After a lifetime spent in awe of an excellent meal, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher died at the age of 83 on 22 June 1992, with – we very much hope – a belly full of the seafood she so adored. Only a year before her death, an LA Times profile found the writer at her ranch in Sonoma, California, “propped up on pillows” but still enthusiastically knocking back oysters baked with a spinach topping. They were, wrote Ruth Reichl, “one of the few sensual pleasures left” to Fisher, who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Her voice was “reduced to whisper”, and she was unable to read or hold a pen to write. An oyster feast, then, was a small but vital moment of celebration, matched only by the friendly cats who would leap onto her bed during the interview.
Throughout her career Fisher was the very opposite of the food-as-fuel brigade. The act of consuming food tends to be reduced to two categories: eating to live or living to eat. Fisher fell firmly in favour of the latter. Her elegant, excitable prose melded the practical with the sensual; eating was a necessity, yes, but it could also be the highlight of your day – a chance to embrace every last drop, scoop and mouthful of what life had to offer. Yet food also provided a much-needed foil to the darker moments of Fisher’s life, including the loss of her brother and second husband to suicide within the same year.
