Description:
What is the spell that M.F.K. Fisher casts over enchanted readers who, privileged, dip into her timeless culinary masterworks and occasional fiction? With this volume of never-before-published letters, fans who know M.F.K. only by such gustatory marvels as The Art of Eating and How to Cook a Wolf may now draw closer to the life--the loves and loves lost, the travails and travels--that inspired this woman of unique appetites, wit, and tastes. In 1929, shortly after she turned 21, Mary Frances Kennedy married Alfred Young Fisher, and together they sallied forth to France. There her senses were freed, her artist's eye and culinary tastes refined, and she began a correspondence with family and friends that would become the raw material for many books to come; those first three years in southern France sharpened her eye for the telling moment, the curious detail. This compendious collection of letters (which includes 32 pages of photos from her family collection) is divided into chronological blocks, introduced by brief biographical synopses. But nothing relates Fisher's rich life as poignantly as the voice that graces her letters: "Things go well here," she wrote in February 1950, having returned to the decrepit family ranch in California to care for her dying father and support her two daughters, "and the new cook, a quiet firm motherly farm-woman, promises to be just about what we need (...although I am still shuddering at one of our opening remarks, when I told her we all like to eat lots of fresh vegetables and she said, 'Oh, ja... t'ings like potato pancakes and sauerkraut...')." Anne Lamott's tender forward to A Life in Letters is a panegyric in recognition of M.F.K. Fisher's shameless delight in and worship of earth's bounty, a balm to our fat-phobic, diet-dazed sensibilities. "She was," Lamott writes, "just about the last of the food people who did not get caught up in any modern madness, insisting instead on staying in the luxuriousness of taste and texture and communion." As these letters prove, it was a good recipe for a long life, filled with grace and gratitude.
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