Mid-Century Modern furniture is one thing, but I’m afraid the dinners originally laid on those enviable teak tables were seldom up to the decor. My new novel, Far Creek Road, is set in suburban Vancouver in 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Research—I love doing research—often had me wading through tomes about Cold War politics. But I also happily chowed down on biographies and social histories, gossipy works about the lives of women during the post-Second World War years. Even though these were educated women, and often artists, many of the ones I read about were expected by their husbands to keep house. Their days could look suburban cookie-cutter, and the dinners they served were often unspeakable. 

Believe me, I’ve read the recipes. And cooked them.

Many of the ones I made came from the kitchen of food writer M.F.K. Fisher, who was an icon of the 1950s and 60s. Reading her autobiographical work was also a big help to me in creating a complex mid-century world, given her rocky private life as well as her career as a writer. Fisher was the author 27 books, and I started to read her work after stumbling across one of her earliest titles, the delightfully-named How to Cook a Wolf. Poet W.H. Auden said at the time, “I don’t know anybody in the U.S. who writes better prose,” although it’s possible he liked her because they both used their initials. 

In fact, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is a pleasure to read, even though her biographers report that she was a restless and often unhappy woman who often exaggerated and frequently fictionalized events in her memoirs, casually hurting people who had been good to her. 

I’ve ended up cherishing a more personal issue. Fisher blighted my childhood with terrible recipes. My mother had Scottish parents, so dinner was already dire. (Steak and kidney pie). But into the mix (which frequently included turnips) came Fisher’s recipes. Many of them were based on her simplification of French cooking, but she also had a fascination with tins of Campbell’s soup even greater than Andy Warhol’s, one that my mother grew to share. 

Here’s a recipe for cake from How to Cook A Wolf—which admittedly Fisher concocted to help U.S. housewives deal with Second World War rationing. It was published in 1942 but popular well into the 60s and 70s, and the one I cooked is pictured above.

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Tomato Soup Cake

• 3 tablespoons butter or shortening
• 1 teaspoon soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg, ginger, cloves mixed
• 1 can tomato soup
• 1 cup flour
• 1-1/3 cups chopped raisins, nuts, chopped figs, what you will

Cream butter, add the sugar, and blend thoroughly. Add the soda to the soup, stirring well, and add this alternately to the first mixture with the flour and spices sifted together. Stir well, and bake in a pan or loaf-tin at 325 degrees. (No baking time is given.)

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You’ll note the lack of eggs, which were rationed during the war, and her reliance on baking soda. I decided to make it, and when I added the soda to the tomato soup, it foamed and hissed and grew in volume: a small chemistry experiment. The batter foamed further when I mixed all the ingredients together, and although I’d been dubious, the cake rose in the oven. (Baking time, 45 minutes at 375 degrees.) 

The cake proved to be somewhat dense. My husband called it gingerbread crossed with Christmas cake. I’d gone heavy on the spices, worried about the tomato soup, although it turned out you couldn’t taste the Campbell’s. Yet it was like nothing we’d make these days, and gave me a sensory hit of a time when people were still living in the aftermath of the terror and privations of the Second World War–which was the point. Sensations like this help you create the tone of a novel.

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Mary Frances Kennedy was born in Michigan in 1908, but her family moved to California when she was three years old. Her father was a newspaperman who owned the local paper in the town of Whittier, a Quaker community where future president Richard Nixon grew up at the same time. Their mother stayed at home with the children, although servants did the domestic work. In a collection of autobiographical essays, The Gastronomical Me, Mary Frances writes that first learned to cook on the servants’ days off. She liked many of the women who worked for her family, but most didn’t last long, given the presence in their household of her stern and religious grandmother, who followed the Kellogg dietary regime and suffered from digestive ailments (cause and effect being unclear). 

“Grandmother, a handsome dignified old lady, had been told by her doctors to belch whenever she felt like it, which she did…long voluptuous Gargantuan belches, anywhere and any time at all, which unless you knew Grandmother would have led you to believe that our table was one of fabulous delights.”

One excellent cook, an older woman named Ora, was among their lost domestics. She left the house one Sunday for her day off and didn’t return as usual in the evening. “Grandmother was pleased as Punch, and that night for supper we probably had her favorite dish, steamed soda crackers with hot milk.”

However, they soon learned that instead of going to church, Ora had taken advantage of her downtime to murder her elderly mother. Or as Mary Frances put it, she “cut her into several neat pieces with her French knife.

“Then she ripped a tent thoroughly to ribbons. I don’t know how the tent came in…maybe she and her mother were resting in it. Anyway, it was a good thing to rip.

“Then Ora cut her wrists and her own throat, expertly. The police told Father there wasn’t a scratch or a nick in the knife.”

Mary Frances’s father and his family believed in education for women, but her mother and grandmother did not. Perhaps as a compromise, she was sent to two not particularly good colleges, did poorly, dropped out, and married her first husband when she was 21. Al Fisher was an academic and a poet, a future professor at Smith College, who took Mary Frances to France so he could work on his doctorate at the university in Dijon. There, she grew enamoured of French cooking, and developed her own take on nutritious eating. 

Eat from all the approved food groups, she advised, but spread them out over the course of a day. Have as much toast and butter as you want for breakfast, but nothing else besides coffee. For dinner, choose a starter, meat and dessert, and serve it with copious wine and spirits. For lunch, prepare a vegetable casserole, also served with wine, or perhaps a dish of peas and lettuce. That was her favourite, which she adapted from Escoffier and often plated on its own with crusty bread.

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Petit Pois à la Française

• ½ cup water
• 1 head lettuce
• 6 green onions
• Handful of parsley
• 2 pounds peas
• ¼ pound good butter
• Salt, fresh pepper

Put water in a heavy casserole or pot; shred lettuce coarsely into it; add onions split and cut in two-inch pieces, using tops; chop parsley and add. Put peas on this bed, and put chunks of butter on top. Cover tightly and bring slowly to boil, shaking now and then. Lower heat, let cook for about 5 minutes, and serve at once, mixing all well together and seasoning to taste. There should be almost no liquid. More butter can be added at the last if it seems desirable.

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Reading the recipe, it occurred to me that some of the housewives I was busy creating in Far Creek Road would have considered her petit pois to be the height of sophistication, even while using iceberg lettuce. But could I possibly bring myself to make it? With all that butter?

To be continued

Lesley Krueger’s most recent novel is Far Creek Road, available here.