“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. Let us take it for granted that the situation, while uncomfortable, is definitely impermanent, and can be coped with.”
Mary Frances talks to herself a lot in this book. That’s okay. So do I. I’m finding that we have a lot in common these days.
“Mary Frances” is my own invention. That was how her friends and family referred to her, but she’s better known as MFK Fisher, the matriarch of food writing. She stares out at me from the cover of How to Cook a Wolf, her wartime-cookbook-cum-manifesto published in 1942. The design of my copy is so retro it looks cool again – her name in all-caps above a 90’s lunch box background, the foreground bearing a black-and-white photo of Fisher staring out at me, equal parts serene and stern. Her hair is in one of those milkmaid-braid headband arrangements that are popular these days amongst the natural-wine drinking, ramp-loving gourmand set. On her, though, in the studio portrait, the look gives me “Miss Trunchbull in Paris” vibes. The cover photo perfectly captures the tone of How to Cook a Wolf – half bone-rigid austerity, half revelatory in its humanity and humility.
I like to imagine Mary Frances as a friend, and so I call her by her regular-person name. Mary Frances sounds like the kind of girl you’d meet at Barnard, eating crab-and-avocado salad on a white tablecloth. She sounds like she has her shit together. Reading her books, for me, feels like hearing a friend say exactly what you’re thinking before you can. Mary Frances always gives my highlighter a workout, doling out sentences like “I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster.” I think about her a lot as I walk the floors of my apartment and try to cook.
I am so, so sick of cooking.
Typing that sentence makes me sad, because in my previous life, I was an avid home cook, baker, and bartender. Like Mary Frances, I found so much joy in making food for others. When the shelter in place order was first announced, I was excited about all the projects I would finally have time for. I pulled out my biscuit book and opened my bookmarked recipes folder. And that worked, for a little while. I made elaborate snacks, put up homemade pickles for sandwiches, tried my hand at focaccia (pretty successfully, I might add). But in the weeks that have passed in isolation, the news keeps getting worse, and I’ve exhausted my personal Rolodex of recipes.
Some days, the reason I have trouble creating a meal is starker than on others–I’m too freaked-out to get out of bed. I try to watch TV or YouTube videos to distract me from the low-flying helicopter buzz of my anxiety. I find that the viral recipes of Bon Appetit’s beloved Test Kitchen, my old Gilead’s balm, bring me no solace, even when I’m watching the videos in my bed after hitting my vape pen. Alison Roman and Sam Sifton have little to offer me in the ways of repurposing Hot Pockets, the lone survivors of my freezer’s shelf space, and probably the only thing I will be able to make on a Bad Day like this one. I check my bank account again, to see if my unemployment insurance has gone through. The site crashes. I check my email. The missives I get from food glossies feel tone-deaf instead of like the benign, millennial-pink escapism they used to provide. They all sound the same, selling me some sponsored ingredient that will certainly be the cure for all of my problems “in these uncertain times”. I want to throw my computer out the window. I don’t have small-batch chili oil or a mandolin. Who are these recipes for? I imagine lots of other people feel this way, have probably felt this way for a long time.
On the other days, it’s mostly because I’m having trouble finding a lot of things at the supermarket, the ones I thought were basics, had never thought twice about procuring in the Before Times, things like non-iodized Kosher salt and sun-dried tomatoes. Spending precious “outside time” trying to find ingredients when I know they’re non-essential–just going to the supermarket at all–provokes sweaty fits of anxiety. I’m doubly upset by this new development because grocery shopping used to be my favorite way to zone out and relax. Gone are my days of weaving around fellow New Yorkers through the stalls of the Union Square greenmarket, getting inspiration from the leeks, or sunchokes, or heirloom cabbages. No more absently listening to a friend’s restaurant-industry podcast while waiting in line at Trader Joe’s, my basket full of the Parmesan Crisps and stuffed gnocchi that I made a special trip for.
Going to the grocery store now is an American Ninja Warrior-style time trial in practicality. What do we need the most? Rice, eggs, broccoli. What can we live without? The good olive oil (too pricey), ice cream (no freezer space), bacon (too fraught, re: meatpacking worker’s rights and besides, we barely eat meat, it’s so bad for us, and for the environment, and for others, and and and…). Do I schlep a 12-pack of canned seltzer the six blocks home and feel refreshed, make cocktails, and pretend I’m at my favorite bar? Or do I opt for cans of diced tomatoes instead, sustenance over susurration? Which of the two is easier to wipe down with Lysol?
Every time I leave, I leave in a haze of panic, grateful to get out with whatever I have and amazed at my former expectancy, how entitled I am. I knew I could have anything I wanted whenever I wanted it. If I forgot something, I could just pop out again, stop by Citarella on my way home to splurge on a block of domestic Parmesan to zhuzh up my pasta. Now, I cut the hard edges off of an old block of mozz to approximate a lasagna (a luxury!) and feel lucky for it. As I should. I try to balance that lucky feeling with the memory of my friends Howie and Abby calling the store “Citronella” as we walked back to the train from a West Village bar. I miss them. I miss the West Village. And although I’m lucky and privileged and so much better off than most, I am still really, really sad.
It’s in this humble-sad mindset that I run my fingers across the spines of my bookshelf, looking for something to read at night that will pair well with my glass of boxed wine and hastily rolled joint. I find my volumes of MFK Fisher’s writing and remember How to Cook a Wolf. I turn the pages, stopping at the table of contents. Its titles give me pause – they seem dramatically prescient, considering the circumstances. Some are practical: “How to Boil Water”. Others are theatrical: “How to Be Sage Without Hemlock”; “How to Rise Up Like New Bread”.
***
My birthday was earlier in the month. My mom had sent me a cake, via Milk Bar, coddled in dry ice and Styrofoam until it reached my doorstep. I joked with her that I felt like Molly, my childhood favorite of the American Girls, getting a special treat during the time of rations. This cake cost my mom upwards of $60, before shipping. It’s an embarrassment of riches, gastronomically and actually. I eat tiny slices of the overpriced cake in bliss, savoring each sprinkle-flecked truffle on top of the cake with reverence. Eating something I hadn’t made myself would have been treat enough, but having it sent to me when I couldn’t even find brown sugar at my grocery store felt transcendental. That cake was meant to be shared, eaten by a dozen tipsy friends at my favorite bar after I blew out the candles and ordered a round of shots, doled out to the bartender and other patrons, frosting smearing on my beer can. But it’s just me and my husband in our place, and after two and a half weeks, I have to toss the remains of the cake when that frosting starts to mold. I feel heartbroken and wasteful and guilty.
As the days turn into weeks and quarantine scarcity becomes the new normal, I find myself coming back to Mary Frances and her lessons for domestic frugality. I imagined she might have some stiff-upper-lip words of advice for maintaining dignity in stressful times, the literary equivalent of my military grandpa telling me “chest out, chin up!” every time that he saw me. Maybe tough love was what I needed.
Instead, I was humbled by her compassion and wisdom, how little had changed from her time of crisis to mine and what that might mean in terms of cooking for my family. As both of our household incomes disappeared, I started thinking about how to stretch what I had, how to be pantry-conscious. I thought about my grandparents, how we found money hidden in the walls of their house after they died, how my grandma washed and reused Saran Wrap. I’m ashamed that I laughed at her foresight.
I got out my quart containers and Sharpies. I made stock from the bones of the good chicken legs that I was lucky to find and put it in the freezer. I know these are not new tricks and I should have been doing them anyway, but I’ve had so much for so long that I’ve forgotten. I just needed to be reminded. As Mary Frances knows, it’s a state of mind – one that can disappear quickly, as soon as peacetime returns.
Mary Frances provides a place to put this feeling, a lesson in learning, towards the end of a chapter entitled “How to Distribute Your Virtue”, in a paragraph ostensibly about salad prep:
“You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and then chill them, and eat them in a bowl. [Why do we not do this oftener, much time as it will take? I am tired of “tossed green salads”, no matter what their subtleties of flavor. I want a salad of a dozen tiny vegetables: rosy potatoes in their tender skins, asparagus tips, pod-peas, beans two inches long and slender as thick hairs…I want them cooked, each alone, to fresh perfection. I want them dressed, all together, in a discreet veil of oil and condiments. Why not? What, in peacetime, is to prevent it? Are we too busy being peaceful for such play?]
You can still live with grace and wisdom, thanks partly to the many people who write about how to do it…and partly to your own innate sense of what you must do with the resources you have, to keep the wolf from snuffing too hungrily through the keyhole.”
I have to mention, again, that I am luckier than most. In addition to the semi-regular unemployment benefits, my landlord is showing us a fair amount of compassion. I assume this is because the building is her family home and not the sole source of her income. When I was visiting the apartment before applying to lease it, she told me she was looking for a tenant who would “treat this place like people had lived here before”. There’s evidence to that point all over the apartment. Like the button below the light switch outside the kitchen that rings the apartment below, a reminder of the grandmother who padded across the same floors as I do now years ago, who was given the upstairs to keep her independence but could ring her granddaughter in times of need. She rang the bell when she needed help getting out of the deep tub in the bathroom, the same one I use to calm myself down when I’m anxious after scrolling the results of my “nyc coronavirus how many” Google searches. I fill the tub with eucalyptus salts and light an overpriced scented candle, hoping that they will settle my nerves, but the water never gets all the way hot. The grandmother rang that bell if she fell down or became ill, something I consider as more and more possible as I hear sirens shrieking down my block, see the collapsed legs of cornflower-blue scrubs in a basket outside the downstairs neighbors’ door–Joe, the owner’s grandson, and his girlfriend, Sophie, a nurse at Maimonides. When I see those scrubs I feel overwhelmed with shame for imagining my straits as being, in any way, dire.
***
The process of reading How To Cook a Wolf is, itself, a craft exercise. Mary Frances is teaching me to revise. The version I have is riddled with parentheticals, bracket inside brackets of notes that Fisher added to her recipes and prose, illuminating the changes to her ways of thought and ways of cooking over the years. She can’t help talking to herself. At times, it feels cheekily like reading a journal entry undergoing edits by its own author and sent to press with the red pen’s circles and scribbles included. Sometimes they are ruthless in their self-criticism – after a facile description of curries, she inserts this note:
“[This is a horrible definition, and only the next sentence saves me from gastronomical guilt.]”
In other places, she allows herself a few crumbs of triumphant praise, an acknowledgment that she has served up something lovely. She ends a chapter on feeding your pets during a crisis with one of these rare moments of pride.
“[For one of the few times in the past thirty-odd years I am pleased with something I have written. I think this is a good chapter.]”
An important distinction is that unlike Mary Frances, my country, at least as of today’s publication, is not actually at war. War is the “wolf” so personified throughout these pages, creeping ever closer to the doors of women figuring out how to feed their families. Mary Frances devotes an entire chapter dedicated to one long recipe for, essentially, gruel– a way to feed your family for a week on a budget of fifty cents. This chapter is not an exaggeration. It is a necessity. Rations and starvation were a fact as much in Mary Frances’ day as they are in ours. How quickly I forget, over and over, that others in our country, in my city, on my street, are not as lucky as I am. The cause for MFK’s bracketed voice-overs, the impetus for her new drafts, are grim: yet another World War. How difficult it must have been, I think, for a woman to go over her notes from one crisis, amending them to the current one, adjusting recipes for scarcity depending on who was the perceived enemy this time, what resources were being gobbled up in the name of homeland security. I think about how many wars, exactly, Mary Frances must have seen in her lifetime. I think about how many I will see. I think about second waves, and flattened curves and spikes, if I will be having to do this again and again, with less and less income until there’s nothing left to repurpose. I think about my family, if I’ll be able to have one, if we’ll be able to feed ourselves resourcefully, if at all, in the decades to come.
On the specifics of war and making soup, Fisher remarks, in typical bracket-confetti fashion:
“There are many variations of any recipe for a soup that 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 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 over might before too long.) [In the 1950s some people feel helplessly antagonistic to borscht! Fortunately, I do not.]”
I would like to see what Mary Frances would have made of the quarantine cooking trends I see all over my social media feeds. Everyone I know is re-growing their green onions in cups on the windowsill or stocking their pantries with brand-name beans. The one I’ve seen most frequently and heard more opinions about than I thought possible, is, of course, the rise of the at-home bread baker. I’m pretty good at making bread, although I find sourdough, the belle of the quarantine ball, to be a lot of trouble for a small reward. The percentages and multi-step feeding routines suck all the fun out of what should, to me, be an almost existentially joyful endeavor.
Mary Frances predicted us making all the bread, though, and describes its appeal, the fulfillment in making something yourself, and the rare moments of beauty that can happen in the horrible time in which we find ourselves, as only she can: losing track of things, rediscovering them, berating herself and bestowing wisdom upon us in the same linguistic breath. I’m glad I found her again, and especially right now. Last weekend I tried making a loaf again, fermenting it myself on the counter, and baking it in the morning before anyone else had woken up. I tore off chunks of it, still warm, smeared them with little knobs of the butter I had left in the fridge, watched the sunrise over the other buildings on my block, stayed quiet, stayed thankful, and hung out with my friend Mary Frances, who had done all of this before and wanted to tell me all about it.
“You can forget the soggy sterile slices that pop up dourly in three million automatic toasters every morning [Why do I say three, either then or now? I own one myself, which makes it at least three million and one, and I hate everything about it, except a rare slice of bread that seems in conjunction with the workings of the robot within, and springs up rightly golden, rightly crisp.] and instead cut for yourself, if you will, a slice of bread that you have seen mysteriously rise and redouble and fall and fold under your hands. It will smell better, and taste better, than you remembered anything could possibly taste or smell, and it will make you feel, for a time at least, newborn into a better world than this one often seems.”