How to Cook a Wolf

“I do not know of any one in the United States who writes better prose.” —W. H. Auden

A practical, culinary, and philosophical guide on how to eke out joy and delight in difficult times.

This program features a new introduction to the text, written and read by Tamar Adler.

There is perhaps no other story that speaks so powerfully to hunger and its pangs and to the ingenuity of those who seek to cook their way out of its snapping jaws. Originally written in the depths of World War II and then revised in the shadow of the Cold War, How to Cook a Wolf is at turns both haunting and ennobling—a study in finding joy and delectation in a world being deprived of both.

Rather than succumb to the predations of the wolf—and the wolf is hunger, and the wolf is adversity and scarcity—M.F.K. Fisher enjoins her listeners to raise a bulwark against precarity and to find deliciousness in unaccustomed places. And even when the table can only be sparely supplied, there will at least be the feast of writing, memories, and wisdom that this classic provides.

A Macmillan Audio production from North Point Press