Ignore the wheelchair and arthritis. Her 80 years weigh lightly upon the mind and wit of M.F.K. Fisher, whose gifts to the world of food and literature are still mounting. But shed a tear for the grand dame of gastronomy: Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher denies herself the pleasure she gives her army of admirers in the 17 books and scores of magazine pieces that for 50 years set a lean and spicy standard few can match. ``I never read anything I've written,'' she snapped. ``I don't care to go back. I never read a word of print about me or by me.'' She wouldn't argue with going back to being able to use her hands for typing. Fate has ruled that she must dictate into a tape recorder. There's no question of her not doing it. Writing is as important to her as air. ``I am compulsive about it,'' admitted the Michigan-born author, who wrote such tasty morsels as ``How to Cook a Wolf,'' ``The Gastronomical Me,'' ``Consider the Oyster'' and her pungent ``Alphabet for Gourmets.'' Chafing among cushions in her little wine-country house, she added, ``But it's like pulling teeth. It's just awful. I can't dictate to a person so I dictate secretly. I don't make many mistakes, you know. It's my newspaper training. ... I don't have any errors once I get it down on paper, thank God.'' In 1937, the world's food writers discovered a tough new kid on the block when they eyed this paragraph leaping from the pages of ``Serve It Forth,'' Mary Frances' first book: ``The quails are an artful lure to the most refined of palates, and the rabbit stew, steaming, aromatic, is made just as tempting with an onion or two, pepper freshly ground, a little bacon and a dash of cheap, pure wine.'' A somewhat less literate reporter observed, ``It's a shame you don't get to read your good stuff like that.'' She was not impressed. Others are. It was once said of her crisp prose: ``She writes about food as others do about love, but rather better. ... Fisher writes not as a specialist but as a whole human being, spiky with prejudices, charming, short-tempered, well-traveled and cosmopolitan. ... She is a person, not a gourmet masked as a writer. Her passion comes from inside her.'' That was 35 years ago. Except for such indignities as two hip replacements, a corneal implant and the arthritis, nothing has changed, and she remembers everything between times _ three husbands, magazine pieces, the books that ``never made me any money,'' the travels in Europe. Of all her mates, said Mary Frances, ``my real husband was Jimmy Parrish (Dillwyn Parrish).'' They lived in a stone house surrounded by a vineyard and garden in Vevey, Switzerland. It was there, she said, that she learned from her Italian Swiss neighbors to cook vegetables in their own juices ``with sweet butter or thick olive oil to encourage them a little; tomatoes and onions and sweet peppers and all the summer things.'' She credits her start in food-writing on an episode during prohibition when she was living in Whittier, Calif., and her newspaperman father, Rex Kennedy, was teaching at a nearby college. She was working in a postcard shop. One afternoon she had a half-day off and decided to go the public library, where she found an Elizabethan cookbook on a table. ``It smelled so good ... the binding. I started writing,'' she said. She showed her writing to Alfred Fisher, the man who became her first husband. She had just turned 21 when they married, and 11 days later they set off to France and three years in Dijon, where he got his doctorate and she earned a degree at the University of Dijon. Back in the states, her writing started making the rounds. At 26, she sold her first magazine story, ``The Standing and the Waiting,'' and it conjured visions, full of verbs and wide swaths of color. The most scholarly of her work is her translation of legendary gastronomer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's ``The Physiology of Taste,'' her favorite work. Smoothing her red polka-dot dress, she peered out the window of the small, busy house she has lived in for 18 years, craning to see who was coming to visit her next. They come all day long, for a few moments in her ``youthful'' presence. They come professionally or as friends, for interviews, a publisher's conference, a chat, advice or perhaps to drop off a particularly nice piece of cheese or share a plateful of the chincoteague oysters she loves so much. She calls her visitors ``strays and wayfarers.'' They sit with her near a large picture window in her Sonoma County house on the edge of the old Bouverie Ranch, in Jack London country. But in her eighth decade, Mary Frances is not overwhelmed with the way things have gone with the world. ``We're suicidal,'' declared the mother of two daughters. ``Our doom is sealed. I take a very dim view of us as a human race, the only one that kills itself and everything around it. ... We've poisoned the earth and the land and the water. What else is there to poison? ... I don't have any hope for us at all.'' We looked out on her green meadow, rolling to the trees, peaceful, and the harsh pronouncement seemed a long way away.
