How to Cook a Wolf : Contentment, Family Menu Planning and Cooking Simply With Love

How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher, attacked my curiosity when I saw the title amongst the cookbooks at the local library.

(My faithful readers know that book titles have a strange power over me – sometimes with life changing results.)

First published in 1942, when wartime shortages were at their worst, the premise is learning to make due and, more importantly, be content with very little.

The “wolf” is a metaphor for the feelings of poverty, particularly the growling of an empty stomach.

Do you know anyone who lived through the Great Depression? Perhaps a mother or grandmother?

Reading this book is bringing back memories of my dear late grandmother-in-law, Trudy Seymour. My eyes well with tears even as I write her name. She was the queen of thriftiness. She scrimped, saved and rationed everything she had. Her basement was stocked with enough food to feed a small army, with everything from canned vegetables to Crystal Pepsi (that had been discontinued years before). She was also notably generous.

Maybe you have a Grandma Trudy in your life. This quote will make you love and appreciate them all the more:

There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far -brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And, that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.

For all the self-help books out there on the self-imposed woes of managing greed and excess, this book is convicting, refreshing and even freeing.

I’m only into the second chapter, “How to Be Sage Without Hemlock”, which deglamorizes the influence of *”slick magazines” on the housewife. Instead of making simple, hearty meals, wives are faced with the panic of trying to fashion a gourmet experience at every meal. Fisher writes about the expectation that it creates, even in our young children. She noted that children growing up with plenty say things like “what kind of pudding will we have after dinner?” as if they have a right to dessert.

She writes about meal planning rituals, “You read magazine articles filled with complicated charts and casual references to thiamin, riboflavin, non-organic nutritional nutritional essentials and International Units. You try to be serious about them all, and with a dictionary and a pencil you fill in at least the first week on a monthly chart, putting little circles, triangles and arrows for minerals and vitamins and such, until you see practically the same chart in a rival magazine and realize that it has switched symbols on you.”

While her words may seem harsh and even cynical, I do think they are a wake up call. How true are her words! I confess that I have been brought to tears while hiding behind my stacks of magazines and cookbooks, wishing that I had more free time. I do believe that women should strive for excellence as they serve their family – but as I read this, I am convicted that it may not have to involve a trip to both Wegmans and Trader Joe’s to find expensive, rare ingredients for each everyday meal on the menu.

Her answer is to create simple, healthy meals (for which she provides recipes throughout the book) and to have so much simple food on the table that people can concentrate on the fellowship and not on being amateur food critiques.

Better is a dish of vegetables where love is
Than a fattened ox served with hatred. – Proverbs 15:17

* This is unbelievably funny to me – at the same time I was writing this, my husband was upstairs making this comment on my Martha Stewart magazine collection. And no, dear, if you’re reading this, it does not necessarily follow from the above epiphany that I will be canceling my subscription any time soon ;-)

How often when they find a sage,
As sweet as Socrates or Plato;
They hand him hemlock for his wage,
Or bake him like a sweet potato!

-from Taking the Longer View by American humorist Don Marquis