She was so gifted a writer that W.H. Auden said of her: “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”

She was so elegantly beautiful that the Dadaist artist Man Ray begged to photograph her, fascinated as he was by her striking bone structure.

She almost single-handedly invented the modern narrative genre of food writing and collected legions of admirers (and some fierce critics) along the way.

She was Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher– MFK Fisher to her readers.

Fisher was a cook, an “influencer” before that term was even imagined, a supremely-talented writer and an unrepentant free spirit. She wrote twenty-seven books, hundreds of stories for The New Yorker Magazine and countless articles in magazines like Vogue, Gourmet and The Atlantic. Among her most important works were her depression-era how-to-cope tome How to Cook A Wolf,  a translation of Brillat Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste (She was deeply influenced by years spent in France and by French cooking.), and The Art of Eating, a book Alice Waters says should be required reading for all cooks. Improbably, she also worked for Paramount Studios for a time writing gags for Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.

What made Fisher’s food writing so novel? She saw (and wrote about) food as a cultural metaphor.

In her personal essays, her writing ranged from the personal to the historical to just about every subject touching human existence. A “food piece” by Fisher was never just a food piece. She explained her wide grasp for subject matter in The Art of Eating: “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, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.”

Fisher called minestrone, for example: “Probably the most satisfying soup in the world for people who are hungry, as well as for those who are tired or worried or cross or in debt or in a moderate amount of pain or in love or in robust health or in any kind of business huggermuggery, is minestrone.”

So…that’s you and me and everyone else. Right?

We need minestrone. Today. Now. Whenever.

So… here is a recipe for an early summer minestrone–a very good one–  adapted from The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook by Jack Bishop. No huggermuggery here.

This recipe is adapted from The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook by Jack Bishop. The book is old–1997–but it is still available at a price. You can find it at used bookstores and on Amazon here.