house. We made plans for me to come over and play.

Anne invited me into her home up the road which was nestled under tall oak and redwood trees. Baskets of oranges and apples adorned the back porch. I entered to meet a very tall woman standing in the kitchen dressed in a long beautiful and colorful flowing gown with a shawl
around her shoulders. Her hair was pulled back with two big black shiny sticks poked through the bun at the nape of her neck. My friend's mother was much more interesting than my friend.

I didn't have time to be startled at this very different looking mom, because I couldn't take my eyes off of her lips, her red lipstick, her sweet smile and her kind eyes looking down at me. She told me she wanted to thank me for being so nice to her daughter at school. Please sit down, she said, you are Anne's first friend in St. Helena. I have made lunch to celebrate. Well, in all my eleven years, this was the first time I was spoken to as an adult, and made to feel like a very important one.

To this day, I remember what she served for lunch. Carrot and celery sticks, piled high in a plate and little tiny pickles. I saw her slicing the meat for the sandwiches. I gulped when I saw the huge piece of raw meat. She put thin slices of this raw meat on bread with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomatoes and mustard. Being polite, I just swallowed the pieces of the raw meat whole, as best I could, without choking. I was the guest of honor and the most important person there and I certainly wasn't going to hurt her feelings by telling her meat has to be cooked first. Being served my first rare roast beef sandwich was unfortunately not appreciated by me.

After lunch, Mrs. Friede excused herself saying she had to go to work, and would we like to play records while she worked in the next room. Anne and I listened to show tunes from musicals and Spike Jones. I looked around the room and saw a painting of a woman that kind of looked like a mermaid on the beach surrounded by shells and starfish. Anne said, "That's my mother. She was painted by my father". I looked at the painting again. She was nude! I was shocked! I was eleven.

I heard typing in the next room. I asked Anne what kind of work did her mother do. Anne said she was a writer. What does she write? She writes books. What books had she written. She showed me a small cloth bound green book. The title was "How To Cook A Wolf." I was brought up never to say unkind things, but I thought, who would buy such a book. Who would want to cook wolves and where would you find one! She doesn't know enough to cook meat before serving it, now she's cooking wolves!

Mrs. Friede floated into the room where Anne and I were playing records and said it's nice and warm outside, let's go make vanilla ice cream for dessert. The four of us took turns cranking the handle on the ice-cream maker. She sprinkled chocolate shavings on top of each mound of the best vanilla ice-cream I had ever tasted.

I skipped home that afternoon reflecting on how I had just met the most different and most interesting person of my short life. I would enjoy almost 10 more years of friendship with Anne, Mary and their mother. As I grew older, I gravitated toward and enjoyed their lifestyle which was so different from my own family. I was invited to many gatherings at her homes in the valley. Mrs. Friede always received me in the same manner that she received her adult guests. She always made it a point to introduce me by saying, this is my good friend, Anita.

Thank-you for giving me this opportunity to remember a great lady. I miss her.

Anita Monroy Peters

In honor of MFK's 70th birthday she had a special dinner at Chez Panisse in which each course was composed around the titles of her books:

the first course, Consider the Oyster, inspired a selection of four varieties of oysters on the half shell

A Considerable Town featured California snails with Pernod, tomatoes and garlic, followed by whole Pacific rockfish charcoal-grilled with wild herbs and anchovies, young spit-roasted pheasant with new potatoes, a bitter lettuce salad with goat cheese croutons, and three plum sherbets with orange rind boats

A Cordial Water suggested the last course, a Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, coffee and candies.

Frances Kennedy Fisher is widely acknowledged as the creator of the genre we now call "food writing." She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received lifetime achievement awards from the James Beard Foundation and the American Institute of Wine and Food

At the beginning of The Gastronomical Me, Fisher explained herself: "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, about love, the way others do?. . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other 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. . . There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk."

Karen Berman from The Art of Writing About Eating.
M.F.K. Fisher's Lifetime of Food for the Soul

Another example of quotes made for an MFK Fisher Commemorative Dinner, Southgate Cafe,
October 25, 1997

Hors d'Oeuvre: With Bold Knife and Fork
"I am too young and of course of the wrong sex to remember the fabulous Free Lunches of the old-time saloons, but the display of hot and cold appetizers I have observed lately in the City is impressive to my naive eyes."

Terrine and Country Pate: With Bold Knife and Fork
"Often in France I have used a rather ruthless gauge of a restaurant's worth, no matter what its class or reputation, by ordering a portion of the 'pate maison,' and as is often the case in other fields, I have found some of the best in the most unpretentious eating places."

Pumpkin Soup: With Bold Knife and Fork
There is excitement and real satisfaction in making an artful good soup from things usually tossed away."

Poached Brook Trout with Salmon Mousse: The Gastronomical Me
"I tasted the last sweet nugget of trout, the one nearest the blued tail...Fate could not harm me, I remembered winily, for I had indeed dined today, and dined well. Now for a leaf of crip salad".

Mesclun Salad: Alphabet for Gourmets
In a perfect meal "there is a large but bland green salad ('to scour the maw,' Rabelais would say), made with a minimum of good white wine."

Apple Tart: Long Ago in France
"Then he would peel apples from Normandy, and cut them into thin, even half-moons, and toss them in a bowl of white wine. . . beat eggs and cream and nutmeg into a custard, and fill the shallow crust half full. He took the apple slices from the bowl one by one, almost faster than we could see. . . and laid them in a great, beautiful whorl, from the outside to the center, as perfect as a snail shell. He did it as effortlessly as a spider spins a web."

Cheese: Alphabet for Gourmets
"Bread stays on the table for the next course of a hand-count of cheeses on a board: buttery Gorgonzola, Camembert 'more running than standing,' impeccable Gruyeres, Cheddar with a bite and crumbling to it, and double-cream as soothing as a baby's fingertip."

John Thorne, the creator of the food letter, Simple Food, has agreed to allow us to quote from his tribute to M.F.K. Fisher. "Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher handled these things differently. She possessed an equally fine sensibility but sported it in an offhand, very American way. Hers was the pose of the maverick.

"I'm not a writer," she would insist the moment she felt you were about to treat her like one. She was just as impatient with culinary pretension. "I know red from white and I think I know good from bad and I know the phonies from the real, and that's about it," she once told food writer Ruth Reichl. To get through to her, you had to be fearlessly honest. If she felt you waver, she would quickly bat you to one side.

The point, however, is that you could get through, and her writing actually encouraged you to try. The clever asides, the dismissive gestures, the sly ironic glances -- a pose is struck and a quick look is thrown your way to see if you've been taken in by it -- all these make up a style that is intimately conversational. It insists that you lean across the table and listen close. The effect is that of a letter from a difficult but compulsively fascinating friend."

If you have a favorite quote or story about M.F.K. Fisher and if appropriate, we will include it on this page.