MFK Fisher (file under Smoked Wolf?)

MFK Fisher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._F._K._Fisher ) is an absolutely brilliant writer. While reading her book “How to Cook a Wolf” I found myself considering things that I hadn’t before. It was written during World War II and offers dazzling insights into wartime mentality, what was on the tables and the triumph of will over shortage.

Her witty writing challenges the reader to consider the world. In my case, with an understanding of time and place but now also a culinary understanding that far exceeds where I was this time last year. Interspersed with her fabulous prose are recipes that any home cook can attempt. Some of which I myself intend to try.

I picked up “How to Cook a Wolf” to explore whether or not I liked MFK Fisher. As I walked through the book store I considered buying the anthology of most of her writings but was not sure that I would find her either compelling or informative. Much to my delight I have found in her a voice that I admire for its simplicity and yet deep and rich complexity. If such a dichotomy can be understood.

To illustrate this point I give you a few quotes;

“What the chefs would say now, if they could, can never be known. The young girls and men who ate grilled steak in their sport clothes at the Café de Paris are as much a secret as the Café de Paris itself. Ghosts of the great restaurants and their cooks may cry that lack of spirit and finesse betrayed the old as well as the unborn; ghosts of the young may answer that richness and subtlety were but a kind of phosphorescence on the decayed culture that Careme and Vatel and all the other masters left to them.”

“Of course there are many other ways to eat the flesh of animals than in its simplest states, raw or roasted or broiled or braised. According to some people, including the mournful ghosts of those masters who once ruled Paris kitchens and wrote letters to the Times, they are the only ways, since barbarians alone can stomach the sweet bloody savour of rare meat.”

“Why is it worse, in the end, to see an animal’s head cooked and prepared for our pleasure than a thigh or a tail or a rib? If we are going to live on other inhabitants of this world we must not bind ourselves with illogical prejudices, but savour to the fullest the beasts that we have killed.”

Fisher through her eloquence has caused me (as well as my experience in the last eight months) to look at food differently. And I appreciate her for that. You should too. Go out and get any book by MFK Fisher today as you will come to see that there is much more to food than the utter simplicity of putting it on a plate in front of you. There are other, more worldly considerations, that you must at the very least consider as someone who lives in this time of gross excess.

Voltaire once said; “Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.”

Dreaming? Inspired? BIG?

A la prochaine

SDM