I ran across a mention of this book while I was poking around web sites looking for information on how American cookery got through the rationing days of the second world war, and promptly ordered a copy. I'm glad that I did so, although the book doesn't really address my original question. That's because it's just darned good writing about food, a book of essays with recipes that makes for enjoyable reading whether the wolf is at your door or not.
Part of that enjoyment comes from the fact that this is a reprint of the 1951 edition, which was created by the author adding marginal annotations to the 1942 original. Many of these are along the lines of "what _was_ I thinking of?"; it's a novel treat to see an author admit to evolving ideas and tastes. And part of the enjoyment comes from the fact that she treats cooking very much as I do myself, as an experimental art concerned with mixing flavors, colors, and textures, rather than as the boring following of precise recipes. Take this example from the book (the 1951 material is in square brackets):
Sausage Pie (or Sardine Pie)
1/2 pound sausage [or bacon] (or 1/2 can sardines)
tomato sauce
biscuit-mix
1 teaspoon grated onion or chopped green onionSpread sausage [or bacon or fish] thin in pie-pan or shallow casserole. Let heat in quick oven and pour off almost all fat. (Leave oil on sardines.)
Make one-half usual baking powder biscuit, mixing with tomato sauce [...or meat stock. It is a question of flavors. One good combination with bacon strips is milk in the biscuit-mix, plus a generous half-cup of grated cheese.] instead of milk or water. Add the onion and any chopped herbs you like. Pour over the sausage, and bake in hot oven until firm and brown [...about 20 minutes].
Shrimps are good in this pie too; indeed, it came from Portugal, where they used to grow on bushes, practically.
Faced with such a recipe, the novice cook throws up their hands in dismay: "but what am I to DO?". The experienced cook, though, recognizes this as a template for a whole series of dishes, a method of cooking that can be adopted by blending tastes in the head until you come up with a good combination. Use leftover duck meat, water in the biscuit mix with a dash of lemon, onions and paprika: it's still the same dish.
Another thing I love about this book is that Fisher was apparently constitutionally incapable of writing an economy manual for the war-weary housewife, even though that's probably what her publisher demanded. True, there are recipes for nutritious but inexpensive sludge (to use her term), and notes on keeping down fuel costs by cooking multiple dishes in the same oven and serving things cold. But then there are flights of fancy, justified with the note that you can save your pennies for a while and have one special meal to break the monotony, and here's a good recipe for that night. I suspect there are more special extravagances than sensible commonplaces in the book.
Along with the recipes there are little bits of essay -- about classic Continental cooking, about how to drink more cheaply during wartime, about how to keep the wolf away from the pet door as well as your own. These flow in and among the recipes, making the book fun to read. Indeed, I enjoyed much of it while I myself was too ill to eat much more than tea and grits. That it be enjoyable when your taste buds are on vacation seems to me as much as one can ask of a food book.
I'll be looking for more of Fisher's work, now that I've run across her voice.