How to Cook a Wolf

How to Cook a Wolf by M. F. K. Fisher is an American cookery book and/or disaster survival guide and/or prose poem that was first published in 1942.

History
How to Cook a Wolf was written following the attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to the American entry in World War II, when Fisher (then known to society as Mrs. Dillwyn Parrish) returned to California from already-war-torn Europe and wrote a well-received guide to blackout curtains and crisis cooking for her father's paper, the Whittier News. The newspaper columns evolved into a book, which she wrote in about a month, and publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce rushed it into print because of its wartime topicality. A revision ("the Cold War edition") was published in 1954, with Fisher revisiting her own text by way of "marginal notes, footnotes, and a section of additional recipes." The revision "quietly spoke out against the over-indulgences of the postwar years," and included new material on feeding children, an experience that Fisher had not yet had when writing the first edition.

How to Cook a Wolf was anthologized in full in The Art of Eating (with an introduction by Clifton Fadiman), which was first published in 1954 and remains in print. Five chapters were included in posthumous compilation of Fisher's work called The Measure of Her Powers. In 1988, the now-defunct North Point Press reprinted How to Cook a Wolf.

Both the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 and the COVID-19 pandemic led to a resurgence of interest in Wolf. A Vox writer commented during the coronavirus crisis, "I am not recommending How to Cook a Wolf for the recipes. They're 1942 recipes, and even if you wanted to roast a pigeon or jug a hare I have no idea how you would get the ingredients right now. This book has outlived its function as a practical how-to guide." Fisher's biographer Joan Reardon wrote that the overarching theme of How to Cook a Wolf was "the will to survive, whether in wartime or in battle with old age or in a crise de nerfs." A pandemic-era writer agreed, arguing that the essays in How to Cook a Wolf are "an argument for living the best life that you can when everything around you goes to shit."

Description
Wolf may be the "best known"  of the 20-odd books produced by American food writer Fisher, whose writing has been described as "highly stylized" and so lyrical that she is "basically a Sappho." Nominally about food, home economics, thrift, and preparedness, How to Cook a Wolf has been described "barely a cookbook" and "part experimental cookbook, part 'escape reading material,' and part war protest."

The book is dedicated to Fisher's friend Lawrence Bachmann, who reportedly came up with the title. The wolf in question "is the one at the door," the ever-allegorical big bad wolf of folk tales, and more precisely, the predator described in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's poem "The Wolf at the Door." As per the brick-house little pig from the folktale collected by the brothers Grimm, the solution to the problem is simply "outsmart him and have him for dinner."

Wolf, along with An Alphabet for Gourmets and A Cordiall Water, is one of three works by Fisher that examine food as a form of self-help. Some critics place How to Cook a Wolf in a poorly studied literary genre known as food memoir, in company with titles like The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and Mimi Sheraton's From My Mother's Kitchen: Recipes and Reminiscences. An Associated Press writer once characterized it as a "budget cookbook," alongside How to Eat Better for Less Money by James Beard and Sam Aaron, Economy Gastronomy by Sylvia Vaughn Thompson, and A Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others by Ann Rogers.

The book contains 73 recipes, but Orville Prescott, the New York Times reviewer, reported that the book's strengths were not so much in its catalog of recipes as in its "unorthodox, specific and pointed suggestions about cooking various types of food..." The book's adaptable prescriptions are derived from Fisher's precept that there's "no such thing as a new recipe." In 1987, a San Francisco Bay Area writer named Cyna McFadden reported that Fisher had told her: "The book has some terrible recipes...We were just so grateful to get hold of anything." A later writer argued that "the forced minimalism" of the recipes Wolf was valuable to him because "I couldn't get carried away with exotic ingredients, [so] I was forced to learn the basics."

Per Humanities magazine, "The book is really a literary rather than a culinary accomplishment—ultimately, more book than cook. Fisher's cheekiness in telling readers how to make war cake and then warning them away from it is a small case in point. Much of the book is like that, as Fisher steps slightly offstage of her narrative and confesses a change of mind." Scholar Allison Carruth calls it "an important text for both late modernism and food writing...Through her modernist redefinition of the cookbook and culinary redefinition of modernism, Fisher reveals a nation's growing appetites for industrialized food and the bodily as well as economic power that food promises."

Reception and legacy
The New York Times critic complained, "She has the weird notion that if a soup is rich enough and good enough, it is almost presumptuous to want anything else. Imagine! And she is very scornful and patronizing about desserts, too."

During the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, it was said that How to Cook a Wolf had been "almost a bible for modern commune dwellers, homesteaders, and other devotees of the simple life...referred to frequently in Mother Earth News and other underground publications." A latter-day practitioner of a similar ideology, Novella Carpenter, references Fisher's dictums on wastefulness in Farm City.

Cherry Pickman wrote a series of poems with titles "stolen" from How to Cook a Wolf. Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal has been characterized as a riff on How to Cook a Wolf with "an up-to-date sensibility about cooking and food and the memories associated with kitchenry." Adler recycled several of Fisher's chapter titles ("How to Boil Water") and explicitly credited Fisher as her inspiration: "How to Cook a Wolf is not a cookbook or a memoir or a story about one person or one thing. It is a book about cooking defiantly, amid the mess of war and the pains of bare pantries...I love that book. I have modeled this one on it."

In 2016, How to Cook a Wolf was number 37 on the Guardian's list of 100 best nonfiction books.

Short film
In 1958, Fisher appeared in a five-minute color short film produced by the Wine Advisory Board of San Francisco called "How to Cook a Wolf Quickly".