An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher

America's preeminent food writer and culinary grande dame, M.F.K. Fisher has influenced today's finest chefs, culinary writers, and legions of rabid readers and eaters.

Fisher's career began in the 1930s and spanned decades, her glittering prose blending musings on food, love, sex, and the pleasures of eating well and reveling in the senses. With her dozens of books including Serve it Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf and The
Gastronomical Me, she  pioneered an entirely new sensibility, daring to suggest that food be enjoyed sensually. In this age of celebrity chefs and "reality" food programming, her essays return the conversation to the simple, often intensely personal experience of food and dining--whether it's a five-course affair or the mysteries of the fried egg sandwich.

An Extravagant Hunger: The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher, through painstaking research and her private papers and correspondence, traces Fisher's own appetites -- both professional and private.

We see how she birthed the genre of food writing. We follow her unhappy first marriage, travels through Europe, the United States, and Mexico ... to the suicide of her great love, and later, her brother. The complete saga, a story never fully told in M.F.K. Fisher's autobiographical work, describes the sometimes turbulent, always passionate intersection of food and personal desire.

Anne Zimmerman keeps her voracious appetite filled in the city of San Francisco where she lives and writes about food and wine.