HIATUS ENCORE: M.F.K. Fisher — How to Cook a Wolf with Anne Zimmerman

HIATUS ENCORE: Anne Zimmerman, author of the 2011 biography An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, joins us to discuss Fisher and her World War II-era book How to Cook a Wolf, which was an attempt to teach people how to eat well and be well amidst personal and collective chaos. 

Discussed in this episode: 

An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher by Anne Zimmerman

How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher

Lost Ladies of Lit episode on Peg Bracken

The Art of Eating Well by M.F.K. Fisher

“The Wolf at the Door” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher

Schlesinger Library at Harvard

Transcript

AMY: We want to share, on behalf of our guest, a dedication of this conversation to Maria Stuart. She was the person who introduced Anne to M.F.K. Fisher when Anne was in college. Anne says, "I reached for her books when I saw them. It's not an exaggeration to say that Maria Stuart and M.F.K. Fisher changed the course of my life."

KIM: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great women writers from history. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY: And I'm Amy Helmes, and maybe it's just me, but I am recuperating from Thanksgiving dinner over here several days after the fact. 

KIM: No, it's not just you. Thank God for elastic waistbands. I regret nothing though. Nothing. 

AMY: Right. Thanksgiving dinner is really one of those meals you look forward to all year. And then when it's finally here, you just want to go whole hog -- or whole turkey, as it were. 

KIM: Right. Or even whole wolf. Do you know how to cook a wolf, Amy? 

AMY: I do now, at least metaphorically speaking, thanks to this week's lost lady.

KIM: That's right. M.F.K. Fisher is a woman who believed in immersing oneself in the pleasures of a perfect meal, even in the midst of trying circumstances. She didn't just write about that. She lived it.

AMY: And lucky for us, we happen to have Fisher's biographer with us as today's special guest. We'll introduce her in a moment.

KIM: Yeah, and I'm already getting hungry. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music begins]

Our guest today is Anne Zimmerman, author of the 2011 biography An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher. She also edited several anthologies of work by Fisher, including Musings on Wine and Other Libations and Love in a Dish and Other Culinary Delights. Anne is also a writing instructor for Stanford University's Online Writers' Studio, and she is a former member of the San Francisco Writer's Grotto. Anne Zimmerman, welcome to the show! 

ANNE: Thank you so much for having me. 

AMY: Okay. Before we jump into talking about M.F.K. Fisher, I want to remind our listeners that last spring we featured another cookbook writer, Peg Bracken, who wrote the, I Hate to Cook Book, and that book was basically more about eating to live than living to eat. Right, Kim? 

KIM: Yeah. This is something very different. M.F.K. Fisher takes the opposite approach. She basically writes about how to find maximum pleasure in the meals you prepare, no matter how humble they may be. And she argues that sustenance is about more than just the food you put in your stomach.

AMY: That's right. How to Cook a Wolf is so much more than just a cookbook, which we're going to get into momentarily. But looking at the recipe she includes in this book, I would say that 95% of them are not only attainable, especially for a not-so-great-cook like me, but they also all really sound delicious. I was marking off many in the book. And I'm going to tell you guys flat out, there was one bit of really easy advice she gives up in this book that has been a total game-changer in my kitchen ever since I started using it. I'm going to share this cooking hack later in the show. I swear by it and everybody in my family agrees. 

KIM: Okay. I can't wait, because I really need all the cooking hacks I can get. I'm not the best cook either, but like Amy said, this book isn't your typical book of recipes. Fisher wrote it in the early 1940s when people were feeling extremely daunted by wartime shortages and were having to economize and get creative with what limited ingredients were available. But it's not a book about deprivation, right, Anne?

ANNE: No. Um, so How to Cook a Wolf and all of M.F.K. Fisher's writing really is about feeding yourself, both practically and spiritually. Wolf was written in 1942, shortly after the death of Fisher's second husband, as the United States entered the Second World War. She had lived in France after World War I and had observed, firsthand, the effects of things like food shortages and air raids. Wolf was an attempt to teach people how to eat well and be well amidst personal and collective chaos.

KIM: Yeah, my mom, who was born in the late 1940s, remembered Fisher very well, and I think she must have read the column that she did for House Beautiful, maybe. My grandfather, her dad, also subscribed to The New Yorker at some point, so maybe she read her there. And speaking of my mom, I actually really want to dedicate this episode to her memory. I had brought How to Cook a Wolf with me when my mom was hospitalized at the end of her life, and I ended up reading the book aloud to her in hospice. It makes this book extra meaningful for me, but it just goes to show how Fisher's writing really made an impression on people.

ANNE: Well, first of all, I'm so sorry about your mom. I really often say the M.F.K. Fisher's work finds people when they need it, which definitely sounds like it was true for you, and was also true for me. I discovered M.F.K. Fisher in my early twenties. I was actually in my first semester of graduate school. I was there to study women's memoir and autobiography, but I hadn't found my subject. And I was actually in the graduate school library intending to write a paper on Zelda Fitzgerald. And right next to Fitzgerald was this very compact section on M.F.K. Fisher. And I had heard her name before; I had worked in the Oregon wine industry for a bit of time, and so her name was one that was tossed around. And I literally picked up The Art of Eating Well more out of curiosity than anything. And I ended up checking out every single M.F.K. Fisher book that they had, which was about a dozen, and taking them back to my apartment. And what happened next was really interesting because there was a wildfire in San Diego County, and I got basically trapped in my apartment for a week due to the smoke, which is now a very common thing for Californians, but at the time was very weird and unnerving, especially since I had just moved to California. So I was living alone and I had all of these M.F.K. Fisher books and a couple of bags of groceries, and I just cooked and read and completely fell in love with her and her work. And by the end of it, I was like, she is the person. She's the person I want to write about. 

AMY: I love that because, in How to Cook a Wolf, there's also this sort of survival element kind of thing. Like "just in case you are starving..." You almost were in that situation where you're like, "I know how to make the crazy vegetable barley stew thing that she talks about." 

ANNE: Just in case.

AMY: So let's talk about the "Wolf" that Fisher references in her title, because it's a recurring theme throughout the book. Can you sort of explain that a little bit for our listeners? 

ANNE: Yeah. So the Wolf is metaphorical. M.F.K. Fisher believed that the thoughtful presentation of food and eating were, and this is a quote from her, "the true ways to ward off hunger, hurt and any other wolf at the door." And it's interesting because as I was preparing for our conversation and looking at How to Cook a Wolf again, I was reminded of the fact that the epigraph to the book is pulled from a poem from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, titled "The Wolf at the Door" and the epigraph reads: "There's a whining at the threshold/ There's a scratching at the floor./To work! To work! In Heaven's name!/ The wolf is at the door!” And the epigraph, it's attributed to C.P.S. Gilman. So I actually Googled it because I was like, "Who is C.P.S. Gilman?" And then it turns out to be Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And I was like, "Oh, that makes it so much more fascinating that that is the source, you know? Another woman with a super interesting biography."

KIM: Yeah, I know; we need to do an episode on her. 

AMY: Yeah, for sure.

KIM: So we want to give you, our listeners, an idea of what How to Cook a Wolf is like, if you haven't read it. Anne, maybe you could start us off.

ANNE: Sure. It was hard to pick, but I decided to choose a chapter, it looks like it's Chapter Six, and the title is How Not to Boil an Egg. And it begins: Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken. Until then, you would think its secrets are its own, hidden behind the impassive beautiful curvings of its shell, white or brown or speckled. It emerges full-formed, almost painlessly from the hen. It lies without thought in the straw, and unless there is a thunderstorm or a sharp rise in temperature, it stays fresh enough to please the human palette for several days. So to me, it's just sort of quintessential Fisher. She manages to see it in this poetic and beautiful way and articulate it, you know, like actually say some of the symbolic things that all of us sort of inherently feel as we look at an egg, she gives voice to all that 

AMY: OKay, so I'm going to piggyback on this one. First off, just to show her kind of dry wit throughout the book she wrote: I can make amazingly bad fried eggs, and in spite of what people tell me about this method and that, I continue to make amazingly bad fried eggs: tough with edges like some kind of dirty starched lace, and a taste part sulfur, and part singed newspaper. The best way to find a trustworthy method, I think, is to ask almost anyone but me. So she's humble in that, but one more little egg anecdote is when she is remembering being in Switzerland and a recipe that they would make, um, well, I'll just quote from her: One [recipe] I remember that we used to make, never earlier than two and never later than four in the morning, in a strange modernistic electric kitchen on the wine terraces between Lausanne and Montreux. We put cream and Worcestershire sauce into little casseroles and heated them into bubbling. Then we broke eggs into them, turned off the current, and waited until they looked done, while we stood around drinking champagne with circles under our eyes and Viennese music in our heads. Then we ate the eggs with spoons, and went to bed. And I just love that, because it gives you this vision of what her life was like when she lived in Europe. And we'll get into that later. 

KIM: I love that one because that is actually one of my favorite alone dinners. So when I get the chance to have a dinner by myself, I always make cream and eggs and bacon in the oven, and I feel so sophisticated, so I just love that you read that passage. And I actually want to piggyback on that one with the boiling water one. I don't know if you remember that part, but, um, I'll read from it: When the water boils, as it surely will, given enough heat under it, it is ready. Then, at that moment and no other, pour it into the teapot or over or around or into whatever it is meant for, whatever calls for it. If it cannot be used, then turn off the heat and start over again when you yourself are ready; it will harm you less to wait than it will the water to boil too long. And I'm guessing some of our listeners from the UK probably agree with the perfection of boiling water, maybe for tea or something like that. But here in the U S the idea of over-boiling water, I don't know. It's kind of foreign to us maybe, right? 

AMY: Yeah, I didn't know it was possible to over-boil water, but yeah, maybe we'll have to do a taste test. 

KIM: Yeah. 

ANNE: She's obviously a creative writer, but a lot of her prose is sort of based off of approaching the kitchen and what goes on in the kitchen in a creative way. And I would argue that thinking like that is what helps you learn to be a better cook, because you're approaching everything in your cupboard and everything in your fridge with sort of like a, "What could I do with that? How could I make this sort of like sagging celery... like, could I do something with that? And could it be beautiful and on my dinner plate tonight?" Much of the time, the answer is yes. 

AMY: Yeah. And even just the idea of, if you're putting something in the oven, use the whole oven; throw some other things in the oven for tomorrow, like use the space. 

KIM: Um, so I'm going to read the conclusion from her edited version: There are too many of us, otherwise in proper focus, who feel an impatience for the demands of our bodies, and who try throughout our whole lives, none too successfully, to deafen ourselves to the voices of our various hungers.... I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears, and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate even tangled as it is with cold wars, as well as hot, cannot harm us. 

ANNE: The term "self care" is totally overplayed these days, but for me, when I discovered M.F.K. Fisher, when I was, you know, living alone in a city I didn't know and at school. I didn't particularly like so much, at the time that idea that I had this power that I could make a meal for myself and nourish myself and care for myself in that way was so powerful, and still is, in a very different way... and it's something that I wish more people realized, that food could be so much more than just energy, you know, way better than a CLIF Bar.

AMY: I just want to jump in now with my little cooking hack that I took away in terms of kitchen skills from this book: she recommends soy sauce as basically your marinade for every single meat. I used to do that a little bit here and there with fish or when I was doing something that I wanted an Asian flavor or whatever, but I took her advice and I started marinating everything in soy sauce. It brines it, so everything is so moist when you cook it and it doesn't taste.... um, there's not like a taste of soy sauce in the meat necessarily. It's just so flavorful when you cook it. 

ANNE: The salt and umami, you know, that kind of unknown savory, they call it the "fifth sense" or whatever. Sometimes when I'm making a soup, like at the very end, I'll finish it with a splash of soy sauce or vinegar, just to kind of give it that extra acid that sometimes can really elevate the normal flavors, 

AMY: I'm trying that now, too! Okay. So going into this, I knew absolutely nothing about M.F.K. Fisher. The "M.F.K." Stands for Mary Frances Kennedy, which was her maiden name by the way. And so in reading How to Cook a Wolf, she weaves in all these interesting personal anecdotes, but it left me with even more questions about her than answers. So, Anne, that's where your book comes in, thankfully. I know Fisher wrote How to Cook a Wolf when she was fairly young. But as we learn from your book An Extravagant Hunger, she had already lived a really eventful life by the time it was published. 

KIM: Yes, Fisher was born in Michigan, but she was raised in Whittier, Southern California, not too far from Los Angeles where Amy and I live.

AMY: Yeah. And that fact alone surprised me, but I think I was even more surprised to discover that the food she grew up eating wasn't really the sort of fare that you'd associate with a budding food writer. So, Anne, can you talk a little bit about her early relationship with food?

ANNE: Sure for much of M.F.K. Fisher's early life, her maternal grandmother, Grandmother Holbrook, her mother's mother, has spent large chunks of time with the family. Grandmother Holbrook had been born in Ireland during the Potato Famine. And as Mary Frances said, uh, this is a quote, believed that "the plainer a dish was, the better it was for you." Mrs. Holbrook was also a fan of the water cure and traveled yearly to the health resort in battleground, Michigan, that was run by John Harvey Kellogg of the cereal dynasty, and he believed that a bland, vegetarian diet was best and that certain foods, especially foods that were very rich or spicy or fatty, would encourage impulsive or hypersexualized behavior. So when Grandmother Holbrook lived with the family, everything was very bland, very overcooked. She has, I think, you know, at least one passage talking about overcooked meat with over-boiled potatoes, with like a gray under-seasoned sauce. And that was just the norm. And then when Grandmother Holbrook would go away, everything was more of a party. The food was flavorful and richer, and her parents had a little bit of wine on the table, and they had dessert. And, you know, even as a very young child, she was able to spot the difference; that there was this pleasure that could be had in food and at the table, and that it was fun and that it was exciting. And it was something that she was drawn to. 

AMY: Then there's also one anecdote from your biography about one of the family's household cooks that they had briefly that I feel like is worth mentioning because it's sort of shocking and it kind of has a little bit of a true crime element.

ANNE: Yeah. So, I mean, we all know that as women, we learn a lot about food and the home from the women that are in our lives. M.F.K. Fisher had Grandmother Holbrook, but she also had her mother obviously, but Edith had a pretty ambivalent relationship to cooking and the entire domestic sphere. She had four children in fairly quick succession and sort of would go into hiding, you know. She would be pregnant and retreat into her room. She was not bustling around the kitchen. And so there was a series of cooks and other domestic helpers that lived with the family all of the time. And one of the women was named Ora, who M.F.K. Fisher said "loved to cook the way that some people love to pray or dance or fight." And Fisher describes Ora as grinding her own meat and using fresh spices and herbs. There's this simple line about her making a pie and taking the pie dough and cutting out little stars and making this beautiful pie crust with the decoration of stars across the. But no big surprise, Grandmother Holbrook was not a fan of Ora. And interestingly, neither was Mary Frances's father, despite the fact that she was such a good cook. And as the legend goes one night, Ora I went home after work and stabbed her mother with a cooking knife and then killed herself. Mary Frances was young -- only about nine -- but, you know, she was smart and observant and seemed to recognize the fact that there was this whole sort of mystery to food. That food could be pleasureful, but also maybe kind of dangerous. And she, again, was drawn to it and wanted to know more even at that young age. 

KIM: Wow. That's really interesting. 

AMY: Yeah, that would leave its mark. 

KIM: For sure. Um, as a young woman, Mary Frances attended Occidental College in L.A., but she ended up leaving school early in order to get married. She was young, and she thought she was in love, but it almost sounds like this marriage was, for her anyway, more of a ticket to a different life. Would you agree with that, Anne? 

ANNE: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, in writing my book and in sort of starting to study M.F.K. Fisher more academically, this is where the story really begins, because we have a young M.F.K. Fisher, she's very bright, but she didn't ever really love or excel at school. She wants to see the world. She doesn't want to just live at home in Whittier, waiting for someone to propose to her so that she can, you know, go off and get married and have children. And she meets Al in the library of UCLA and they have this immediate connection. But my theory is sort of that the connection is that each saw in the other a lot of aspirations. Um, he wanted to be a poet and she was into the idea of being a muse. But they also had similar, I guess you could say family values. They were both from religious homes and so they could take each other home to meet each other's families and the match was seen as appropriate and that this would be good for everybody. But then there was one thing that was really interesting, and that is that the only PhD program that Al had gotten into was in Dijon. So he was going to leave and move to France. And I think she was like, "This is intriguing. You know, I like this man. He's going somewhere. I want to go with him. This is my moment." There was just one tiny problem, and that is that their relationship mostly evolved over letters. He had gone away to college actually in Wyoming, and so they communicated back and forth and wrote these long, beautiful love letters, back and forth, full of longing. But by the time they got married, there was already, she reports, like in the pit of her stomach, a little bit of trepidation. And they marry and they set off for France, and my personal belief is that they just did not click and that it was almost immediate; that they probably hadn't really been physical with each other, and that there was this awkwardness around their union. But instead of being on like a bad date, they're living together in another country, married with huge emotional and financial pressures: you know, student budgets, no family around, no friends around, minimal language skills. So kind of, it was, you know, I think glorious, yet bleak. 

KIM: Yeah. There's nothing like traveling to bring out, you know, whether a relationship is working or not. 

AMY: Yeah. And she kind of danced around it, but you could tell the sex was not good.

ANNE: Well, and that was what sucked me in, that there was all this stuff going on under the surface. She's such a master of prose, and she tells you so much, but yet, if you really are reading every word of her work, which I did, there are so many questions. And I just knew that there was this huge story bubbling under the surface and that it hadn't really been told. And that was what was really intriguing to me. 

KIM: So, although her marriage wasn't going well, Mary Frances was in her element, living in Europe in the years leading up to World War II. This was when the "Lost Generation" of writers and artists were living it up in Paris. How did these years shape her into a foodie, as we'd say?

ANNE: Well, I think, you know, we've all had that experience right? Of going somewhere new, a really fancy restaurant or visiting a new city or a new country and trying something that is new or different and is literally astonishing. And that's what happened to her. She and Al went from the United States to France and once they got to France, they took a train into Paris. And according to her, on the dining train into Paris, she was served the most perfect baby lettuce salad with a tart vinaigrette and a beautiful, crusty French bread. And it was just like, it awakened her, you know? All of her senses, all of her inner longings, you know, she had finally gotten married and made it to this other country and she had her first taste and it just was like a rebirth. She became a whole new person right in that moment, as she said, actually: Suddenly I recognized my own possibilities as a person, and I was almost stunned by the knowledge that I would never eat and drink as I had done for my first 20 years. Sanely and well, but unthinkingly. 

AMY: It's hard to think of train food being that good in this day and age. Those old glamour days of travel. Um, where would you say that her ambitions to become a writer fit in with all of this?

ANNE: I mean, I do think, you know, it's pretty easy to bash Al Fisher, her first husband, and to talk about all the things that were wrong in that marriage. But I do think he wanted to be a writer. And I do think that the couple did connect over storytelling and poetry. And they had no money when they were living in Dijon and at night would kind of sit around in their two little chairs and they would work together on like pulpy, mystery, thrillers that they hoped to sell someday. Al definitely had bigger literary aspirations, and he believed that in order to be a true poet, he needed to be tortured and he needed to spend a lot of time alone in his little writerly hole, trying to do his work. And so that left, you know, clearly Mary Frances had enormous talent, but it was also just sort of this perfect environment. She was alone, but she didn't really go to school. She took a few art classes. She didn't have any friends, really, she didn't speak the language. And so she did what any of the rest of us would do if we were sort of on this weird kind of extended life vacation. And she started walking around and seeing the patisserie and going to the markets and occasionally eating in restaurants. And then she came home, and she wrote long, and by long, I mean, sometimes eight to 10 page letters home to her family to tell her siblings and her parents everything that she had seen and everything that she had done. And from a very practical point of view, I think that was where her writerly sensibilities began, is with just the recording and the telling of what she saw and learned about in France and tasted.

AMY: And so then she didn't have any formal culinary training then? It just all came to her through experiences like that? 

ANNE: No, she never attended culinary school. I mean, she did much later in life when she became more famous, start to hang out with other food luminaries like James Beard and Julia Child. But, um, not to burst the bubble, but is actually said she was not a wonderful cook. There are a lot of stories about people who showed up to eat with M.F.K. Fisher and all she would offer them was a glass of sherry and like a bowl of nuts or a bowl of olives. I think both Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters have written about being charged with packing a meal to take to M.F.K. Fisher in Napa, which is where she lived at the end of her life. My literary agent actually was M.F.K. Fisher's literary agent. He has since passed away, but at the time of the writing of my book and, uh, yeah, he said that she was not actually a particularly strong cook. Maybe she just didn't like it at that point in her life. I'm not sure. 

KIM: I don't judge her for that at all. It's like, that's fine. She knew how to express how it felt to enjoy eating.

ANNE: And she was a single mom for a long time. And I think, you know, like when you're cooking just for yourself and for your own palette, cooking can be very pleasureful and decadent and energizing. And when you were feeding a bunch of small mouths, that can become an entirely different task.

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Absolutely. So, um, Mary Frances and her husband, Al, ended up leaving France and moving back to California. She was pretty much over her husband by then, but she did keep trying to make it work. She thought starting over in California, maybe, might help. While living there, she ended up meeting someone who would change everything. Do you want to fill our listeners in on this? 

ANNE: Sure. So it's 1932. The Great Depression is happening. Mary Frances and Al were unhappy, but divorce was not really on the table, both culturally and practically because there was a huge financial crisis at the time. Mary Frances was trying to write, but she wasn't really sure that she was an artist because she didn't think she was devoted enough to her work. That obviously wasn't true because during that time was actually when she was first published in a magazine called Westways, which was actually the precursor to the AAA magazine that you may get quarterly in your mailbox. In 1933, they became friends with another couple, Tim and Gigi Parrish, and they formed this immediate and intense friendship. Gigi was actually a fledgling starlet, so she was on the road a lot, kind of traveling around the United States. And Al and Mary Frances and Tim became this sort of threesome, and they would talk about art and they would talk about books and cook together and eat together. And pretty soon thereafter, Mary Frances and Tim developed feelings for each other, and she began showing pieces of her creative work to Kim. And within a few years, by 1936, they were fully having an affair, and she had also finished the manuscript of her first book, which is called Serve It Forth. 

KIM: Is it true that people thought she was actually a man because her name was so neutral? And do you think writing under her initials helped her popularity in that sense? 

ANNE: Yeah, this is an interesting question. So in the early thirties, when M.F.K. Fisher began publishing, if a woman was going to write about food, it was usually short, pithy pieces about cookery and home management and domesticity, not this sort of sensuous, historical philosophical pieces about the pleasures of food and the table. So I think yes, in that regard, having a gender-neutral nom de plume made her more palatable, so to speak, or at least helped her get her foot in the publishing house door. There's actually some myth about this. She always said that no one knew she was a woman until she had signed the contract and she walked through the door of the publishing house. And then there are other people that say, you know, that's impossible. They would have had to have known that she was a woman. So, you know, it makes for a good story. And I certainly think from a really practical point of view, I am not sure that I knew that she was a woman the first time I heard her name mentioned, and I'm sure that there are many, many people who have a similar experience.

AMY: So getting back to her personal life before she finally split from her first husband, things got super weird between the trio. So Mary Frances, her husband, and her lover, who, as you said, were all great friends, they ended up moving into a house together in Switzerland that they were building, which turned out to be a hundred percent awkward as you recounted in your book. And I guess Al kind of saw the writing on the wall, but I don't know what was going through his head at that point. 

ANNE: I mean, you know, it seems so clear that the arrangement was not going to work, but for some reason they thought it might! 

KIM: Yes, they were willing to try anything at that point. Anyway, Al, husband No. 1, eventually left and Frances and Tim were finally free to be together openly, but their happiness was soon marred by tragedy. Can you tell us what happened there? 

ANNE: Yes. So this is a very fascinating, I find, plot twist in the otherwise very decadent and privileged story of M.F.K. Fisher's life. She and Tim were in Bern, Switzerland in 1938, and Tim got terrible pain in his left leg. And when they took him to the hospital, the doctors found blood clots lining all up and down in the veins of his leg from his foot, all the way to his pelvis. They did surgery to remove the blood clots, and it ended up that they amputated his left leg just above the knee. So overnight he becomes an invalid and she becomes his caretaker. Um, they're still unmarried at this point, but you know, committed to each other. But even with great commitment, this was a tremendous, tremendous change. He was in a wheelchair and needed a ton of drugs to dull his pain, specifically opioids that the couple could only get in Europe. Unfortunately it soon became clear that he was not really going to get better and that there was the possibility that he would get worse. And he was a smoker. Smoking was something that he had done all of his life, but became one of his simple pleasures, so to speak after he was so ill. And if you have a predisposition to blood clots, smoking is like number one not what you were supposed to do. So he was looking at more amputations and just a really, really poor quality of life. Um, they did get married, but about a year or two after they were married, he did kill himself. 

AMY: Right. The whole ordeal of his illness and the suicide, it was so heartbreaking to read about this in your book, because it was clear that they were really in love and they had just finally found the freedom to be together, but their day-to-day existence just seemed so anguishing that I would imagine his death, as terrible as it was, must have also come at some relief to her. She was in her mid-thirties at this point, and she was at her lowest emotionally. Anne, you mentioned in the book that she even had her own suicidal thoughts. How did she kind of pull herself out of it and did food play a part in that in any way?

ANNE: Sure. So even when Tim was sick, Mary Frances did find some relief in sort of the ritual of food preparation and eating his illness. And the drug use caused his appetite to really diminish, but she of course, was this 24/7 caretaker and needed to keep her strength up to care for him. And in her journal, she writes dark, but lovely, journal entries about the kind of the solemn nature of preparing really simple foods and meals for the two of them; think, like, plain toast and plain tea that he could hardly eat, but that she had to. And after his death, she sort of continued with this routine, sort of eating to keep herself alive with not a lot of pleasure coming from it, in hopes that one day she might eventually feel like herself again. And the real turning point that she writes about at the end of Gastronomical Me was that she went with her siblings to Mexico. And the sun, the temperatures, the foods, it just sort of helped shift things for her and sort of bring her back to life and, you know, interestingly another travel...another trip to a different place and another kind of awakening to a new self. 

Right. And 

KIM: then that leads us to How to Cook a Wolf, which is the first book she wrote after Tim's death. What was the genesis of the book? And would you say this is the title that really solidified her career?

ANNE: Well, I think practically speaking, it was just a project that she could throw herself into. She came from a newspaper writing family. Her father had been the publisher of The Whittier News and she said something like "I wrote Wolf the way I would write a report for my father." You know, she just was able to kind of put her head down and do the work. The prose is so beautiful it's kind of hard to even like, make sense of that. The creative project is a form of comfort, and I think that's what it was for her. And because it did have this practical domestic angle and because it contained recipes and because it came at exactly the right time in the history of the United States, right as we were entering World War II, I think it did broaden her reach. During this time. She was also living alone. She had many love affairs and even worked and wrote for Hollywood. So it was kind of this weird period of grief, but also very sort of sophisticated and exciting. Um, but it was also a little bit of facade, right? So she's writing How to Cook a Wolf. She's writing kind of more about the domestic sphere and how to make your house strong to protect it against the wolf. And really she was living like a very different existence. 

AMY: So, many more food related books followed for her after this. Um, which other titles are your favorites, or which would you recommend to people who have sort of read How to Cook a Wolf and want to read more?

ANNE: Um, I really love Gastronomical Me. It's really the book that ignited my love affair with M.F.K. Fisher. It kind of is a more linear autobiographical story. She's writing a memoir, basically short memoir essays about her life. And I really have a fondness for that. 

KIM: She also wrote a novel, and I'd love to hear more about what that one's like. Is she as good at fiction writing as she is at writing about food? 

ANNE: Well, I, you know, I'm not a fiction writer, but I have to say that I think the general consensus is that it's an interesting portal into her thoughts, but that it is not compelling in the same way that her creative nonfiction is. Counterpoint Press actually published her novel a couple of years ago. And it's interesting to me, it's a little bit melodramatic and it maybe doesn't have the plot in the pacing that modern readers desire, but when read as a part of her larger collection of work, it's fascinating. I think that it helps fill in the blank sometimes when you wonder what she was scribbling in her notebooks and writing the fiction and writing the imaginative stuff. That's what it is. 

KIM: Oh, I love thinking of it as a piece like that, with everything that she wrote for us. Um, so you had said that many lovers followed in Fisher's life. She eventually remarried to a man whom she seems to have felt quite tepid. And she also had two children, somewhat sneakily in the case of her eldest daughter, who was conceived out of wedlock, it was a shocking predicament for her at the time.

AMY: Yeah. And she ended up dying in 1992 at the age of 83. But, Anne, I want to know more about your own experiences trying to discover the quote unquote "real M.F.K. Fisher." What were your biggest challenges in trying to find out about her life, and what were your biggest takeaways in what you discovered? 

ANNE: So I was relatively young, in my mid-twenties basically, when I discovered M.F.K. Fisher and started writing my book. So there were just, at the beginning, a lot of sort of practical things. It was a lot of work to gain access to her personal archive at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and to convince the executor of her estate that I had the legs, the stamina, to write a book. A little bit later on, as I was writing the book, it took work to gain the trust of M.F.K. Fisher's younger daughter, whose name is Kennedy, who is now a dear friend. And then actually writing a biography is not easy. It takes a lot of work. But I also felt very lucky. I felt like, you know, I mean, not to get too "woo-woo," but I just always felt like I kind of discovered her work and her life at the right time. And my interest was deep and genuine enough that the right doors just sort of opened for me. I never met her. People ask all the time if I did. I'm glad that I didn't. I think that it's better for the biographer not to know the subject so intimately. But that said it would be interesting in some other portal to have that experience of meeting her and seeing how we would have gotten along. In terms of takeaways, not to get too philosophical, but I continue to go back to her work. And I think when I was writing my book, I was in a different stage of life. I wasn't married, I didn't have children. And there were parts of her life and the things that she wrote about that didn't always make sense to me. And now that I'm older, I find myself thinking about her and things that she wrote; not even necessarily things that made it into my book. Sometimes they're intimate thoughts that I read in the personal archive that I didn't know what to do with, and I didn't know how to put them into my book, but now make a lot more sense. So it feels like this ... I hope this doesn't sound too crazy, but it feels like this lifelong friendship, you know, that I am just going to continue to read her work and come back to it at various points in my life and learn new things. I mean, we've been through a real situation these past 22 months and she can give us all, still, a lot of nourishment with her work and with sort of teaching us how to return to the table and feed ourselves, metaphorically and actually, day after day.

KIM: Beautifully said. Anne, thank you so much for joining us to talk about M.F.K. Fisher and her extraordinary life. We loved having this discussion with you.

ANNE: This was so much fun. Thank you for having me!

AMY: We need to have some sort of M.F.K. Fisher dinner party where we dress up in the era and sample some of the recipes.

ANNE: I don't even feel like it has to be a dinner party. Can we just cook the eggs and stand around and drink champagne? 

KIM: Absolutely. 

ANNE: That's pretty good for me. 

AMY: Some Strauss playing lightly in the background. 

KIM: I love it.

ANNE: My expectations are pretty low these days. The champagne and the baked eggs and a little, you know, adult conversation would be great.

KIM: Hopefully, we won't be doing it on Zoom. Maybe we can actually do it.

ANNE: I mean, we could go to Switzerland!

KIM: I'm in; sign me up! Totally down with that. Yeah, we need a post-pandemic writer's retreat in Switzerland. Yeah. I love that idea. 

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you've got a shelf of cookbooks in your kitchen, How to Cook a Wolf really needs to be there in the mix. I think it's the sort of thing you'll reread while waiting for a pot to boil. And I'll even venture to guess you might get a little sauce splattered all over the pages of your favorite recipes, which is always the sign of a great cookbook, in my opinion.

KIM: True. And I usually slosh a little wine on it, typically. And likewise, we really hope you subscribe to this podcast so you can continue to find your favorite new forgotten women writers. And while you're at it, take a moment to leave us one of those five star reviews, which for us is the equivalent of a Michelin star. 

AMY: Oh yeah. And if you want to know what a James Beard Award might be like for us, that would be a shout-out on social media. So please consider that as well. Until next week, bye everyone! 

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.