“The saving grace of all wine’s many graces, probably, is that it can never be dull. It is only the people who write about it who may sound flat. But wine is an older thing than we are, and is forgiving of even the most boring explanations of its élan vital.” - MFK Fisher

Last Sunday, July 3rd, was Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher’s birthday. An American author, who wrote eloquently about wine and food before Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson were born, Fisher was lauded by WH Auden as our country’s best writer of prose. In 1946, she became the first female judge on the California Wine Panel of the Los Angeles State Fair, and in 1963, she was a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. Erudite and unorthodox, MFK Fisher examined, through a prodigious series of deadly serious and whimsically playful essays, the simple pleasures of sustenance and their importance in the larger world.

And her larger world was tumultuous. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from January 17th, 1920 to December 5th, 1933. Born in 1908, MFK Fisher turned twenty one during prohibition, the same year the stock market crashed, prompting the Great Depression. Her parents secretly ignored the alcohol ban and drank simple red wines with supper, whatever they could find that was good: “The wines had to be honest to be good, and good meant drinkable,” she wrote. Fisher began her writing career in the years leading up to the Second World War, and in How to Cook a Wolf, published in 1942, Fisher writes of air-raid shelter meals, rationing and shortages, stressing the importance of “living agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.”

For MFK Fisher, it was not the quality of the meal, but the spirit in which it was prepared and consumed that was most important. A perfectly poached egg is not mundane, but beautiful, necessary, and sustaining, and we all have the power to transcend our troubles with a humble joy in properly satisfying our appetites.

“People ask me:” Fisher wrote, “Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, about love, the way others do? The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it. There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”

To the queen of comestibles: Oakland Yard salutes you! Happy Birthday MFK; thank you for the words of encouragement.

Cheers,

Max􏰀