In 1942, when wartime shortages were at their worst, the legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote “How to Cook a Wolf.”
Part cookbook, part essay, this slim volume is an instruction manual on getting through the “thin days,” a primer on keeping the proverbial wolf from the door. Fisher once described it as a book “about living as decently as possible with ration cards and blackouts and like miseries of World War II.”
Toward that end, she advised readers on such matters as cooking food in a haybox to conserve fuel, adding bread crumbs to eggs to make them “go a lot further,” and reducing the sugar in cake recipes by adding bicarbonate of soda.
We make no such sacrifices today. We can have our war and eat our cake, too! And we can bake it with a full complement of sugar.
It’s so interesting how different this war is from WWII… (See Bill Maher’s excellent book, When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden for more on this topic.)
mwaddell.com 