Anne Zimmerman

An Extravagant Hunger

The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher

In An Extravagant Hunger, time slows and is relished, and the turning points and casual strolls of M.F.K. Fisher's life are unwrapped and savored. From the Berengaria that washed her across the sea to France in 1929, to Le Paquis, the Swiss estate that later provided a backdrop for some of the most idyllic and fleeting moments of her life, the stories of Fisher's love for food and her love for family and men are meticulously researched and exquisitely captured in this book. Exploring Fisher's lonely and formative time in Europe with her first husband; her subsequent divorce and re–marriage to her creative sparkplug, Dillwyn Parrish, and his tragic suicide; and the child she carried from an unnamed father, the story of M.F.K. Fisher's life becomes as vibrant and passionate as her prolific words on wine and cuisine.



Letters and journal entries piece together a dramatic life, but An Extravagant Hunger steps further, bridging the gaps between personal notes and her public persona, filling in the silences by offering an engaging and unprecedented depth of intuitive commentary. With a passion of her own, Anne Zimmerman is the careful witness, lingering beside M.F.K. Fisher through her most dramatic and productive years.

Love in a Dish . . . And Other Culinary Delights by M.F.K. Fisher

Whether the subject of her fancy is the lowly, unassuming potato or the love life of that aphrodisiac mollusk the oyster, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher writes with a simplicity that belies the complexities of the life she often muses on. She is hailed as one of America's preeminent writers about gastronomy. But to limit her to that genre would be a disservice. She was passionate and well–traveled, and her narratives fill over two dozen highly acclaimed books. In this collection of some of her finest works, we learn that Fisher's palette was not only well trained in gastronomical masterpieces, but in life's best pleasures as well.



Love in a Dish . . . and Other Culinary Delights by M.F.K. Fisher is an instructional manual on how to live, eat, and love brought together by prolific researcher and culinary enthusiast Anne Zimmerman. With great care she has selected essays that sometimes forgive our lustful appetites, yet simultaneously celebrate them, as in "Once a Tramp, Always . . . " and "Love in a Dish," which guides us down the path to marital bliss via the family dining table.



It is through this carefully chosen selection, which includes two essays never before collected in book form, that we encounter Fisher's bold passion for cuisine and an introduction to her idea of what constitutes the delicious life.