With Bold Pen and Fork

By Mimi Sheraton

M.F.K. (for Mary Frances Kennedy) Fisher is the grande dame of American food writers. Her passion for cuisine, conveyed with a novelist's supple prose in 17 books published since 1937, inspired a host of other writers to take up the craft of food criticism. One such is TIME's critic, who recently visited Fisher, now 78, in California's Sonoma Valley. Her report:

"Now I am going to write a book. It will be about eating and about what to eat and about people who eat. And I shall do gymnastics by trying to fall between these three fires, or by straddling them all . . . I serve it forth."

Fifty years have passed since Fisher made that modest promise in her first published book, Serve It Forth. Still at work on two new books, she struggles daily in that endeavor, performing it gracefully and elegantly and evoking thoughts not only of food but of the life that is lived around it.

To one beguiled into writing about food by the engaging articles signed with that somewhat mysterious byline in early issues of Gourmet, the prospect of visiting Fisher brought with it some nervous excitement. Meeting a writer one admires is risky business, for there is the awful chance that the real-life personality will be so at odds with the literary presence that the written word no longer rings true.

Any such fears were dispelled at Fisher's small, white Spanish-style house in Glen Ellen, Calif., close to the Sonoma vineyards. The interior is vibrant, bursting with the warm, roseate tones of the landscapes the author loves -- Provence, Mexico and California. Each room testifies to the range of interests of the occupant. There are floor tiles with the soft black gleam of Oaxaca pottery, bright peasant rugs, wreaths of silver-green bay leaves and garlands of dried black-red chili peppers, leaning towers of books, phonograph records on and under tables, and paintings stacked against and hung on rough- painted white walls. Through it all moves the shadow of a calico cat, Zazie.

"That's a VCR monitor, not a television set," Fisher points out emphatically. "I like to watch movies at night after dinner now that I can't get out much." Failing eyesight, severe arthritis and other infirmities are about the only limitations she accepts, and then only because she must. It is hard to reconcile the hands so stiff they can no longer type and the slow movement across the room with the gleam of the gray-green eyes, the brightly lipsticked smile, the clear voice and, most of all, the feisty opinions.

Having championed native American foods and wines in the '50s and '60s, when only the word imported had currency with pseudo gourmets, Fisher is now tiring of all the hype about native food. "If I hear any more about chic Tex- Mex or blue cornmeal, I'll throw up. And I've always hated goat cheese because it tastes like dirt," she says. About the present wave of young American chefs, she observes, "Of course they should be encouraged, but most are too young to be so famous. I think it takes twelve years of experience after graduation from a culinary school for a man or woman truly to be a chef. Many of those young chefs pay more attention to the way food is arranged than the way it tastes."

Expressing boredom at the many seminars devoted to "serious" discussions of American cuisine, she adds, "They make it all so tiresome and pretentious." As for the effort to establish a culinary center in the Manhattan town house of the late James Beard, she says, "Ridiculous. No one would hate that more than Jim."

Loyal readers of such Fisher classics as How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, Consider the Oyster and With Bold Knife and Fork are familiar with her life, which includes three marriages and two daughters. Born in Michigan, she was raised in Whittier, Calif., where her father Rex Kennedy was a newspaper editor and publisher. "I am a fifth-generation writer," she says with pride, "even though now I dictate into a cassette. It's awful."

Although the literary diet provided by her family was large and exotic, the food was anything but. "My maternal grandmother was in residence during most of my childhood, and she decided what we would eat. She believed in having only the simplest food -- always fish on Friday, very little meat, no salt, sugar or other seasonings, and absolutely no coffee." A great revelation concerning the wonders of food came in 1929, when Fisher, while in France, dined at the Hostellerie de la Poste in Avallon. "The dish that forever changed my idea about food was mashed potatoes, dripping with butter," she recalls. "It wasn't only that it was perfectly made but most of all that it was served as a separate course. At home potatoes always came as an automatic adjunct to meat. Seeing them given individual respect taught me a great lesson."

In 1978 she accepted the invitation of the Japanese chef Shizuo Tsuji, a friend of 35 years and the founder and president of a cooking school for professionals in Osaka, to come to Japan and write an introduction to his cookbook Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. She took along her sister and recalls the darker side of being a woman in Japan. "I would work all day long in the school, thinking only of going out in the evening and how I would be able to get up off the floor after dinner. My sister and I were the only women, and the men hardly spoke to us during the meal. Once each evening Tsuji would call to me at the other end of the table, 'Fisher-san, how do you like this?' 'Delicious, but what is it, Tsuji-san?' I would ask, and he would answer, 'The ovary of a pregnant sea slug.' And that was my conversation for the night."

Despite the kudos her work has won, Fisher's subject is still considered by many people to be lower literary ground. To such a criticism she had an early answer: "There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me, Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?"