How to Cook a Wolf by M. F. K. Fisher
What A Read!
Written to inspire courage in those daunted by wartimes shortages, How to
Cook a Wolf continues to rally cooks during times of plenty, reminding
them that providing sustenance requires more than putting food on the
table. M. F. K. Fisher knew that the last thing hungry people needed were
hints on cutting back and making do. Instead, she gives her readers
license to dream, to experiment, to construct adventurous and delicious
meals as a bulwark against a dreary, meager present. Her fine prose
provides reason in itself to draw our chairs close to the hearth; we can still
enjoy her company and her exhortations to celebrate life by eating well.
Personal Review: How to Cook a Wolf by M. F. K. Fisher
Ms. Fisher was writing in Europe during WW2; due to wartime rationing
and shortages, the wolf seemed literally to hover near the door. Fine, she
says, a wolf! Let's eat him!

Ms. Fisher shows the best of the chin-up attitude one hopes we would all
be disposed to display in hard times. She was in Europe during the war,
and suffered the hardships thereof; she writes from a love of the food she
had been exposed to before shortages, but her writing is ABOUT the food
she can obtain rather than what she can't. She writes wittily, even
charmingly about how to live on practically nothing and how to do it with an
eye to health and nutrtion, and flavor and enjoyment! Even in the 40's Ms.
Fisher was aware that everybody needs to eat plenty of vegetables; even
then she was aware that even sparse rations would be "better for you" if
the food could look and taste appealing.
The book was later edited and annotated by the author, and this edition
includes those notes.
One comes to see that in writing during wartime Ms. Fisher wrote from the
"furnace of affliction" indeed and and that this book is as much a statement
of philosophy as a guide to cooking and eating when food is sparse. One's
attitude toward food, family, friends can be shaped to something
resembling common sense and love of beauty whether a war is raging
around one or no. The notes she added years later indicate that she still
agreed with her earlier thoughts, in the main -- something had solidified,
something had crystallised, in her thinking.
A must for the shelf if one likes to think about food in more than a visceral
and immediate way.
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