You don't need to cook a wolf -- yet!

Original cover of How to Cook a Wolf.
My kindle edition has several of FIsher's
books under the title The Art of Eating.

Quite a few food writers recently have been quoting M.F.K. Fisher's wartime book How to Cook a Wolf, published 1942. Curious, I got out my dogeared copy -- well ok, I own the kindle edition, but it has a lot of highlighting, electronically, so I guess it's virtually dogeared. Anyway, I read through it.

These food writers are enamored of Fisher, a classic of 20th century food writing. I agree that her writing is quirky, vivid, and often insightful. Nevertheless, I find that How to Cook a Wolf is too preachy. It's presented as advice on how to be thrifty in the kitchen, based on her experiences, opinions, and prejudices. But it's still advice, maybe too much advice.

Since the beginning of the current pandemic and the shortages and food problems it's caused, these lovers of Fisher have been suggesting that her sage advice could help us in our current troubles. However, Fisher's worries are not our worries. Generically, thrift is a virtue, but the details are important.

For example, those of us now worried about shortages of this or that specific food or how to stay away from the store don't really have to worry about the use of gas or electricity right now. The economic disaster resulting from the coronavirus pandemic might reduce us to such worries as time goes on, but not yet. So the many lessons she offers on conserving cooking fuel don't really apply at the moment. Fisher's words on the subject:

"More or less, this simple but surprisingly little-practiced rule is true in using an oven: try to fill every inch of space in it. Even if you do not want baked apples for supper, put a pan of them with whatever is baking at from 250 to 400 degrees. They will be all the better for going slowly, but as long as their skins do not scorch they can cook fast.... Another thing to do while the oven is going is to put in a pan of thinly sliced bread which is too stale to use any more. It makes good Melba toast, if you watch it so that it does not get too brown." (The Art of Eating, Kindle Locations 3615-3620).

Tips for cooling food really show how different our lives and kitchens are: "As for your icebox, then, there are several ways to use it with the most intelligence," Fisher wrote. In 1942, she didn't assume that you have an electric refrigerator, but that if lucky, you may have a wooden box in which you keep food cool with a block of ice. She offers ways to get the most of this primitive appliance (see example in photo). Well, we need to count our blessings, don't we! (Kindle Locations 3600-3601).

Fisher addressed far more severe shortages than ours. Wartime rationing was much more drastic than our supermarkets temporarily running out of some items. Of course I mean the plight of current middle class families who haven't lost their livelihood in the current pandemic, and can still afford to buy what they can find. Hunger is a reality in our society, but that's a very different topic.

Here are some quotes from How to Cook a Wolf that in my opinion highlight the differences between us and them --

"For myself, if I were rationed to two ounces of meat a day, as many of our brothers are (to mention only the more fortunate ones) ... I should prefer to save it for a week perhaps, and make a nice stew of it, or fix it in some way so that for one meal at least I would feel myself safe and fat again in the time of plenty." (Kindle Locations 4894-4896).

"Another trick is to cut the consumption of sugar in half when you are making jams and preserves by mixing one cup of sugar with every two cups of fruit and the correct amount of water, and then adding one-half a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda. I have never done this, but ardent housewives who lived through the last war in both England and America swear that it works, and of course the wear and tear on sugar cards is cut down considerably." (Kindle Locations 3586-3589). 

"It is best to keep it [meat-cooking water] in an old gin bottle in the icebox, alongside the other old gin bottle filled with juices left from canned fruit. You can add what’s left of the morning tomato juice. You can squeeze in the last few drops of the lemon you drink in hot water before breakfast, if you still do that. You can put canned vegetable juices in. You can steep parsley stems in hot water and pour their juice into the bottle. In other words, never throw away any vegetable or its leaves or its juices unless they are bad; else count yourself a fool."(Kindle Locations 3663-3667).

How to Cook a Wolf offers quite a few recipes, which definitely reflect the cooking style of the 1940s when Fisher wrote it. For example, she's fond of "one-dish meals." She recommends a baked ham slice, and includes two recipes, one with apples, one with cream, plus variations. (Yes, it's retro -- my mother used to serve baked ham slice, but I haven't had in years.) She says:

"Get a little more meat [ham] than you plan to use at dinner, because it is fine the next day diced in a macaroni-and-cheese casserole, or in an omelet or any way you want it. A green salad is good with this, and either a light beer or a rather sharp white wine. And for dessert, if you want one, nothing can be a better complement to the tang of ham and apples than hot gingerbread." (Kindle Locations 3634-3637). 

Many of Fisher's suggestions, on the other hand, apply quite well to the here and now, especially this one:

"It is often a delicate point, now, to decide when common sense ends and hoarding begins. Preparing a small stock of practical boxed and canned goods for a blackout shelf, in direct relation to the size of your family, is quite another thing from buying large quantities of bottled shrimps and canape wafers and meat pastes, or even unjustified amounts of more sensible foods." (Kindle Locations 5952-5955).  

Taken all together, Fisher's prescriptions for saving fuel, food, and money are neither wrong nor bad, just not always applicable to current problems as some writers would have it. Many of her thrifty practices, in fact, are normal habits of careful household managers. Using vegetable scraps and a chicken carcass is a way to get a delicious stock (I did it yesterday); however, making some sort of cake out of vegetable scraps and oatmeal, while it may be good when the wolf is really at the door, doesn't fit our current situation. Saving some fat from cooking bacon or chicken to use later is a way to get good flavor; however straining and re-using cooking fat from every frying pan and being miserly with cooking oil may not be reasonable under current circumstances. Can you overdo the reuse of leftovers? Maybe, maybe not.

Living with ration books that limit all purchases, to me, is a very different thing from living with limited time in the grocery store, even with erratic emptying of shelves and unreliable delivery times and incomplete orders. Our food supply is still generous, and we should appreciate it. And we should be helping our less fortunate fellow humans who have many serious problems.

This review copyright © 2020 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

If you read this elsewhere it's been pirated.