'A poet of the appetites' John Updike 20010730

Born in Michigan in 1908, M. F. K. Fisher developed her love of cooking in France, where she lived with her first husband, Al Fisher. She began to write about food in 1935. In 1938 she moved to Switzerland with her second husband, the painter Dillwyn Parish. After his death in 1941 she returned to California and several years later married the publisher Donald Friede, with whom she had two daughters. In the early 1960s she became active in the American civil rights movement and went to Mississippi as a volunteer teacher. She died in 1992.