ABSTRACT
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher 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", Serve It Forth, in 1937. Examining her personal writing through the genre of culinary memoir requires a better understanding of how M.F.K. Fisher's writing fits within the label. Using the term 'memoir' over 'autobiography' places Fisher's prose in a long and historical literary conversation about the difference between the two terms. Fisher, who passes judgement and passes on recipes perfectly singed by her literary ancestors' fires. Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of autobiographical writing, and one Fisher arguably most succeeds in producing, is this definitive, poised sense of self in her texts. By the end of her far-reaching literary career, M.F.K. Fisher had a distinctive understanding of the imaginative act that produced her literary persona in her culinary memoirs.
