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.
15-17
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University of California Press
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G
In 1942 m.f.k. fisherwrote 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 1941Parrish, suffering from Buerger’s disease—a debilitating illness that was a source of unceasing pain—committed suicide. On December 7of 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 iiby 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).1Fisher manages to show us how to do that
with both pleasure and grace. She writes:
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
This is classic M.F.K. Fisher—pleasure tinged with wist-ful 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 experi-ence. Fisher unhinges the stultifying relationship between pleasure and abundance, between happiness and simple optimism. Hers is a tender ethicandaesthetic 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 2000seventy-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 possibil-ity 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 pas-tas (spelled “pastes” because the thing was so foreign that no standardized English spelling had been established yet, just as haikuwas 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 rou-tine, the control over a recipe, the predictability, and the stability that the preparation promises are what draw us back
What I Learned from
M.F.K. Fisher About Living After
9/11
a n n i v e r s a r y | krishnendu ray
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.
to slow-cooked, familiar foods during moments of crisis. As Regina Schrambling, a food critic for theNew 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, espe-cially 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.6Under 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 relax-ation 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
seemed much too far from you both, lately.7
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.”8She then proceeds to
allo-cate 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.”10Although 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 vegeta-bles 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.”11Or elsewhere: “Now, when
the hideous necessity of the war machine takes steel and cotton and humanity, our own private personal secret mech-anism must be stronger, for selfish comfort as well as for the good of the ideas we believewe 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 believethat 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.”13She 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 miner-als and vitamins. Do the sensible thing with balance and judgment. At the end of it, experts cannot solve your exis-tential 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
Even Fisher’s patriotism is gentle. She refuses to demean the putative enemy. After a robust recipe for a minestroneshe 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 some-thing with the foreign name minestrone, because in this year of 1942 the United States is at war with Italy. There is a fundamental if tiring
truthabout all this, and you and I can only hope that right will conquer over might before too long.15(italics mine)
She does not stop there. She begins a chapter on fish with a Japanese haiku.16Remember, this is a few months
afterPearl 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
…the Italian fleet at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf is tied up
now [as they are considered enemy aliens], and the canneries along the coast are waiting for other men to take the place of all the Japanese who used to work so neatly, slashing off heads and pressing out guts and packing the bodies in straight lines.17
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 “concen-tration camps.”18Why amazing? Because even the New
York Timesin its six years of coverage of World War ii
(1939–1945) barely mentioned the camps.19The 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 char-acteristic of her style: “[T]hen they are malnourished just
as surely as any sad wretch kept alive in a concentration camp on this soup and bread.”20Fisher is never overly
didactic. Speeches are typically cheered or ignored. They seldom resonate with a deeper truth. In contrast, a well-crafted 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,
throw discretion into the laundry bag, put candles on the table, and for 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 make a few cocktails, or have a long open-hearted discussion of cheeses
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.
3. Ibid., 94.
4. Ibid., 24, 56.
5. Regina Schrambling, “When the Path to Serenity Wends Past the Stove,” The New York Times,19September 2001, f1, f2.
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 Timesdrew 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 Timesbe 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 Timesspecial 150-year commemorative issue, 14November 2001, p. 10of the special pull-out.
