What I Learned from MFK Fisher about Liv

What I Learned from M.F.K. Fisher About Living After 9/11
Author(s): Krishnendu Ray
Source: Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Summer 2002), pp. 1517
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/gfc.2002.2.3.15 .
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a n n i v e r s a r y | krishnendu ray

This is classic M.F.K. Fisher—pleasure tinged with wistful awareness, for which the Heian Japanese had a phrase:
mono no aware, the ahhness! of beautiful things, like cherry
blossom strewn in spring or falling leaf in autumn. Death is
never far behind. Deprivation, too, is part of human experience. Fisher unhinges the stultifying relationship between
pleasure and abundance, between happiness and simple
optimism. Hers is a tender ethic and aesthetic of scarcity, one
that tells us it is okay to be poor and eat organ meats, cheap
cuts, and even cheaper substitutes, such as bread crumbs
in scrambled eggs.
By the end of the twentieth century, we as Americans
had come to assume that we would be ever safer, richer,
and prettier, into the everlasting future. According to the
New York Times, in the year 2000 seventy-six percent of
our college students assumed that they would one day be
millionaires! Many of us believed that the poor are poor

because they are bereft of virtue. We were told a thousand
tales, if not of rags to riches, then of garage to penthouse.
What optimism!
Fisher reminds us of a world with limits, of the possibility of pleasure without mindless optimism and cheerfulness.
Life ends in death, we all know; the point is to make it as
enjoyable as possible within the limits of disease, poverty,
and difficulty. She inculcates a deep-seated humanism
towards the poor and the unfortunate, which every great
religion merely adumbrates. At the end of a gorgeous recipe
for bread she says, “[p]erhaps this war will make it simpler
for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we
came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps,
even, we will remember how to make good bread again.”3
Her menus are filled with soups, stews, breads, and pastas (spelled “pastes” because the thing was so foreign that
no standardized English spelling had been established yet,
just as haiku was spelled as “hokku”4). She repeatedly
returns to comfort foods. Sometimes it is not the food itself
but the making of it that is the source of comfort. The routine, the control over a recipe, the predictability, and the
stability that the preparation promises are what draw us back

If, with the wolf at the door, there is not very much to eat, the child
should know it, but not oppressively. Rather, he should be encouraged
to savor every possible bite with one eye on its agreeable nourishment
and the other on its fleeting but valuable esthetic meaning, so that
twenty years later, maybe, he can think with comfortable delight of the
little brown toasted piece of bread he ate with you once in 1942, just
before that apartment was closed, and you went away to camp.
It was a nice piece of toast, with butter on it. You sat in the sun
under the pantry window, and the little boy gave you a bite, and for
both of you the smell of nasturtiums warming in the April air would be
mixed forever with the savor between your teeth of melted butter and
toasted bread, and the knowledge that although there might not be any
more, you had shared that piece with full consciousness to both sides,
instead of the shy awkward pretense of not being hungry.2

gastronomica—the journal of food and culture, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 15–17, issn 1529–3262.

©

2002 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved.

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15
GASTR O N O M I CA

In 1942 m.f.k. fisher wrote How to Cook a Wolf. She
had just lost the love of her life, Dillwyn Parrish, for whom
she had abandoned her husband. In August 1941 Parrish,
suffering from Buerger’s disease—a debilitating illness that
was a source of unceasing pain—committed suicide. On
December 7 of that year, Fisher faced the collective trauma
of Pearl Harbor. There couldn’t have been a worse year to
write a book. Then again, perhaps there couldn’t have been
a better year to take stock, amidst the “howling, hideous,
frightful grief.”
In 2002, we are there once again, with “holes in the
texture of our belief.”
How to Cook a Wolf, a book of essays on scarcity,

rationing, and human dignity, was written in the midst of
World War ii by a woman who is to food writing what Julia
Child is to American cooking. Fisher was a pioneer who
almost single-handedly invented a genre of writing and a
prose style that the rest of us have sought to imitate ever
since. The alleged point of the book is to show us “how to
practice true economy” in the context of food rationing
(that is, with the wolf—a metaphor for hunger and danger—
at the door).1 Fisher manages to show us how to do that
with both pleasure and grace. She writes:

S U M M E R 2002

What I Learned from
M.F.K. Fisher About Living After 9/11

to slow-cooked, familiar foods during moments of crisis. As
Regina Schrambling, a food critic for the New York Times,
put it in the days following September 11:
…those three hours of putting one step after another led to a kind of

serenity, the feeling that no matter what was happening outside my
kitchen, I had complete control over one dish, in one copper pot, on
one burner…But cooking also lets you cede control, if that’s what you
need. There’s a reason they call it following a recipe. Sometimes it just
feels calming to know that a cake needs exactly one teaspoon of salt
and no less than half a pound of butter.5

In Fisher’s eyes sociability is central to any comfort.
Assuaging our desire for desserts in a time of scarcity, especially of butter and sugar, she writes, “Probably one of the
best ends to a supper is nothing at all” as long as we can
share a cup of coffee with a friend or two.6 Under social
pressure to abstain from alcoholic drinks, she states with
characteristic ebullience towards the slow, sensual pleasures
of the table that
One of the best antidotes [to feeling low]…is to decide the person you
like best to drink with and see if you can arrange to have a pre-dinner
nip with her or him…alone…to sit back and absorb a little quick relaxation from a glass and then eat, quaffing immortality and joy. He will
if possible be your husband or your own true love, and you will find in
this sudden quiet and peacefulness something that has sometimes

S U M M E R 2002

seemed much too far from you both, lately.7

GASTR O N O M I CA

16

It is not surprising that there is a certain quaintness
to Fisher’s language, given that we are six decades away
from her. Sometimes you can hear it in the telling poverty
around her, a poverty that preceded food stamps. She
writes, “The first thing to do, if you have absolutely no
money, is to borrow some. Fifty cents will be enough, and
should last you from three days to a week, depending on
how luxurious are your tastes.”8 She then proceeds to allocate the money thus: fifteen cents for ground beef, ten
cents for electricity/gas, ten cents for ground whole cereal,
and twenty-five cents for wilted one-day-old vegetables—a
bunch of carrots, a head of cabbage, some tomatoes, onions,
celery, and garlic—all to be turned into a nutritious mess.

Aptly named “sludge,” this was not dignified food, but
survival food. Do it if you have to.
This was also an age before widespread refrigeration.
You might have to keep eggs in a gelatinous “water glass”
(“the jellied chemical made a sucking noise as I spooned
out the thickly coated hideous stuff”9), and give up ice
with your whiskey (it tastes better anyway), and depend on

canned vegetables. “Canned vegetable are usually good,”
Fisher writes, “and often have more of the all-necessary
vitamins and minerals in them than do the same vegetables
cooked at home.”10 Although industrial canning did make a
greater variety of foods available to most Americans and
evened out the year nutritionally, processed goods were also
considered modern and stylish at the time. “Frozen vegetables are very good,” Fisher continues. If her suggestions
appear wrong-headed in our eyes today, this is actually an
indication of how far we have come in terms of affluence
and access to food. She also gives recipes for soaps, and
mouthwashes, and pre-feminist advice on how to keep your
hair clean with a scarf so that you can still “lure the wolf”—

the wolf that was now morphing into a man rather than
being an image of hunger and dismay.
Then there is her exquisite use of language. One essay
begins: “Probably one of the most private things in the world
is an egg until it is broken.”11 Or elsewhere: “Now, when
the hideous necessity of the 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 ideas we believe we believe in.”12 (italics mine)
Quintessential M.F.K. Fisher. Repetition deepens reflection.
The “ideas we believe we believe in.” Instead of delivering
a pompous declamation of life, liberty, etc., Fisher invites
us to think. What are these ideas we believe that we believe
in? Do we really believe in them? What does it mean to
believe in them? At a moment of the greatest danger to
the United States since the Civil War, M.F.K. Fisher could
still encourage her readers not to depend on clichés of
conformity, but to think their way through the difficulty, be
idiosyncratic, and challenge the received wisdom.
That goes hand-in-hand with her deep suspicion of
experts, especially nutritionists and home economists, who

were endlessly preaching about “balanced diets.”13 She does
not dismiss their advice but cautions us against excessive
dependence on the expertise of others. Be cautious, listen
to them, but eventually make your own judgment using
common sense. Do not panic and start hoarding a million
things, do not worry yourself to death about whether your
family is getting enough calories and riboflavins and minerals and vitamins. Do the sensible thing with balance and
judgment. At the end of it, experts cannot solve your existential problems of health and disease, safety and risk, life
and death, pleasure and pain. Learn to live with them: with
humor, with irony, without regret. “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.”14

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Even Fisher’s patriotism is gentle. She refuses to
demean the putative enemy. After a robust recipe for a
minestrone she writes:

There are many variations of any recipe for a soup which includes
chopped vegetables. They depend on the ingenuity of the cook and the
size of the purse…not to mention a few other things like climate and
war, and even political leanings. (I know several earnest thoughtful
women who would rather see their children peaked than brew something with the foreign name minestrone, because in this year of 1942

as surely as any sad wretch kept alive in a concentration
camp on this soup and bread.”20 Fisher is never overly
didactic. Speeches are typically cheered or ignored. They
seldom resonate with a deeper truth. In contrast, a wellcrafted allusion can reverberate in the reader’s soul. Fisher
is the master of the elusive, embedded critique. Sometimes
the barb is so gentle that one cannot feel a thing other
than a lingering unsettlement.
Finally, Fisher concludes, when you are tired of all the
scrimping and saving and discipline and restraint,

the United States is at war with Italy. There is a fundamental if tiring
truth about all this, and you and I can only hope that right will conquer

throw discretion into the laundry bag, put candles on the table, and for

over might before too long.15 (italics mine)

your own good if not the pleasure of an admiring audience make one
or another of the [opulent] recipes…[B]uy yourself a bottle of wine, or

now [as they are considered enemy aliens], and the canneries along

with the man on the corner who is an alien but still loyal if bewildered. 21
(italics mine)

As an alien, I take refuge between her words.g
notes
1. See Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of
Domesticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
2. M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf (New York: Stratford Press Inc., 1942), 209.

the coast are waiting for other men to take the place of all the Japanese

3. Ibid., 94.

who used to work so neatly, slashing off heads and pressing out guts

4. Ibid., 24, 56.

and packing the bodies in straight lines.17

5. Regina Schrambling, “When the Path to Serenity Wends Past the Stove,” The
New York Times, 19 September 2001, f1, f2.

This was war. Italian-Americans were under suspicion
and Japanese-Americans were in internment camps. Yet
M.F.K. Fisher refuses to consider them enemies. She
refuses to feed that prejudice. Instead, she mentions them
matter-of-factly, humanely, quietly. She even tangentially
compliments them for their hard work, “so neatly slashing
off heads.” Fisher carries her loyalty lightly, hopefully. Hers
is a persistent cosmopolitanism, one that refuses to recoil
into a virulent nativism. No red-white-and-blue menu here:
her recipes have names such as Chinese Consommé, A Basic
Minestrone, Hawaiian Shrimps, Shrimp and Egg Curry,
Italian Frittata, Egg Foo Yeung, Eggs Obstaculos, Gaspacho,
Beef Moreno, Shrimp Pâté, etc., etc.
Amazingly and astutely, she even mentions the “concentration camps.”18 Why amazing? Because even the New
York Times in its six years of coverage of World War ii
(1939–1945) barely mentioned the camps.19 The silence was
in keeping with the anti-Semitism that pervaded European
and American culture at that time. Yet Fisher mentions
the concentration camps, quietly and glancingly, as is characteristic of her style: “[T]hen they are malnourished just

6. M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf, 191.
7. Ibid., 224.
8. Ibid., 84.
9. Ibid., 66.
10. Ibid., 169.
11. Ibid., 65.
12. Ibid., 4.
13. See Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the
Century (Boston: North Point Press, 1995).
14. M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf, 16.
15. Ibid., 50.
16. Ibid., 56.
17. Ibid., 58.
18. Ibid., 184.
19. In fact, in six years the Times drew attention to the mistreatment of Jews in
Europe only six times on its front page! The Jewish publisher of the Times, Arthur
Hays Sulzburger, was hypersensitive about drawing too much attention to Jewish
suffering lest the Times be tainted as a “Jewish newspaper” and hence be seen as
making a case for the special treatment of Jews. See Max Frankel, “Turning Away
from the Holocaust,” in The New York Times special 150-year commemorative
issue, 14 November 2001, p. 10 of the special pull-out.
20. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf, 184.
21. Ibid., 246.

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S U M M E R 2002

…the Italian fleet at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf is tied up

make a few cocktails, or have a long open-hearted discussion of cheeses

17
GASTR O N O M I CA

She does not stop there. She begins a chapter on fish
with a Japanese haiku.16 Remember, this is a few months
after Pearl Harbor! How many of us would have the courage
today to begin an essay on food with an eloquent quotation
from the Koran?
A few pages down she advises us to buy canned tuna or
salmon, “if you can find a store that carries it,” because