Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
A sweet, realistic book about young boys playing and growing up in the shadow of London's air raids. They're too young to appreciate the real danger, but love the thrill and excitement. I love a Susan Cooper book, and this is the most grounded of any of hers I've read.
a note about Dawn of Fear
Short essays on oysters; I picked this up after loving How to Cook a Wolf. Not quite as charming but I see why people like it! She's a great writer.
a note about Consider the Oyster
Interesting to see the culinary and nutritional differences between midcentury and today. Fisher’s chapter on eggs, which was fun throughout, is very concerned with the idea that eggs are good but hard to digest, and the harder they are cooked the more stress it is on your body to process it.
a note about How to Cook a Wolf
This is a revised edition; originally written in 1942 when food shortages were dire, then revised in 1951. The author adds lots of notes qualifying or disagreeing with herself in [brackets]. Of course it’s interesting to hear some thoughts about how things have changed in the intervening years, and watch her equivocate or affirm herself - but by page 29 I’m finding it oftentimes more distracting than not.
a note about How to Cook a Wolf
This is entirely charming - a pseudo-cookbook about how to eat well when food (or money or fuel) is short. The proverbial wolf here is ‘the wolf at the door,’ ie hunger. It’s got chapters of general advice broken down by topic (or sometimes dish or ingredient), but with many specifics and recipes scattered throughout. Fisher’s a great writer, delightful and opinionated and funny.
a note about How to Cook a Wolf
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
Restaurants, even air-cooled perforce in the midst of hot sand, like Palm Springs, or as far from the sea as Oskaloosa in lowa, can serve oysters without fear these days. Tycoons with inlets in Maryland have their highfalutin molluscs flown for supper that night to a penthouse in Fort Worth, or to a simple log-cabin Away from It All in the Michigan woods, and know that Space and Time and even the development of putrescent bacteria stand still for dollars. Bindlestiffs on a rare bender in Los Angeles (Ell-ay, you say) gulp down three swollen "on the half's" with a rot gut whiskey chaser in any of a dozen joints on Main Street, and are more than moderately sure that if they die that night, it won't be from the oysters.
an excerpt from Consider the Oyster
Those few of us who actually live to eat are less repulsive than boring, and at this date I honestly know of only two such lost souls, gross puffy creatures, both of them, who are exhibited like any other monstrous curiosity by their well-fed but still balanced acquaintances.
On the other hand, I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers. There are too many of us, otherwise in proper focus, who feel an impatience for the demands of our bodies, and who try throughout our whole lives, none too successfully, to deafen ourselves to the voices of our various hungers. Some stuff the wax of religious solace in our ears. Others practice a Spartan if somewhat pretentious disinterest in the pleasures of the flesh, or pretend that if we do not admit our sensual delight in a ripe nectarine we are not guilty. .. of even that tiny lust!an excerpt from How to Cook a Wolf
Perhaps it is an old wives' tale; perhaps it is a part of our appetites more easily explained by The Golden Bough than by a cook or doctor: whatever the reason, a roasted pigeon is and long has been the most heartening dish to set before a man bowed down with grief or loneliness. In the same way it can reassure a timid lover, or comfort a woman weak from childbirth.
It is not easy to find pigeons, these days. Most of the ones you know about in the city are working for the government.an excerpt from How to Cook a Wolf
Wise men forever have known that a nation lives on what its body assimilates, as well as on what its mind acquires as knowledge. 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.
an excerpt from How to Cook a Wolf
One of the saving graces of the less-monied people of the world has always been, theoretically, that they were forced to eat more unadulterated, less dishonest food than the rich-bitches. It begins to look as if that were a lie.
an excerpt from How to Cook a Wolf