How to Catch the Wolf

Once during the last war [“The last war” means something different now. I was thirtyish when I wrote this, thinking of 1917 and thereabouts. Now I am infinitely and eons more than forty-ish, and my mind says “next” sooner than “last”. ...] when rationing of sugar and butter had been in effect just long enough to throw all the earnest young housewives into a proper tizzy, my grandmother sat knitting and listening to a small excited group of them discuss with proper pride their various ways of making cake economically. Each felt that her own discovery was the best, of course, and insisted that brown sugar or molasses-with-soda was much better than white, or that if you used enough spices you could substitute bacon fat for butter, or that eggs were quite unnecessary.