How to Rise Up Like New Bread
“Little Bear,” I incant in the quiet of the bookstore or my wind-whipped walk home, “the world is not as we would wish it. And what we ask of you is unfair: to come in, and not only survive, but love it, as if you had made it yourself.”
Some remnant of a poem I’ve been writing (I don’t write poetry) to my future child, or to my inner child; an invitation to be born into a calamitous world or an incantation to help myself live through it. In this annual period peppered with people’s announcements of resolutions and achievements like gnats flying around your timeline, it’s tempting to shout, “I survived; and I will survive” into the void and leave it at that. But that doesn’t quite feel like the whole story. We expect more from life than its continuation. The world owes us more, and the other way around.
I’m reading MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, which is a beast of prose. Critically acclaimed at its 1942 publication, it became a pillar of modern food writing for its style of mixing recipes with personal reflections and for its celebration of epicurean desire within limited resources. I’d been putting off reading it in the way you do when something is too well-regarded — what if I didn’t like it? — but it’s funnier and more unpretentious than I expected, and feels honest.
The wolf at Fisher’s door was food scarcity. She wrote at the height of wartime food shortages that limited availability of the ingredients that made food pleasurable, like butter or sugar, and even that which made cooking possible, like fuel. Much of her book is devoted to cooking more cheaply. In 1942, cheaper food meant organ meat or whole grain cereals, and wasn’t yet synonymous with low-quality highly-processed packages, so she wasn’t left with the trade-off between cheapness and nutrition that plagues us today. Kitchen economy could be seen as patriotism, and patriotism as a virtue. The heroes of her book are people like the withdrawn cliff-dweller “Sue” who forages sage and steals potatoes for dinner parties lit by a single candle in her little house. “Sue had neither health nor companionship to comfort her and warm her, but she nourished herself and many other people for many years, with the quiet assumption that man’s need for food is not a grim obsession, repulsive, disturbing, but a dignified and even enjoyable function. Her nourishment was of more than the flesh, not because of its strangeness, but because of her own calm.” Fisher seemed less afraid of hunger than the way poverty becomes an identity, devouring a person and pushing aside the joys and desires that made them who they were. Her teachings are ultimately aimed not at keeping the wolf away, but accepting its proximity with grace.
It’s common to think of our epoch as the most gloomy. How could it not be? We’re living through a starkly immediate worldwide crisis, and we’re certain that once it lifts, an endless parade of ecological disasters awaits us. It’s true that we are royally fucked in a way that the human species has never before encountered. But the feeling of being alive today might not have been so different from living through the Second World War. Old enough to remember the first, Fisher speaks wearily of second, fully expecting that there might be a third, and maybe they would never go away, but return bigger and more destructive until everything was gone. The weight of all that, I think, was her wolf just as much as the fear of not having enough to eat.
“Now, when the hideous necessity of the war machine takes steel and cotton and humanity, our own private personal secret mechanism must be stronger, for selfish comfort as well as for the good of the ideals we believe we believe in,” she writes near the beginning of the book. What did she mean by that “secret mechanism,” I wondered. It could be our cooking tricks for making appetizing food, I suppose, or the simple ability to gratify our own tastes, or maybe our personal religion or mythology. And why does she repeat “we believe” twice? Perhaps she’s saying that our ideals aren’t strong enough to maintain belief unless we practice these secret mechanisms. Whatever they are, they’re the key to holding onto ourselves.
I think many of us have grown more comfortable with wolves in the last two years. Precarity seemed like a crisis, and then became the norm. I expect that the child I’m ejecting into this world will grow up fully aware that the wolves are circling outside and could rush the door at any time. I will build a house of love and safety, but I can’t pretend its walls will be impenetrable. It isn’t easy to live this way, but it’s a way to live and life of any kind demands to be full. My hope is that each of us identifies the secret mechanisms that make it possible to believe what we believe in. Let’s practice them this year.
What I’m cooking
I’ll be sending out this recipe on Friday to paid subscribers! Please subscribe if you would like it. It‘s a really good one ;)
Salted almond butter rye chocolate chip cookies (v)
I was after a cookie that was chewy and rich but not full of sugar, which is how most vegan cookies achieve their texture. I ended up settling on almond butter, which provides some of the protein that would otherwise come from eggs. I use whole dark chocolate bars instead of chocolate chips, for the taste and those satisfying bites of pure melted chocolate. After about eight tries, and a lot of cookies forced onto family and coworkers, I think I got the perfect texture. Chewy, with a slightly caramelized outer layer and soft inside, that doesn’t dry out or get hard after a day.
Cookies are never going to be a health food, but these ones also aren’t completely empty of nutrition. Almond butter is a healthy source of fat and protein. Dark rye flour has more fiber and micronutrients and spikes blood sugar less than white or wheat flour, and maple syrup also has a lower glycemic index than white sugar. I’m not saying that you should eat these cookies for breakfast, but if it happens, you should be feeling a lot better than if you grabbed some Oreos.