M.F.K. Fisher nook
Always one to enjoy a sip, M.F.K. Fisher was born and died in California, and lived in St. Helena before she and David Pleydell-Bouverie built her house in Glen Ellen, California on what is now the Audubon Canyon Ranch. She was a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library.
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher first wrote as “M.F.K. Fisher” because she was sure no publisher would accept an article by a woman. It stuck. Fisher wrote 27 books, many of them best sellers, including The Art of Eating, How to Cook a Wolf, Consider the Oyster, and Last House.
She brilliantly translated the phenomenal The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826). Her translation of one of his most famous sentences: “Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are.”
Having spent many weekdays with Mary Frances during the last seven years of her life, including the day that she left this earth, I had the almost accidental opportunity to cook lunch for Mary Frances, Julia Child and myself one day when Julia Child was visiting. After we agreed to translate another French cookbook, Child suggested we switch the conversation “from bookery to cookery” and asked if there was a McDonald’s nearby.
So lunch was mine to make from what was in Mary Frances’ refrigerator: eggplant, tomatoes and garlic, plus salad-makings.
Having long suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, M.F.K. Fisher died at Last House in 1992.