9,60 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
'A passionate argument for the necessity of pleasure.' Guardian'Since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.'Written in 1942 to inspire courage in those daunted by wartime shortages, How to Cook a Wolf has continued to rally readers and cooks during times of both scarcity and plenty.With her trademark wit and warm wisdom, Fisher shares her timeless tips for keeping up spirits – and appetites – when ingredients are in short supply. Instead of regretting what we don't have, she teaches us how to savour what we do. Fisher also offers dozens of recipe ideas, from making soups and simple omelettes, to baking bread and sprucing up tinned food. Knowing that the last thing hungry people need are hints on cutting back and making do, Fisher gives us licence to dream, experiment and invent adventurous and delicious meals from whatever we can salvage from the back of the cupboard.How to Cook a Wolf shows us how to feed our hungers and nourish our souls, even when fear is in our hearts and the wolf is at the door.'Makes working out what to do with the last egg feel like a higher pursuit, rather than an act of desperation.' Guardian'Essential reading . . . Fisher's advice on attitude, thrift, and how to nourish yourself and others in a crisis is newly relevant.' Eater'Her fans include Yotam Ottolenghi, Ruth Reichl and Bee Wilson. Her voice finds an echo in the writings of Nigella Lawson, Samin Nosrat and more.' Ruby Tandoh, VICE'The greatest food writer who has ever lived.' Simon Schama
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Ähnliche
i
‘Makes working out what to do with the last egg feel like a higher pursuit, rather than an act of desperation.’ Guardian
‘Essential reading … Fisher’s advice on attitude, thrift, and how to nourish yourself and others in a crisis is newly relevant.’ Eater
‘Her fans include Yotam Ottolenghi, Ruth Reichl and Bee Wilson. Her voice finds an echo in the writings of Nigella Lawson, Samin Nosrat and more.’ Ruby Tandoh, VICE
‘The greatest food writer who has ever lived.’ Simon Schama
‘Poet of the appetites.’ John Updike
Also by M.F.K. Fisher
Serve it Forth
Consider the Oyster
The Gastronomical Me
Here Let us Feast: A Book of Banquets
Not Now But Now
The Physiology of Taste (as translator)
An Alphabet for Gourmets
A Cordial Water
Map of Another Town
With Bold Knife and Fork
Among Friends
A Considerable Town
As They Were
Sister Age
Long Ago in France
The Measure of Her Powers: An M. F. K. Fisher Reader
The Theoretical Foot
iii
iv
For Lawrence Paul
vi
Contents
A Note from the Publishers
How to Cook a Wolf was first published in 1942, when wartime shortages were at their worst. It was revised by the author in 1951, by the addition of copious marginal notes and footnotes and a special section of additional recipes. These have now been incorporated in their proper places in the text, and are enclosed in brackets, as is, for an example, the Introduction to the Revised Edition which follows.
The Publishers, 1951
The reader is required to note that the recipes within have not been tested or updated for the contemporary kitchen or palate, and some should be approached with caution. In the chapter ‘How to Make a Great Show’, the recipes for Mouth Wash and Monkey Soap call for the use of borax, which can be toxic and may pose a risk to fertility and pregnancy. We would advise against attempting these recipes.
The Publishers, 2020
Introduction to the Revised Edition
[It is hard to know whether war or peace makes the greater changes in our vocabularies, both of the tongue and of the spirit.
Certain it is, however, that in less than ten years this book about living as decently as possible with the ration cards and blackouts and like miseries of World War II has assumed some of the characteristics of quaintness. It has become, in short, in so short a time, a kind of period piece. In its own way it is as curious, as odd, as any fat old goldribbed volume called, a hundred years ago instead of nine or ten, Ladies’ Indispensable Assistant and Companion, One of the Best Systems of Cookery Ever Published for Sister, Mother, and Wife …
Of course, it is difficult, in spite of the obvious changes in our physical problems since How to Cook a Wolf was first published in 1942, to say truthfully and exactly when we are at war.xii
Now we are free of ration cards (it was shocking, the other day, to hear that after almost twelve years gas rationing had come to an end in England. What a long time! Too long …): no more blue and red tokens, no more flimsy stamps to tear out or not tear out.
We can buy as much porterhouse and bourbon and powdered sugar as our purses will allow, given the rise of almost one hundred per cent in the cost of such gastronomical amenities.
We need not worry, temporarily at least, about basic cupboards for blackouts … while at the same time we try not to think, even superficially, about what and when and how and where to nourish survivors of the next kind of bomb.
Thus stated, the case for Peace is feeble.
One less chilling aspect of the case for War ii is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about daily living which is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words. (In one week from the writing of this cautious statement, or one hour from the final printing of it, double ridicule can be its lot. Are weapons ever cold?)
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 xiiigood, 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.
War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof that we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist. If this book, written in one wartime, still goes on helping to solve that unavoidable problem, it is worth reading again, I think, no matter what its quaint superficiality, its sometimes unintentionally grim humour.
That is why I have added to it, copiously. Not everything new in it is purely practical, of course. But even the wolf, temporarily appeased, cannot live on bread alone.
(And that is why I have added even more, I have sneaked other recipes into the book. Some are hopelessly extravagant (16 eggs!) and some are useful and some are funny, and one is actually for bread that even a wolf would live on.
These ‘extra’ recipes are culinary rules to be followed with not a thought of the budget, not even half an ear cocked towards that sniffing at the door. I know, because I know, that one good whiff from any of these dishes will send the beast cringing away, in a kind of extrasensory and ultra-moral embarrassment.)]
M. F. K. Fisher, 1951
xiv
xv
There’s a whining at the threshold,
There’s a scratching at the floor.
To Work! To Work! In Heaven’s name!
The wolf is at the door!
C. P. S. Gilman
How to Be Sage Without Hemlock
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!
Don Marquis, Taking the Longer View
In spite of all the talk and study about our next years, and all the silent ponderings about what lies within them for our sons [Why only sons? Since I wrote this I have acquired two daughters, and they too shape the pattern’s pieces, and the texture of my belief!] it seems plain to us that many things are wrong in the present ones which can be, must be, changed. Our texture of belief has great holes in it. Our pattern lacks pieces.
One of the most obvious fallacies is that of what we should eat. Wise men forever have known that a nation lives on what its body assimilates, as well as on what its mind acquires as knowledge. Now, when the hideous necessity of 4the war machine takes steel and cotton and humanity, our own private personal secret mechanism must be stronger, for selfish comfort as well as for the good of the ideals we believe we believe in.
One of the stupidest things in an earnest but stupid school of culinary thought is that each of the three daily meals should be ‘balanced’. [This still goes on in big-magazine advertising, but there seems less and less insistence on it in real life: baby doctors and even gynaecologists admit that most human bodies choose their own satisfactions, dietetically and otherwise.]
In the first place, not all people need or want three meals each day. Many of them feel better with two, or one and one-half, or five.
Next, and most important perhaps, ‘balance’ is something that depends entirely on the individual. One man, because of his chemical set-up, may need many proteins. Another, more nervous perhaps [or even more phlegmatic], may find meats and eggs and cheeses an active poison, and have to live with what grace he can on salads and cooked squash.
Of course, where countless humans are herded together, as in military camps or schools or prisons, it is necessary to strike what is ironically called the happy medium. In this case what kills the least number with the most ease is the chosen way.
And, in most cases now, the happy medium, gastronomically, is known as the balanced diet.
A balanced diet in almost any well-meaning institution is a plan for meals which means that at each of the three 5daily feedings the patient is given a set amount of carbohydrates and protein and starch, and a certain amount of International Units, and a certain number of vitamins in correct ratio to the equally certain amount of minerals, and so on and so forth.
What it boils down to [an unhappy if accidental play on words: the trouble with almost all cooking is the boiling down thereof, and the resultant dearth of gastronomical guts] is that for breakfast you have fruit or a fruit juice, hot or cold cereal, eggs and cured pork in any of about four ways, bread or toast, and coffee (or tea, or milk). For the noon meal you eat soup, potato, meat, two vegetables or one and a ‘salad’, a pudding or cake of some sort, and tea or coffee or milk. And for supper, to continue the drearily familiar song, you probably eat soup again, eggs again, a vegetable again, and stewed fruit … and tea, coffee, or milk.
Of course, this sad rigmarole varies a little in every institution, but it can be considered either a proof of democracy or a shocking human blindness, that intrinsically it is the same at the Arizona Biltmore and your county hospital. [Of course, oysters or caviar before the soup (consommé double); beef filet grilled with pâté de foie gras, instead of eggs; a cloudlight pile of zucchini Florentine instead of the respectable peas-and-carrots of Old Watanooga … and compote de fruits instead of stewed prunes … and it is still a meal of ghastly good balance!]
One of the saving graces of the less-monied people of the world has always been, theoretically, that they were forced to eat more unadulterated, less dishonest food than 6the rich-bitches. It begins to look as if that were a lie. In our furious efforts to prove that all men are created equal we encourage our radios, our movies, above all our weekly and monthly magazines, to set up a fantastic ideal in the minds of family cooks, so that everywhere earnest eager women are whipping themselves and their budgets to the bone to provide three ‘balanced’ meals a day for their men and children.
It is true, without argument of any kind, that as a people we know much more about correct human nutrition than we did even a few years ago. But we are somewhat confused by all the exciting names [riboflavin, monosodium glutamate, arsofinibarborundum … all fine things, when used with a modicum of non-hysteria …] and more so by the solemn exhortations of the ‘food editors’ of all the slick magazines we read to improve ourselves.
We want, and not only because we are told to but because we sense instinctively that it is right, to give Mortimer III the vitamins and minerals he should absorb in order to be a fine sturdy little Mortimer indeed. But what a rat race it is: formulas, schedules, piles of dishes, little dabs of this and that three times every monotonously regular day! And Mortimer III rebels sometimes (‘Poached egg again? I had one yesterday!’) and sometimes so does his stomach, because how can you know that tomato juice and toast play hob together in certain insides?
This bugbear of meal-balancing is hard not only on the wills and wishes of the great American family, but is pure hell on the pocketbook. There are countless efficient-looking 7pages in ‘home magazines’ each month, marked into twenty-eight or so squares with a suggested menu for each meal of the week, and then one supposedly tempting dish to prepare every day. The lead usually cries, ‘Let’s economise, Mothers! Here is how you can do it for only 39¢ per person! Try it, and help Uncle Sam!’ [Not today, you can’t! Not if you follow the balanced-meal plan, you can’t! Not even if you buy it wholesale and cook it for fifteen people at a time, you can’t! I know. I tried it. I went to auctions for unwanted potatoes, for dented cans … All I got was more red in my budget book and more grey in my hair.]
And then you start reading the familiar old routine: BREAKFAST, fruit juice, hot or cold cereal, scrambled eggs with bacon, buttered toast, coffee or tea or milk; NOON-DAY MEAL, tomato soup, beef patties, mashed potatoes, lima beans, Waldorf sal … but why go on? It is familiar enough.
It is disheartening, too. Now, of all times in our history, we should be using our minds as well as our hearts in order to survive … to live gracefully if we live at all. And people who fought to know better keep telling us to go on as our mothers did, when it should be obvious to the zaniest of us that something was wrong with that plan, gastronomically if not otherwise. [It may not have seemed wrong then. Now we have polio, let us admit. But fifty years ago babies died of Summer Complaint. We progress.]
No. We must change. If the people set aside to instruct us cannot help, we must do it ourselves. We must do our own balancing, according to what we have learnt and also, for a change, according to what we have thought.8
Given that Mortimer should eat fruit, vegetables, a starch, and perhaps meat or another protein every day. (Almost any good dietician will tell you that a normal ‘rounded’ food plan includes all the necessary vitamins without recourse to pills and elixirs.) Given also that Mortimer is in average physical fitness. (Otherwise he and you should be guided by a doctor, who might tell you to stop all fruit, or even milk, for a time …)
Then, instead of combining a lot of dull and sometimes actively hostile foods into one routine meal after another, three times a day and every day, year after year, in the earnest hope that you are being a good provider, try this simple plan: Balance the day, not each meal in the day. [This is a very solemn footnote, and if I could I would, a hundred and eight years from now and with serene confidence, make another footnote to this footnote. It is true, and true things are worth repeating, perhaps ad nauseam because all truth smacks of smugness, but never to the point of ridiculosity.]
Try it. It is easy, and simple, and fun, and – perhaps most important – people like it.
At first older ones who have been conditioned through many unthinking years will wonder where the four or five dull sections of each dinner have gone to, and will raise their heads like well-trained monkeys after the meat course, asking automatically but without much real enthusiasm what kind of pudding there will be tonight.
The best answer to that is to have such good food, and such generous casseroles and bowls and platters of it, that there cannot be even a conditioned appetite for more, after the real sensuous human one is satisfied.9
Your plan, say, for Mortimer as well as for the others who depend on you for nourishment, includes one meal of starches, one of vegetables or fruits, and one of meat. There are amplifications and refinements to each, naturally [There are indeed many: some human beings bog down with too much meat or too much starch, for instance. Such peculiarities must of course be noted by a loving provider.] but in the main they can be thus simplified.
Breakfast, then, can be toast. It can be piles of toast, generously buttered, and a bowl of honey or jam, and milk for Mortimer and coffee for you. You can be lavish because the meal is so inexpensive. You can have fun, because there is no trotting around with fried eggs and mussy dishes and grease in the pan and a lingeringly unpleasant smell in the air.
Or, on cold mornings, you can have all you want of hot cereal … not a pale pabulum made of emasculated wheat, but some brown nutty savorous porridge. Try it with maple syrup and melted butter instead of milk and sugar, once in a while. Or put some raisins or chopped dates in it. It is a sturdy dish, and better than any conventional mélange of tomato juice and toast and this and that and the other, both outside and within you.
If you want Mortimer to drink a fruit juice [I continue to be astonished at the number of people who automatically down a glass of fresh fruit juice, especially before the unavoidable kick of morning coffee. I believe firmly that the combination is pure poison, according to the chemical balance of the one man who, along with several million others, considers it his meat.] you can almost certainly arrange to have it given to 10him in the middle of the morning or afternoon, when it will not war with the starches in his own middle, and will give him an unadulterated and uncluttered lift.
For lunch, make an enormous salad, in the summer, or a casserole of vegetables, or a heartening and ample soup [… with hot tea for the oldsters, and milk at will for everyone … and plenty of good buttered toast]. That is all you need, if there is enough of it.
And for dinner, if you want to stick solemnly to your ‘balanced day’, have a cheese soufflé and a light salad, or, if you are in funds, a broiled rare steak and a beautiful platter of sliced herb-besprinkled ripe tomatoes.
That, with some red wine or ale if you like it [and a loaf of honest bread, with or without butter, and toasted or not] and good coffee afterwards, is a meal that may startle your company at first with its simplicity but will satisfy their hunger and their sense of fitness and of balance, all at once. [An unnecessary peptic goad, but a very nice one now and then, is a good soft stinky cheese, a Camembert or Liederkranz, with what is left of the bread, the wine, the hunger.]
And later, when they begin to think of the automatic extravagance of most of our menus, and above all of the ghastly stupid monotony of them, they too will cast off many of their habits, and begin like you to eat the way they want to, instead of the way their parents and grandparents taught them. They will be richer, and healthier and perhaps, best of all, their palates will awaken to new pleasures, or remember old ones. All those things are devoutly to be wished for, now especially.
How to Catch the Wolf
A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aristocracy
Once during the last war [‘The last war’ means something different now. I was thirty-ish when I wrote this, thinking of 1917 and thereabouts. Now I am infinitely and aeons more than forty-ish, and my mind says ‘next’ sooner than ‘last’ …] when rationing of sugar and butter had been in effect just long enough to throw all the earnest young housewives into a proper tizzy, my grandmother sat knitting and listening to a small excited group of them discuss with proper pride their various ways of making cake economically. Each felt that her own discovery was the best, of course, and insisted that brown sugar or molasses-with-soda was much better than white, or that if you used enough spices you could substitute bacon fat for butter, or that eggs were quite unnecessary.
Finally my grandmother folded her knitting and then her hands, which was unusual for her because she believed that 12no real lady’s fingers should ever be idle.
‘Your conversation is very entertaining, indeed,’ she said with somewhat more than her ordinary dryness. [People tell me that Grandmother could not possibly have been as unpleasant as I always picture her. Only a psychiatrist would know …] ‘It interests me especially, my dears, because after listening to it this afternoon I see that ever since I was married, well over fifty years ago, I have been living on a war budget without realising it! I never knew before that using common sense in the kitchen was stylish only in emergencies.’
My grandmother’s observation need not have been so sardonically phrased (from what I have heard about her she felt it a sign of weakness to be anything but firmly disagreeable most of the time), but probably it was true then … and it is even more appropriate now. [As well as now, eight years later and in so-called Peace Time!]
Every slick magazine in the country is filled with full-page advertisements suggesting that all Americans ‘try the new thrill of thriftier meat-cuts’, and home economics editors in the women’s journals are almost incoherent over the exciting discovery that dollars can and should buy more. Vitamins are written and talked about with eager – if at times somewhat confused – enthusiasm, and the old saw that Europe could live on what we throw away rears its inane head in every editorial column. [The word inane seems crude and bloodless here, applied to such painful truth. All over the world great piles of wasted potatoes and coffee and tender piglets and dried milk make that truth more shameful, in our economy as well as our hearts.]13
In other words, not all women are as sensible as my grandmother … until they have to be. Then, I believe, after the first spate of eager bewilderment they can be fully as practical as she, and certainly a lot less grim about it.
It is true that, when the wolf first proves he is actually there, you feel a definite sense of panic. ‘To work! To work! In heaven’s name!’
You talk with your friends. They are either as bewildered as you, or full of what sound like ghastly schemes for living with three other congenial couples and buying all their food from the city dump.
You talk with an older woman, and usually she writes you a long list of recipes full of eggs and cream, both of which give your husband hay fever even if you could afford them, which looks more and more doubtful.
You read magazine articles filled with complicated charts and casual references to thiamin, riboflavin, non-organic 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 realise that it has switched the symbols on you. [I don’t think we get as excited about such schemes as we used to. Perhaps that is a bad sign: pills and injections can’t do everything!]
Out of the murk of misinformation and enthusiasm that bedims even the advertisements in the first months of war (one double-page spread used the words thrifty and 14thriftier seventeen times, with an almost breathless sense of discovery!), and the monotony of the articles about what fun it is to buy cheap food and less of it, a better knowledge of each dollar’s purchasing power is bound to come.
Women who never thought one way or another about such things before, are going to find that fuel and light, even if they have enough money to pay for them, may be scarce and impossible to hoard, and after the first sense of irritation will learn to cook well and intelligently and economically with very little gas or electricity. [Present-day pottery and kitchenware, available in peacetime, are a wonderful investment for wartime economy. Used intelligently, it makes something as simple as boiling an egg cost half as much as it would in a thin, badly designed utensil, even though a three-minute egg still takes about as long today as it did in 1722.] Magazines give a great many good hints about such thriftiness, usually, and so do other people like my grandmother, and so, in the end, does your own good sense.
It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises. [Some of them are merely funny, like the carefully sealed cans filled with milk-solids, nitrous-oxide gas and suchlike, which spit out a ‘dessert topping’ vaguely reminiscent of whipped cream when held correctly downwards, and a fine social catastrophe when sprayed, heedlessly upright, about the room.]
How to Distribute Your Virtue
Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection.
Edmund Burke, Letters to a Noble Lord, 1796
Almost all people, whether they are potential or actual grandparents, have practised certain forms of economy in their day, even if they are not like my own grandmother who practised it her whole life. Sometimes their systems have a strange sound indeed, after the thin days are past and they can look back with a perspective which is impossible while the wolf seems actually at the door.
I think especially of one man, moderately famous now as a deliverer of weighty papers before weightier minds (the kind of papers, and minds, that are filled with abstruse puns in nine languages, at least five of which are dead). [The best talker I ever heard once said to me, ‘Never ruin a good story by sticking to the truth.’ That may be why this one, essentially as it appears here, has been read in somewhat 16more embroidered versions, stitched both by me and by my various loyal friends. The famous-deliverer-of-weighty-papers himself, wiser if no better nourished than so long ago, prefers this version.] When he was working on his doctorate in a small French university, he discovered the rather macabre delights of a poverty which could have been depressing to an older tireder man but was gleeful and exciting to him.
He stopped shaving, because he never had any hot water, or sharp razors, or soap, and finally not even a mirror. The result was a fine Old Testament beaver, full of genius.
He bought food at the market on Mondays and Thursdays, after his credit ran out at a succession of lower-than-lowest-grade boarding houses, and cooked on a one-burner gas plate which was, for some reason, in the outside privy of his mean lodgings.
He began by making himself fairly neat, well-ordered little meals. But washing dishes with no water was a problem, so he found himself using fewer and fewer plates. He was tempted to throw them all away and simply fish things out of the stew-pot with his fingers, but he sensed that man must keep a few barriers between himself and savagery, and compromised on one large soup dish and one spoon.
For several weeks he ate thus in solitary manliness, so pleased with himself and the free good life he was living that he never noticed how ugly and smelly and surly his room and his landlady were. [Good honest stew is better the second day, and better yet the third. But on the fourth, unless the weather be cool and right …]17
Finally, however, inertia and a desire perhaps for complete functionalism overcame him, and he found that rather than ask or hunt for water for his one dish and his one spoon he was eating whatever was in or on them and then spending several minutes licking them clean, very slowly and meticulously, so that they shone and twinkled as much as the cheapest ware can manage to.
