M.F.K. Fisher

How do you choose ten cookbooks out of more than a hundred collected over sixty years? With difficulty. After my beloved husband Richard died, I decided that the only place I would want to live without him was in Meursault, France. The most difficult part was having to leave behind my cookbook collection. For a food writer, it was a daunting challenge. Here is what made the cut. I obviously couldn’t get rid of my father Bob Jones’s The Outdoor Picture Cookbook, published in 1954 and launched to Americans over their morning coffee on NBC’s Today show. He demonstrated how to cook his famous grilled chuck steak as Arlene Francis and Dave Garroway looked on with a bevy of buckets at the ready in case of fire.

Inflation having topped 9 percent this summer, Americans are looking for ways to cut their spending. Rising prices at the grocery store are impossible to avoid, but we can learn to adjust. There’s no better inspiration than M.F.K. Fisher. Fisher, a food writer who hung around with Julia Child and James Beard during her lifetime, felt the pain of wartime rationing acutely. Her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf addressed the problem of hunger — “the wolf on the doorstep” — with a few clever recipes and a great deal of philosophy. Survival of the crisis, she predicted, would require first and foremost an attitude of abundance. Fisher ascribes virtues like honesty, dignity and nobility to simply prepared foods.