For this episode Andy and John are joined by the writers Dan Richards and Felicity Cloake. Dan’s first book, Holloway was co-authored with Robert Macfarlane & illustrated by Stanley Donwood. It was self-published in 2012, picked up by Faber in 2013 and became a Sunday Times bestseller. His fourth book, Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth, was published by Canongate in April, 2019. Dan has written about travel, literature, art and music for publications including the Economist, Guardian, Telegraph, Monocle, Slightly Foxed, and The Quietus. He loves oysters and M.F.K Fisher.

Felicity Cloake is a food writer and the award-winning author of the Guardian’s long-running ‘How to Make the Perfect’ series and the New Statesman’s food column, as well as five cookbooks, including the André Simon award shortlisted The A-Z of Eating, and a culinary travelogue, One More Croissant for the Road, which was recently shortlisted for a Fortnum & Mason award. She has been obsessed with M.F.K. Fisher for at least a decade, and wrote the foreword to the 2019 Daunt Books reissue of Consider the Oyster, though in truth she hasn’t eaten many oysters since consuming one the size of her hand in Brittany.

The book under discussion is M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf, her classic guide to surviving the privations of war, first published in the United States by Duell, Sloan & Pearce in 1942, (allegedly) first published in the UK as a part of The Art of Eating by Faber & Faber in 1963, and released earlier this year in a handsome new paperback edition by Daunt Books.

Also featured in this episode is Andy revisiting Becky Brown’s brilliant pitch for the thrilling ‘man on the run’ novel Figures in a Landscape by Barry England (which didn’t make the final cut of the Barbara Pym episode, while John delights in the smells and sounds of Roman London in Bernadine Evaristo’s 2001 verse novel, The Emperor’s Babe (Penguin).

Books mentioned:

M.F.K. Fisher - How to Cook a Wolf; Consider the Oyster; The Gastronomical Me; An Alphabet for Gourmets
Felicity Cloake - One More Croissant for the Road; The A-Z of Eating
Dan Richards - Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth; Holloway
Bernadine Evaristo - The Emperor’s Babe; Girl Women Other
Barry England - Figures in a Landscape
Geoffrey Household - Rogue Male
Edouard De Pomiane - Cooking With Pomiane
Craig Brown - One Two, Three Four - The Beatles in Time

Other links:

Alan Bennett on M.F.K. Fisher in the London Review of Books (Jan 2001)
Jazz Company - ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’
Howlin’ Wolf - ‘The Wolf at Your Door’
M.F.K Fisher on how she got her nom de plume
Dan Richards’ How to Cook a Wolf playlist