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 📓
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
This is a self-published photo book of Trees in front of Dollar Trees. As a guy who likes projects that straddle the line between Joke and Art, this is extremely up my alley. I bought it right away, not because I think I'm going to refer to it but mostly as a vote for the future in which more things like this exist.
a note about Dollar Tree Trees
I got to read a galley of this - it comes out in summer 2026 - and I don't know how much it's normal to say here. But it's great! More details in June!
a note about Retro
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
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
Probably the most satisfying soup in the world for people who are hungry, as well as for those who are tired or worried or cross or in debt or in a moderate amount of pain or in love or in robust health or in any kind of business huggermuggery, is minestrone.
an excerpt from How to Cook a Wolf
This frittata is a good dish. It can be made with almost anything: string beans, peas, spinach, artichokes. Cheese can be sprinkled over it. Different kinds of herbs like sweet basil, summer savory, on and on, can change its whole character. And with a glass of wine and some honest-to-God bread it is a meal. At the end of it you know that Fate cannot harm you, for you have dined.
an excerpt from How to Cook a Wolf