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Her Body of WorkHer Friends RememberThe LDEI M.F.K. Fisher AwardBack to Front Page
Mary Frances Kennedy was born on July 3, 1908 in Albion, Michigan. When she was two, her father, a journalist, moved the family to Whittier, California. She grew up an Episcopalian in a Quaker community. Her family was highly literate. Her childhood recollections are chronicled in her autobiography: Among Friends. In 1929 she met Alfred Young Fisher while studying at the University of California. They spent the first three years of their marriage in Europe, mostly in France at the University of Dijon. Years later, in her book Aix-en-Provence, she defined her stay there as "two shaking and making years in my life." Dijon was known as the "gastronomical capital of the world." She learned how to live and eat economically and was introduced to various wines, pastries and cheeses They
returned to southern California in 1932 when Al Fisher began teaching at
Occidental College. Mary Frances contributed to their income by working
in a picture-framing shop that sold pornographic postcards. She read
books and, inspired by an Elizabethan cookbook she discovered at the Los
Angeles Public Library, she began writing essays of her own on cooking.
Dillwyn Parrish, a friend of the couple's, urged and helped her to
publish them. Her first Book, Serve it Forth was so unlike other
"women" writers on the subject of cooking that many critics
thought it was written by a man. In 1938 Fisher divorced Al and married
Parrish, a painter and close relative of artist Maxfield Parrish
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Included on this list are books about M.F.K. Fisher. Those that are underlined are still in print and available for sale at www.amazon.com. Just click on the underlined book title to purchase a book. In Association with Amazon.com all proceeds generated by the sales of books through this site will benefit the Les Dames d'Escoffier M.F.K. Fisher Award fund. |
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| Sponsored by Les Dames d'Escoffier International (LDEI) www.ldei.org |
