How to Cook a Wolf
First-edition cover
AuthorM.F.K. Fisher
PublisherDuell, Sloan and Pearce
Publication date
May 1942 (revised 1954)
Pages261
LC ClassTX715 .F542

How to Cook a Wolf by M. F. K. Fisher is an American cookery book and/or disaster survival guide and/or prose poem that was first published in 1942.

History

How to Cook a Wolf was written following the attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to the American entry in World War II, when Fisher (then known to society as Mrs. Dillwyn Parrish) returned to California from already-war-torn Europe and wrote a well-received guide to blackout curtains and crisis cooking for her father's paper, the Whittier News.[1][2] The newspaper columns evolved into a book, which she wrote in about a month, and publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce rushed it into print because of its wartime topicality.[3] A revision ("the Cold War edition") was published in 1954, with Fisher revisiting her own text by way of "marginal notes, footnotes, and a section of additional recipes."[4] The revision "quietly spoke out against the over-indulgences of the postwar years,"[5] and included new material on feeding children, an experience that Fisher had not yet had when writing the first edition.[6]

How to Cook a Wolf was anthologized in full in The Art of Eating (with an introduction by Clifton Fadiman), which was first published in 1954 and remains in print.[7] Five chapters were included in posthumous compilation of Fisher's work called The Measure of Her Powers.[8] In 1988, the now-defunct North Point Press reprinted How to Cook a Wolf.[9]

Both the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 and the COVID-19 pandemic led to a resurgence of interest in Wolf.[10] A Vox writer commented during the coronavirus crisis, "I am not recommending How to Cook a Wolf for the recipes. They're 1942 recipes, and even if you wanted to roast a pigeon or jug a hare I have no idea how you would get the ingredients right now. This book has outlived its function as a practical how-to guide."[11] Fisher's biographer Joan Reardon wrote that the overarching theme of How to Cook a Wolf was "the will to survive, whether in wartime or in battle with old age or in a crise de nerfs ."[12] A pandemic-era writer agreed, arguing that the essays in How to Cook a Wolf are "an argument for living the best life that you can when everything around you goes to shit."[13]

Description

Wolf may be the "best known"[14] of the 20-odd books produced by American food writer Fisher, whose writing has been described as "highly stylized" and so lyrical that she is "basically a Sappho."[15] Nominally about food, home economics, thrift, and preparedness, How to Cook a Wolf has been described "barely a cookbook"[13] and "part experimental cookbook, part 'escape reading material,' and part war protest."[16]

The book is dedicated to Fisher's friend Lawrence Bachmann, who reportedly came up with the title.[3] The wolf in question "is the one at the door,"[17] the ever-allegorical big bad wolf of folk tales, and more precisely, the predator described in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's poem "The Wolf at the Door."[18] As per the brick-house little pig from the folktale collected by the brothers Grimm, the solution to the problem is simply "outsmart him and have him for dinner."[18]

Wolf, along with An Alphabet for Gourmets and A Cordiall Water, is one of three works by Fisher that examine food as a form of self-help.[19] Some critics place How to Cook a Wolf in a poorly studied literary genre known as food memoir, in company with titles like The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and Mimi Sheraton's From My Mother's Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences.[20] An Associated Press writer once characterized it as a "budget cookbook," alongside How to Eat Better for Less Money by James Beard and Sam Aaron, Economy Gastronomy by Sylvia Vaughn Thompson, and A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others by Ann Rogers.[21]

The book contains 73 recipes,[22] but Orville Prescott, the New York Times reviewer, reported that the book's strengths were not so much in its catalog of recipes as in its "unorthodox, specific and pointed suggestions about cooking various types of food..."[23] The book's adaptable prescriptions are derived from Fisher's precept that there's "no such thing as a new recipe."[14] In 1987, a San Francisco Bay Area writer named Cyna McFadden reported that Fisher had told her: "The book has some terrible recipes...We were just so grateful to get hold of anything."[24] A later writer argued that "the forced minimalism" of the recipes Wolf was valuable to him because "I couldn't get carried away with exotic ingredients, [so] I was forced to learn the basics."[25]

Per Humanities magazine, "The book is really a literary rather than a culinary accomplishment—ultimately, more book than cook. Fisher's cheekiness in telling readers how to make war cake and then warning them away from it is a small case in point. Much of the book is like that, as Fisher steps slightly offstage of her narrative and confesses a change of mind."[18] Scholar Allison Carruth calls it "an important text for both late modernism and food writing...Through her modernist redefinition of the cookbook and culinary redefinition of modernism, Fisher reveals a nation's growing appetites for industrialized food and the bodily as well as economic power that food promises."[26]

Reception and legacy

The New York Times critic complained, "She has the weird notion that if a soup is rich enough and good enough, it is almost presumptuous to want anything else. Imagine! And she is very scornful and patronizing about desserts, too."[23]

During the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, it was said that How to Cook a Wolf had been "almost a bible for modern commune dwellers, homesteaders, and other devotees of the simple life...referred to frequently in Mother Earth News and other underground publications."[27] A latter-day practitioner of a similar ideology, Novella Carpenter, references Fisher's dictums on wastefulness in Farm City.[28]

Cherry Pickman wrote a series of poems with titles "stolen" from How to Cook a Wolf.[29] Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal has been characterized as a riff on How to Cook a Wolf with "an up-to-date sensibility about cooking and food and the memories associated with kitchenry."[30] Adler recycled several of Fisher's chapter titles ("How to Boil Water") and explicitly credited Fisher as her inspiration: "How to Cook a Wolf is not a cookbook or a memoir or a story about one person or one thing. It is a book about cooking defiantly, amid the mess of war and the pains of bare pantries...I love that book. I have modeled this one on it."[31]

In 2016, How to Cook a Wolf was number 37 on the Guardian's list of 100 best nonfiction books.[32]

Short film

In 1958, Fisher appeared in a five-minute color short film produced by the Wine Advisory Board of San Francisco called "How to Cook a Wolf Quickly".[33][34]

Table of contents

How to Cook a Wolf
Chapter titleTopicNotes
Introduction
How to Be Sage Without Hemlock Balanced diets
How to Catch the Wolf
How to Distribute Your Virtue Thrift The general topic is frugality, about which Fisher wrote: "There are many other ways to save money, some of them written in cookbooks for people to study, and some of them only hidden in the minds of those who might have been hungrier without them."[35] Allison Carruth describes this chapter as "form of a montage: an almost incoherent primer that combines the traditional and the modern, the technological and the rudimentary, and the time-intensive and the labor-saving."[36]
How to Boil Water Soup[3] Recommends Sheila Hibben's Kitchen Manual and Ambrose Heath's Good Soups; recipes for Chinese consommé, Parisian onion soup, chowder, cream of potato soup, gaspacho, cold buttermilk soup, minestrone, green garden soup, potage Else
How to Greet the Spring Seafood Recipes for salmon cakes, Hawaiian shrimps, shrimp and egg curry, baked tuna with mushroom sauce,
How Not to Boil an Egg Eggs Recipes for French omelette, basic soufflé omelette, "frittata of zucchini (for example)", basic foo yeung, eggs in hell, eggs obstáculos, scrambled eggs
How to Keep Alive Stew, sort of
How to Rise Up Like New Bread Bread Recipes for white bread, hot loaf, Addie's quick bucket-bread
How to be Cheerful Through Starving
How to Carve the Wolf Meat, offal Recipes for bœuf tartare, crackling bread, baked ham slice, baked ham in cream, mock duck, prune roast,[lower-alpha 1] "Aunt Gwen's cold shape (!)", tête de veau, calves' brains, kidneys in sherry, sausage or sardine pie, "an English curry", Turkish hash
How to Make a Pigeon Cry Poultry, game Recipes for kasha, roast pigeon, rabbit in casserole, jugged hare, partridge or pheasant and sauerkraut, Normandy pheasant; chapter includes a quote from John Wecker's Secrets of Art and Nature (1660) with directions for roasting a goose alive "as part of her encouragement to cooks faced with rationing, assuring them that their talents could conquer and transform the most bizarre kinds of meats."[39]
How to Pray for Peace Assorted starches Recipes for quick potato soup, Chinese rice, Napolitana sauce for spaghetti, Southern spoon bread, polenta, beef sauce for polenta
How to Be Content with a Vegetable Love Veg Recipe for "petits pois more-or-less à la Française"
How to Make a Great Show Personal, household make-dos Recipes for mouthwash, monkey soap, regular soap, other nonsense she found amusing in old books of household hints
How to Have a Sleek Pelt Pet food[3]
How to Comfort Sorrow Comfort food and dessert Recipes for war cake, tomato soup cake, baked apples, cinnamon milk, Edith's gingerbread, wine sauce, hard sauce, "date delight", sweet potato pudding, "rice and spice", Riz à l'Impératrice
How to Be a Wise Man
How to Lure the Wolf
How to Drink to the Wolf Alcoholic beverages Recipes for half-and-half cocktail and faux vodka
How Not to Be an Earthworm Food storage
How to Practice True Economy Recipes for shrimp pâté, eggs with anchovies, bœuf moreno, poulet à la mode de beaune, colonial dessert, fruits aux sept liqueurs (Fisher "apologises, given the year, for [this recipe's] craziness and seeming impossibility, while 'wolf whuffs through the keyhole'")[40]
Conclusion

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ The prune roast recipe was elsewhere recommended as "marvelous."[37] Fisher's biographer asserted that as a home cook, roast beef was "a dish Mary Frances executed to perfection.[38]

References

  1. ↑ Reardon (2004), p. 141–142.
  2. ↑ "Blackout lessons drawn from Europe". The Whittier News. December 24, 1941. p. 7. Retrieved 2023-09-23 – via Newspapers.com.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Reardon (2004), p. 144.
  4. ↑ Reardon (2004), p. 207.
  5. ↑ Neuhaus (1999).
  6. ↑ Reardon (2004), p. 207–208.
  7. ↑ Reardon (2004), p. 241.
  8. ↑ Fisher, M. F. K. (1999). Gioia, Dominique (ed.). The Measure of Her Powers: An M.F.K. Fisher Reader. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint. ISBN 9781582430317.
  9. ↑ BOOK How to cook a wolf. North Point Press. 1988. ISBN 9780865473362. LCCN 88061170. Retrieved 2023-09-25 – via catalog.loc.gov.
  10. ↑ Daley, Bill (December 12, 2001). "Hungry for comfort, Americans reading 1942 survival handbook". Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Hartford Courant. p. 69. Retrieved 2023-09-24 – via Newspapers.com.
  11. ↑ Grady, Constance (March 23, 2020). "The World War II food memoir that's getting me through life in a pandemic". vox.com. Archived from the original on 2023-05-30. Retrieved 2023-09-24.
  12. ↑ Reardon (2004), p. 208.
  13. 1 2 Terhaar, Emma (June 8, 2020). "How To Cook A Wolf, a WWII cookbook, has plenty to teach modern readers". The Takeout. Archived from the original on 2023-03-20. Retrieved 2023-09-23.
  14. 1 2 "Author takes reporter into her famous kitchen". The Press Democrat. Santa Rosa, Calif. February 27, 1957. p. 35. Retrieved 2023-09-24 – via Newspapers.com.
  15. ↑ "With Bold Knife and Fork". Redwood City Tribune. Redwood City, Calif. December 13, 1969. p. 49. Retrieved 2023-09-24 – via Newspapers.com.
  16. ↑ Carruth (2013), pp. 73.
  17. ↑ Ditum, Sarah (April 29, 2020). "I wish more people would read ... How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher (Food and drink books)". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2023-03-28. Retrieved 2023-09-23.
  18. 1 2 3 Heitman (2023).
  19. ↑ Reardon (2004), p. 290–291.
  20. ↑ Smith (2019).
  21. ↑ Romanoff, Jim (January 25, 2009). "Lessons on economizing from some culinary legends". Carlsbad Current-Argus. Carlsbad, N.M. Associated Press. p. 19. Retrieved 2023-09-24 – via Newspapers.com.
  22. ↑ Reardon (2004), p. 146.
  23. 1 2 Prescott, Orville (May 22, 1942). "How to Cook a Wolf". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2023-09-24.
  24. ↑ McFadden, Cyna (November 30, 1987). "Reading 'How to Cook a Wolf' restored equilibrium and outlook". The South Bend Tribune. p. 33. Retrieved 2023-09-24. & "Reading from page D1 (part 2 of 2)". The South Bend Tribune. November 30, 1987. p. 34. Retrieved 2023-09-24.
  25. ↑ Kuh, Patrick (January 25, 1998). "Getting all souped-up". The Los Angeles Times Magazine. p. 33. Retrieved 2023-09-24.
  26. ↑ Carruth (2013), p. 77–78.
  27. ↑ Lambert, Pattie (April 18, 1971). "A Mouthwatering Package". Rocky Mount Telegram. Rocky Mount, North Carolina. p. 15. Retrieved 2023-09-24 – via Newspapers.com.
  28. ↑ Truax, Alice (April 2011). "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer [Review]". Site Lines. 6 (2): 20–22 – via Database: Art & Archit (EBSCOhost).
  29. ↑ Pickman, Cherry (2017). "How to Carve the Wolf". The American Poetry Review. 46 (1): 30. ISSN 0360-3709. JSTOR 44979670.
  30. ↑ Jacobs, Barbara (October 1, 2011). "An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace [Review]". Booklist. 108 (3): 21.
  31. ↑ Adler, Tamar (2011). Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-4391-8189-8. LCCN 2011275207.
  32. ↑ McCrum, Robert (October 10, 2016). "The 100 best nonfiction books: No 37 – How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher (1942)". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2023-01-17. Retrieved 2023-09-26.
  33. ↑ "Wine Cooking, Tasting Are Film Topics". The Modesto Bee. October 5, 1958. p. 49. Retrieved 2023-09-24.
  34. ↑ "Fairgoers Will Sample Wine Coolers; Films Are Planned". The Sacramento Bee. August 26, 1958. p. 49. Retrieved 2023-09-24.
  35. ↑ Fisher (2004), p. 308.
  36. ↑ Carruth (2013), p. 70.
  37. ↑ "Say Prunes". The Reporter Dispatch. White Plains, New York. October 2, 1974. p. 44. Retrieved 2023-09-24.
  38. ↑ Reardon (2004), p. 260.
  39. ↑ Raber (2017), p. 26.
  40. ↑ Elen, Judith (November 23, 2013). "Cherry pickers". The Australian. New South Wales.

Sources

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