Sludge for supper

In “Still Life With Crows,” a thriller by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, FBI agent Pendergast recreates the scene of an 1845 Indian massacre in Kansas using an ancient Eastern form of mystical meditation . He thinks there’s a connection between this historical event and a series of murders he’s investigating -- specifically, how the Indians suddenly appeared as if out of thin air to ambush the soldiers.

We were several hours into our own time-travel experiment this week when I found myself wishing I knew agent Pendergast‘s technique for mentally removing modern-day objects from your field of view. Because it’s really, really hard to pretend you’re a Depression Era family with nothing to eat but MFK Fisher’s recipe for “sludge” when you have all this other food sitting around the house.

Part of the problem is that Ben and I were the only ones running the experiment. So while we were choking down a gruel made of barley, a couple of strips of bacon, and an onion, the girls were making themselves peanut butter sandwiches and eating pretzels straight from the bag. It was really hard to picture a kitchen that didn’t have at least a dab of peanut butter in the bottom of a jar, or a couple of eggs in the ice box.

But sludge isn’t something you eat when you have other options. “There comes a time 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,” Fisher writes in her 1942 book “How to Cook a Wolf.” “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.”

It’s a time, she says, to use the metaphor that frames her book, when the wolf is at the door, with “one paw wedged firmly in what looks like a widening crack.”

In our experiment, Ben ate two bowls of Fisher’s sludge -- which really should’ve had a few more wilted vegetables in it to be authentic -- before deciding he’d rather just fast until midnight, when I promised him a cheeseburger. I stuck to the regimen, and though the first bowl tasted like dishwater, by the second serving, with a little more salt, I found myself thinking that barley is a worthy grain, deserving of more attention than its bit role in my usual recipe for vegetable soup.

By late afternoon, though, I was really eager to have something else -- anything else, even just a dab of peanut butter or a single pretzel. And that was when I realized just how much better off we are even now, in supposedly hard times, when we open the fridge and think there’s nothing to eat or can’t imagine what we could possibly make for dinner -- we still have all these bits and pieces of this and that that look awfully good when the alternative is sludge.