ABSTRACT
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908–1992) wrote what Patricia Storace would call “the first of her unclassifiable works on the art of eating, blends of autobiography, culinary history, parable, and cookbook” (1989), Serve It Forth, in 1937. This volume, as much of her other writing, fits into a distinctive genre that can be identified as the culinary memoir (Kelly 2000), which is also sometimes known as the food memoir (Waxman 2008; Brien 2011). She followed this volume with Consider the Oyster (1941) and How to Cook a Wolf (1942), followed by a more traditional autobiography, The Gastronomical Me (1943). Together with the short volume, An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949), Fisher collected these autobiographical writings into The Art of Eating in 1954, producing a definitive volume of gastronomic writing and assuring her distinctiveness as a culinary memoirist. Her other culinary-styled volumes, Here Let Us Feast (1946), With Bold Knife and Fork (1969), and Among Friends (1971), as well as her national public reputation as an authority on epicurean manners and delights, make her one of the most important figures in American culinary memoir.
