Food for Hard Times
Posted: October 23, 2008 Filed under: Food for Thought, Phil Wrote It, Recipe 3 CommentsAt Casserole Crazy, Emily Farris directs us to a short video series on “Depression Cooking” by a 91-year old woman named Clara.
This is exactly the kind of kitchen knowledge I was talking about in my Pollan post yesterday. It’s simple cooking rooted in memory, history, and family. And the recipe is vegetarian! Also, I would like to point out the bonus-point awesomeness that is Clara’s removal of the (presumably branded) label from her can of peas, replacing it with her own black marker label.
Clara’s video series can be found here.
30 Bucks a Week 
This is amazing! Thanks so much for sharing, and for visiting Wordblur (http://wordblur.typepad.com/readers/). How to Cook a Wolf is M.F.K. Fisher’s World War II-era classic about how to survive on a budget, worth reading both for her suggestions and her phenomenal prose. I’ll be writing about it and cooking from it over the coming weeks.
Sounds like an amazing project and I look forward to reading about it. I’ve never read Fisher before (though I had heard of Consider the Oyster), but I think I better hurry up and get to it.
I really it when writers dig up older instructional texts and write about their attempts to reconnect with what might be considered antiquated knowledge. …I make it sound like this is some sort of phenomenon, but I can’t really think of many examples.
Something like the Julie/Julia project has now had this media life of its own, but anyway, I appreciate the idea of reviving skill sets and recognizing that DIY is not just some sort of twenty-something trend, but rather the recognition of skills that used to be far more commonplace.
I’ve loved Fisher for a long time–she’s the kind of food writer you read just to read, whether you intend to cook from her direction or not. What’s striking going back to How to Cook a Wolf is how truly edible it all (well most of it) is. I made her salmon pancakes last night and my four year old ate two and a half of them.