 First-edition cover | |
| Author | M.F.K. Fisher |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Duell, Sloan and Pearce |
Publication date | May 1942 (revised 1954) |
| Pages | 261 |
| LC Class | TX715 .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.
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]
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]
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]
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]
| Chapter title | Topic | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 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, [a] "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 |
A recipe is a set of instructions that describes how to prepare or make something, especially a dish of prepared food. A sub-recipe or subrecipe is a recipe for an ingredient that will be called for in the instructions for the main recipe. Cookbooks, which are a collection of recipes, help reflect cultural identities and social changes as well as serve as educational tools.
A cookbook or cookery book is a kitchen reference containing recipes.
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher Parrish Friede, writing as M.F.K. Fisher, was an American food writer. She was a founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library. Over her lifetime she wrote 27 books, among them Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943) and a translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored this in her writing. W. H. Auden once remarked, "I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose." In 1991 the New York Times editorial board went so far as to say, "Calling M.F.K. Fisher, who has just been elected to the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, a food writer is a lot like calling Mozart a tunesmith. At the same time that she is celebrating, say, oysters or the scent of orange segments drying on a radiator, she is also celebrating life and loneliness, sense and sensibility."
Depression cake is a type of cake that was commonly made during the Great Depression. The ingredients include little or no milk, sugar, butter, or eggs, because the ingredients were then either expensive or hard to obtain. Similar cakes are known as "War Cake", as they avoided ingredients that were scarce or were being conserved for the use of soldiers. A common depression cake is also known as "Boiled Raisin Cake", "Milkless, Eggless, Butterless Cake", or "Poor Man's Cake". "Boiled" refers to the boiling of raisins with the sugar and spices to make a syrup base early in the recipe. However, some bakers do include butter. Boiled raisin-type cakes date back at least to the American Civil War.
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is a cookbook by Hannah Glasse (1708–1770), first published in 1747. It was a bestseller for a century after its first publication, dominating the English-speaking market and making Glasse one of the most famous cookbook authors of her time. The book ran through at least 40 editions, many of which were copied without explicit author consent. It was published in Dublin from 1748, and in America from 1805.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a two-volume French cookbook written by Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, both from France, and Julia Child, from the United States. The book was written for the American market and published by Knopf in 1961 and 1970.
Joan Nathan is an American cookbook author and newspaper journalist. She has produced TV documentaries on the subject of Jewish cuisine. She was a co-founder of New York's Ninth Avenue Food Festival under then-Mayor Abraham Beame. The Jerusalem Post has called her the "matriarch of Jewish cooking".
Ambrose Heath was an English journalist and food writer. He authored many cookbooks.
Everything Tastes Better with Bacon: 70 Fabulous Recipes for Every Meal of the Day is a book about cooking with bacon written by author, food commentator and The Oregonian columnist Sara Perry. The book was published in the United States on May 1, 2002, by Chronicle Books, and in a French language edition in 2004 by Les Éditions de l'Homme in Montreal. In it, Perry describes her original concept of recipes combining sugar and bacon. Her book includes recipes for bacon-flavored dishes and desserts.
Deborah Madison is an American chef, food writer and cooking teacher. She has been called an expert on vegetarian cooking and her gourmet repertoire showcases fresh garden produce. Her work also highlights Slow Food, local foods and farmers' markets.
Tarla Dalal was an Indian food writer, chef, cookbook author and host of cooking shows. Her first cook book, The Pleasures of Vegetarian Cooking, was published in 1974. Since then, she wrote over 100 books and sold more than 10 million copies. She also ran the largest Indian food web site, and published a bi-monthly magazine, Cooking & More. Her cooking shows included The Tarla Dalal Show and Cook It Up With Tarla Dalal. Her recipes were published in about 25 magazines and tried in an estimated 120 million Indian homes.
Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes (2004) is author Maya Angelou's first cookbook. It pairs 28 essays written by Angelou with 73 recipes. Angelou got the title from an African-American spiritual. The book's audio version, which was produced at the same time as the print edition was published, was narrated by Angelou and included five cards created from recipes from the book.
Henrietta Stanley Dull was an American cook and food writer. She was a respected authority on the cuisine of the Southern United States, and her 1928 book Southern Cooking is regarded as a definitive work on the subject.
The Settlement Cook Book is a complete cookbook and guide to running a household, compiled by Lizzie Black Kander, first published in 1901. The compendium of recipes, cooking techniques, nutrition information, serving procedures and other useful information was intended to support young women raising their families. The context for the cookbook was the Settlement House of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which served the needs of recent immigrants including many Jewish families arriving from Europe.
Julia Turshen is an American cookbook author, food writer, cook, and food equity advocate. She lectures on food and home cooking and has published four solo books on the subject and has contributed to many others in collaboration or as a writer. She has collaborated with Gwyneth Paltrow, Dana Cowin, and Mario Batali. Her 2020 collaboration with Hawa Hassan, In Bibi's Kitchen, won the 2022 James Beard Foundation award for Best International Cookbook.
Molly Baz is an American cook, recipe developer, and food writer. She was a senior food editor at Bon Appétit magazine and appeared frequently in videos for the magazine's YouTube channel before leaving in 2020. Baz has published two cookbooks, Cook This Book (2021) and More Is More (2023), both of which are New York Times Best Sellers.
The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize culinary professionals in the United States. The awards recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists each year, and are generally scheduled around James Beard's May birthday.
The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize culinary professionals in the United States. The awards recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists each year, and are generally scheduled around James Beard's May birthday.
Louisa Shafia is an American chef and cookbook author. Her 2009 cookbook Lucid Food focuses on local and sustainable eating. The New Persian Kitchen (2013) features traditional Persian dishes as well as reinterpretations.
Cream of sorrel soup, also known as potage Germiny, crème Germiny, or potage crème d'oseille, is a traditional French springtime vegetable soup, often served cold. It can be made with French sorrel, common sorrel, or with foraged wild greens with similar flavor profiles, such as sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella), wood sorrel (Oxalis corniculata, Oxalis albicans), sour grass, or young leaves of dock, etc.