‘Essential” has become the most wearing word of the lockdown. The order is to only leave your house for “essential supplies”, but what counts as essential? Every venture into public, every social contact, comes with the possibility of spreading death or bringing it back with you. “Popping to the shop” is obscene, impossible. The way of eating that I’ve learned as a comfortably-off adult – a casual, desire-led, last-minute way of eating, where I could decide what I fancied for dinner at 6 and have shopped for and cooked it by 7 – no longer works.
This is hardly the first era to be forced through such an adjustment. “There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the last war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the 20s. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution,” wrote MFK Fisher in How to Cook a Wolf. First published in 1942, Fisher’s cookbook was reissued after the war with Fisher’s later commentary on her work incorporated in square brackets; in one of my favourite bits, she rebukes her past self for speaking only of her sons and neglecting the daughters.
How to Cook a Wolf has a simple, stark purpose: to provide “a streamlined answer to the pressing problem of how to exist the best possible way for the least amount of money.” The wolf of the title is the one at the door. When I first read it, about four years ago, the message seemed quaint – not a practical guide, but a reminder to enjoy my own good fortune. I’ve never cooked from it. It lives on my bookcase, rather than on the kitchen shelf with my oil-splashed Delia and broken-backed Slater.
But now, as I peer into my cupboards and calculate how long my stash of tins will last, I go back to Fisher’s book as a supplicant. Teach me how to live this way. This time, I’m listening. Of course, the idea that my privations match the ones she was writing for is itself a mark of my nonchalant extravagance. Her chapter headings include How to Be Cheerful Though Starving and the striking How to Stay Alive, which consists of directions for making a kind of “sludge” that Fisher reckoned could feed one person for a week at a cost of 50 cents.
I will not be cooking sludge. (Yet.) But Fisher’s practicality makes her a reassuring companion at the stove. “Use as many fresh things as you can, always, and then trust to luck and your blackout cupboard and what you have decided, inside yourself, about the dignity of man,” she writes. This sturdy advice makes working out what to do with the last egg feel like a higher pursuit, rather than an access of desperation. She does not counsel us to eat offal out of parsimony, but because we must “savour to the fullest the beasts we have killed” (though I imagine she drew the line some way before bat).
How to Cook a Wolf is a passionate argument for the necessity of pleasure. Even sludge, Fisher claims, can be made “delicious” (if less economical) by frying it in slices. And things ought to be delicious whenever possible: “Since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with grace and gusto.” To eat with delight, she says, “is not wicked sensuality”, but positively moral. It bespeaks a “thoughtful system of deliberate choice” allowing one to “weigh values, not only sensual but spiritual.”
This philosophy is deeply welcome at time when “nice things” are being treated as ethically suspect. Is it acceptable to buy lemons during a national crisis? After all, you could live on sludge. But, objects Fisher, if you can eat well and choose not to, you are hardly living at all. When we “nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy and ever-increasing enjoyment”, she writes, it is a way to “assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains”. That, too, is essential.
