Intended to rally home cooks during the second world war, this is food writing that addresses privation ‘with grace and gusto’
‘Essential” has become the most wearing word of the lockdown. The order is to only leave your house for “essential supplies”, but what counts as essential? Every venture into public, every social contact, comes with the possibility of spreading death or bringing it back with you. “Popping to the shop” is obscene, impossible. The way of eating that I’ve learned as a comfortably-off adult – a casual, desire-led, last-minute way of eating, where I could decide what I fancied for dinner at 6 and have shopped for and cooked it by 7 – no longer works.
This is hardly the first era to be forced through such an adjustment. “There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the last war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the 20s. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution,” wrote MFK Fisher in How to Cook a Wolf. First published in 1942, Fisher’s cookbook was reissued after the war with Fisher’s later commentary on her work incorporated in square brackets; in one of my favourite bits, she rebukes her past self for speaking only of her sons and neglecting the daughters.
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