I keep wondering if I should try to wedge MFK Fisher into my frugal bible. She’s not a great fit, because you don’t get the sense she was naturally frugal so much as necessarily frugal during the lean years of the Depression and World War II. (The concluding chapter of her 1942 book, “How to Cook a Wolf,” suggests that readers imagine concocting such recipes as shrimp pate, even though the ingredients were then nearly impossible to find, much less afford. “This therapy, unconscious or deliberate, is known to any prisoner of war or woe,” she wrote.)
I can’t help thinking, though, that Fisher would be an improvement on Job, the rich Old Testament dude forced to suffer in an experiment Satan cooked up and got God to endorse. You can’t blame Job for whining, though he does go on and on about his troubles. Whereas Fisher, at least in her writing, retained her good humor while focusing on how to get through the darkest days without “living like earthworms ... existing as gracefully as possible without many of the things we have always accepted as our due: light, free air, fresh foods, prepared according to our tastes.”
Fisher saw hard times as a good time to espouse philosophies that would be a harder sell in times of plenty. She railed against American white bread, for instance, long before it was fashionable to do so, and criticized the notion that each meal must be “balanced” like a school cafeteria lunch. “Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money,” she wrote.
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