Английская Википедия:How to Cook a Wolf

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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.Шаблон:Sfnp 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.Шаблон:Sfnp 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."Шаблон:Sfnp The revision "quietly spoke out against the over-indulgences of the postwar years,"Шаблон:Sfnp and included new material on feeding children, an experience that Fisher had not yet had when writing the first edition.Шаблон:Sfnp

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.Шаблон:Sfnp Five chapters were included in posthumous compilation of Fisher's work called The Measure of Her Powers. In 1988, the now-defunct North Point Press reprinted How to Cook a Wolf.

Both the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 and the COVID-19 pandemic led to a resurgence of interest in Wolf. 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." 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 Шаблон:Ill."Шаблон:Sfnp 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."

Description

Wolf may be the "best known" 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." Nominally about food, home economics, thrift, and preparedness, How to Cook a Wolf has been described "barely a cookbook" and "part experimental cookbook, part 'escape reading material,' and part war protest."Шаблон:Sfnp

The book is dedicated to Fisher's friend Lawrence Bachmann, who reportedly came up with the title.Шаблон:Sfnp The wolf in question "is the one at the door," 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."Шаблон:Sfnp 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."Шаблон:Sfnp

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.Шаблон:Sfnp 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.Шаблон:Sfnp 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.

The book contains 73 recipes,Шаблон:Sfnp 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..." The book's adaptable prescriptions are derived from Fisher's precept that there's "no such thing as a new recipe." 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." 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."

Per Humanities magazine, "The book is really a literary rather than a culinary accomplishmentШаблон:Mdashultimately, 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."Шаблон:Sfnp 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."Шаблон:Sfnp

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."

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." A latter-day practitioner of a similar ideology, Novella Carpenter, references Fisher's dictums on wastefulness in Farm City.

Cherry Pickman wrote a series of poems with titles "stolen" from How to Cook a Wolf. 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." 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."

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

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".

Table of contents

How to Cook a Wolf

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."Шаблон:Sfnp 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."Шаблон:Sfnp
How to Boil Water	SoupШаблон:Sfnp	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,Шаблон:Efn "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."Шаблон:Sfnp
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 foodШаблон:Sfnp
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'")
Conclusion

See also

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References

Sources

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External links

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