M. F. K. Fisher, Exquisite Food Writer, Dies at 83

M. F. K. Fisher, the peripatetic author whose crystalline prose and keen observations raised food writing to the high art of literature, has died at 83, it was learned Tuesday.

Mrs. Fisher had suffered from Parkinson’s disease and arthritis. She died Monday at her cottage home in Glen Ellen, Calif., in Sonoma County, said one of her two daughters, Kennedy Wright.

From her childhood in Whittier through old age in California’s wine country and across thousands of miles in between, Mrs. Fisher was enthralled by food.

But critic Frances Taliaferro observed that calling her a leading food writer was like calling Cezanne “the leading painter of apples.”

Mrs. Fisher used food as a means of exploring life, and the passion she displayed for an eggplant or an apple seemed more truly concerned with people and their hunger, the real subject of most of her widely acclaimed books and articles.

“Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly,” she wrote. “There are few people alive with whom I care to pray, sleep, dance, sing or share my bread and wine.”

Her 26 books of essays, reminiscences, recipes and fiction reflect that view. Mrs. Fisher led a cosmopolitan but often solitary life, and much of her work concerns traveling, loneliness and nostalgia.

Ruth Reichl, The Times’ food editor, had both a professional and personal relationship with the witty, acerbic author.

“I don’t like to read the stuff I’ve written,” Mrs. Fisher once told her. “Never have, never will.”

But, as Reichl said after Mrs. Fisher’s death, “she might have been alone in that regard. Her importance to those of us who write about food goes beyond mere pleasure--she single-handedly legitimized our craft. . . .

“As she once wrote, ‘I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers.’ ”

Despite three marriages, the author spent most of her years without a husband. But she had her daughters and wrote movingly of parental and family relationships, as well as of being alone.

In her many reminiscences, some of them fictionalized, she also evoked the life of a well-bred, well-read family living in modest prosperity in the California of a bygone age. Just as her writing was both elegant and voluptuous, Mrs. Fisher seemed concerned in her work that a life should marry passion and propriety.

Her prose was marked by imagery as rich and fresh as the food she often described. Maya Angelou, writing about her in 1983, quoted the late W. H. Auden as saying, “I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose.”

Her contemporary Craig Claiborne once called her “without question the greatest food writer in America. Yet she’s far beyond being a food writer. She’s a marvelous writer on any subject.”

She was also a fine cook. Claiborne, for example, said his favorite among her recipes was one for cold buttermilk soup with shrimp.

“She had a very special way of looking at things. She was a great deal of fun to be with,” said Julia Child, who worked with Fisher on a Time-Life cookbook and had known her since the 1960s. “She really had a very sensuous way of writing.”

Born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Mich., she was the daughter of a small-town newspaperman and a “prairie princess.” Both were from Iowa families studded with journalists.

She started cooking for the family as a young girl on the cook’s night off, inspired to adventure by her grandmother’s hypersensitive stomach, which mandated culinary blandness. The family moved to Southern California when she was still a girl, and Mrs. Fisher later described her childhood in Whittier, a not altogether friendly Quaker community, in the book “Among Friends.”

In 1929, after some college, she married Albert Young Fisher, a minister’s son and scholar of English literature. The newlyweds moved to Dijon, the Burgundian capital where, the author later wrote, she spent “two shaking and making years,” learning about food and life.

Returning from France to Southern California in 1932, Mrs. Fisher began writing. In 1934, she sold her first magazine story, using her initials so her father would not know what she had done, she said.

In 1937, she published “Serve It Forth,” a collection of essays that was her first book. Her initials and her erudite, personal style, in marked contrast to the home economics more typical of food books, led many to assume the author was a man.

“The quails are an artful lure to the most refined of palates, and the rabbit stew, steaming, aromatic, is made just as tempting with an onion or two, pepper freshly ground, a little bacon, and a dash of cheap, pure wine,” she wrote in that book.

In 1938, Mrs. Fisher divorced her husband and soon afterward married Dillwyn Parrish, a painter and friend who helped get “Serve It Forth” published. A cousin of Edith Wharton and Maxfield Parrish, he died just three years later. Her third marriage, to publisher Donald Friede, ended in divorce in 1951. He was the father of her daughters.

During the war, she spent some time as a screenwriter for Paramount, and began writing books to teach Americans what she had learned about food in Europe.

These volumes--”Consider the Oyster,” “How to Cook a Wolf” (about coping with wartime food shortages), “The Gastronomical Me” and “An Alphabet for Gourmets”--were collected in 1954, along with “Serve It Forth,” in Mrs. Fisher’s classic, “The Art of Eating.”

By that time she had completed her acclaimed 1949 translation of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s “The Physiology of Taste,” itself a classic among food books.

One of Mrs. Fisher’s favorite works first appeared in 1961. “A Cordiall Water: A Garland of Odd & Old Receipts (Recipes) to Assuage the Ills of Man or Beast” is a brief, charming and fascinating rumination on folk medicine and the history of some folk remedies.

Mrs. Fisher’s recent works include “As They Were,” published in 1982 but containing essays written over the preceding 40 years; “Sister Age,” a 1983 story collection that often verges on reminiscence, particularly in dealing with Aix-en-Provence, a French city sacred for the author; “Boss Dog” in 1990, and “Long Ago in France,” 1991, a compilation of stories of her time in Dijon.

Reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the best “Sister Age” stories “possess the subtlety of fine chiaroscuro,” but like some other critics, she also seemed to notice a certain chill in Mrs. Fisher’s work. The characters, she wrote, “are people whose loneliness stems not from age, but from the fact that they either have no one to love or are themselves afraid to care.”

Mrs. Fisher lived alone for many of her last years, first in St. Helena, Calif., and later in a custom-built cottage on the ranch of a friend in Glen Ellen. One writer described the bathroom as “practical but voluptuous and outfitted with the largest tub in the region, a rocking chair, Oriental rugs, and on one wall, painted the same Pompeian red as the ceiling, an art gallery.”

Despite her ailments, Mrs. Fisher took an intransigent line toward infirmity.

“I will not bow,” Angelou quotes her as saying as early as age 74. “Absolutely not bow. I say, ‘Brother Pain, come in and sit down, you and I are going to take this thing in hand.’ And I will not give in.”

Despite her discomfort and solitude, Mrs. Fisher did considerable cooking, entertaining and writing at her wine country home. She also kept a sense of humor about old age, envisioning “the queer old-lady authoress, found quietly dead between the stove and the icebox, with a glass of vermouth in one hand and an overripe pear in the other.”

It was an appropriate assessment, as food editor Reichl recalled Tuesday, reflecting on their final meeting last year.

“Eyesight failing, voice gone, fingers unable to hold a pen, she was reduced to little more than her own ferocious energy. But there she was, face made up, propped up on her pillows. She sipped a cocktail through a straw, and nibbled at a plate of oysters.”