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Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was American and wrote about food from the 1930s until her death in 1992. She was the first writer in English to treat food as a subject for literature rather than as a set of instructions, and she is still widely regarded as the person who did it best. Her books have remained continuously in print ever since and are currently published by three different publishers in parallel, which is unusual more than 30 years after an author's death.
This volume brings together her five most important books, published between 1937 and 1949: Serve It Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me and An Alphabet for Gourmets. Her debut was published under her initials alone because the publisher did not want readers to know that the author was a woman. One is about the history of eating from antiquity onwards. One is entirely about oysters. One is about how to eat well during wartime rationing. One is autobiographical, covering her years in France, her marriage and her husband's death. The last is a collection of essays arranged from A to Z, with A standing for eating alone.
It sounds weightier than it is. The pieces are short, and you can open the book anywhere and read four pages. She writes about meals she remembers, about hunger, loneliness and pleasure, and does so without ever becoming solemn. One of her most quoted passages is about a tangerine she left to dry on a radiator in Strasbourg.
She is in our range because this is where modern food writing begins. If you have read Kitchen Confidential or Heat, you have read something that can be traced back to Fisher. With her books, it became possible to write about food as literature. She was also the person who translated Brillat-Savarin's book into English.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 784
Language: English
First published: 1954
