How to Cook a Wolf

Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

There are times when helpful hints about turning off the gas when not in use are foolish, because the gas has been turned off permanently, or until you can pay the bill. And you don’t care about knowing the trick of keeping bread fresh by putting a cut apple in the box because you don’t have any bread and certainly not an apple, cut or uncut. And there is no point in planning to save the juice from canned vegetables because they, and therefore their juices, do not exist.
In other words, the wolf has one paw wedged firmly into what looks like a widening crack in the door.

M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf is a book about food written during World War 2. It’s full of meditations on hunger—the wolf clawing at the door—and recipes for dishes that you might eat to survive if supplies, fuel, and morale are limited. Chris and Suzanne talk about the food she describes (both sumptuous and horrifying), her curious personality, and the insight she provides on war and survival.

20. How to Cook a Wolf.

The Spouter-Inn M.F.K. Fisher’s book about food, written during World War 2. More episodes

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Show Notes.

M.F.K. Fisher: How to Cook a Wolf, also available in the omnibus The Art of Eating. [Bookshop.]

Laurie Colwin: Home Cooking.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: The Physiology of Taste, translated by Fisher.

A review of Fisher’s translation from the New York Times.

M.F.K. Fisher: A Cordiall Water.

Luke Barr: Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste.

YouTuber Emmymadeinjapan recreated the preserved eggs.

Bill Moyers interviews M.F.K. Fisher.

Next book: Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

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