![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert the reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war's fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.
This unique and lovely book has a very unusual pedigree. It was first published in 1942, as a book on cooking during shortages, rationing, and other problems of war. It was then added to extensively in 1954, during the Cold War, without changing or omitting a word of the original text, but instead adding notes in brackets.
This method creates a double period piece, a record of Fisher's changing ideas and new experiences, reflections on times past, new recipes, and a number of hilarious bits in which she admits that she has no idea what she was talking about in the original, like an original bit where she suggests using leftover or canned rice followed by a bracketed addendum where she wonders what she was thinking and whether canned rice exists or has ever existed.
Some of my favorite parts were Fisher's account of her aunt who called headcheese (itself a euphemism) by the polite alternative of "cold shape," the absolutely hilarious story of how we should always trust cats to steer us clear of smoked salmon that will be unchanged and bright orange till doomsday, and the character portrait of Sue, who foraged hundreds of types of sage in the California hills and dug potatoes from neighbors' patches in the dead of night.
Like all the best period pieces, it's both a record of what used to be before things changed and an aching reminder of what hasn't changed. I hope none of us ever need to attempt her life-sustaining "sludge" or do strange and ingenious things to cook food with the minimum use of heating oil, but the spirit of seeking comfort and even coziness in a time of danger is still relevant.
How to Cook a Wolf
This unique and lovely book has a very unusual pedigree. It was first published in 1942, as a book on cooking during shortages, rationing, and other problems of war. It was then added to extensively in 1954, during the Cold War, without changing or omitting a word of the original text, but instead adding notes in brackets.
This method creates a double period piece, a record of Fisher's changing ideas and new experiences, reflections on times past, new recipes, and a number of hilarious bits in which she admits that she has no idea what she was talking about in the original, like an original bit where she suggests using leftover or canned rice followed by a bracketed addendum where she wonders what she was thinking and whether canned rice exists or has ever existed.
Some of my favorite parts were Fisher's account of her aunt who called headcheese (itself a euphemism) by the polite alternative of "cold shape," the absolutely hilarious story of how we should always trust cats to steer us clear of smoked salmon that will be unchanged and bright orange till doomsday, and the character portrait of Sue, who foraged hundreds of types of sage in the California hills and dug potatoes from neighbors' patches in the dead of night.
Like all the best period pieces, it's both a record of what used to be before things changed and an aching reminder of what hasn't changed. I hope none of us ever need to attempt her life-sustaining "sludge" or do strange and ingenious things to cook food with the minimum use of heating oil, but the spirit of seeking comfort and even coziness in a time of danger is still relevant.
How to Cook a Wolf
