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A fierce and funny memoir of kitchen and bedroom from James Beard Award winner Betty Fussell A survivor of the domestic revolutions that turned American television sets from Leave It to Beaver to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Julia Child's The French Chef, food historian and journalist Betty Fussell has spotlighted the changes in American culture through food over the last half century in nearly a dozen books. In this witty and candid autobiographical mock epic, Fussell survives a motherless household during the Great Depression, gets married to the well-known writer and war historian Paul Fussell after World War II, goes through a divorce, and finally escapes to New York City in her mid-fifties, batterie de cuisine intact. My Kitchen Wars is a revelation of the author's lifelong love affair with food--cooking it, eating it, and sharing it--no matter where or with whom she finds herself. From Princeton to Heidelberg and from London to Provence, Fussell ladles out food, sex, and travel with her wooden spoon, welcoming all who come to the table.… (more)
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She and Paul came from different
Many returning vets went to college under the GI Bill and then returned to campus as professors. Europe had provided a cosmopolitan atmosphere lacking in the States, and many made annual trips to Europe (as did my father) under the aegis of the Fulbright program. The Fussells must have been at Heidelberg about the same time as my family, the early to mid-fifties, and you learned, as did I in German public school, that for the Germans, WW II was not the "good" war. Audiences in movies had moments of silence to honor those who had fallen for the Vaterland -- I still cringe every time I hear the words "Homeland Security" -- and all Americans had to be members of the military.
The book is almost Cheeveresque in its description of faculty life at Princeton during the late fifties: stay-at-home wives, a sort of female Arbeit Macht Frei concept, husbands who drank themselves under the table, affairs fueled by post-war European attitude shifts. Betty began to find her metier in the kitchen as a party host where food had evolved from a pre-sexual morsel to an element of power. "Parties were no longer the pretext for sex, and sex no longer the subtext of food. . . cooking had become a magnificent obsession." They move into a larger house with a spectacularly functional professional kitchen, and the first shots of the wars to follow began as Paul and Betty began to compete in the same realm.
This is probably not a book vegans or vegetarians would enjoy because it's a real celebration of food. She reveres the French attitude, where farmers and cooks brag about the "perfect chicken."` One old farmer described how "his wife caponized the birds the way the Romans had and lovingly force-fed them a paste of corn and milk in their Death Row days. . . . Who but the French would make a chicken a love object, would caress it with the passion of a lover for his beloved or a communicant for his God, would turn it into a work of art that, no matter how crowned with laurel, must be eaten to be experienced."
The end of her relationship with Paul began with her desire to earn a Ph.D. in English so she could teach full-time. Whether it was competition or envy or no longer being the honored one, Paul had difficulty appreciating that his wife had given years of her time . "I found I could no longer stomach academic gamesmanship, in which anger was disguised as argument, The underlying aggression was too palpable, the need to dominate too naked too ignore." The final straw was when she discovered Paul and a male student in flagrante delicto the early morning following a party for his Teacher of the Year Award ceremony to be awarded the following day. It became impossible to "make bisque out of the carcass of their marriage." When finally they decided to tell the children, Paul took each to lunch and bluntly revealed he was a pederast and their mother an adulteress. After an endless separation and parting, Betty learns to love her independence and aloneness."
She does have a way with words: "The kitchen mediates between power and submission and love and hate. It's the place where, if we but have eyes to see, we can see the miraculous in the ordinary--one can see each day water turned into wine, wine into vinegar, flour into bread, milk into butter, butter into cheese, loaves and fishes into food for multitudes... To eat and be eaten is a consummation devoutly to be wished in a universe that is all mouth, where black holes have a prodigious appetite for stars and neutrinos are always changing flavors. Small wonder that we humans have but one orifice for food, speech and love."
Fussell was born in the late 1920s. Her life and the food coming out of the kitchens of her homes, from childhood with a depressed mother and later an unpleasant stepmother, to her marriage to noted historian and author Paul Fussell, mirror the seismic changes that took place in society. From uninspired, rather tasteless meals meant only to provide sustenance to elaborately conceived and executed parties overflowing with gourmet offerings and loosened sexual mores to a more simple and satisfying fare, Fussell uses kitchen utensils to chart a personal and social history. She cooks up a memoir of her own sensual awakening after a puritanical childhood and a marriage fraught with strife.
After escaping her stepmother's strict and priggish household, she marries Paul Fussell, despite early intimations that there will be problems in their marriage. Initially, she behaves just as a good faculty wife is expected to act, hewing to accepted gender roles, performing as the good little woman, throwing parties and entering into the kitchen competitions that seem to be the sole outlet of the women of the time. She and Paul spar even then though, as Betty's desire to be more, to engage herself intellectually like he is doing, something so long denied to her, makes him feel threatened. Through her food writing, she starts to achieve a feminist awakening, desiring to be more than just Paul's support or secretary for his celebrated books. Eventually earning her PhD in English and finding her own writing voice, she does break out of the prison of the kitchen while still celebrating the essence, skill, and importance of the place, its contents, and food.
Fussell is clearly passionate about food, demonstrating a true foodie transformation over the years. Her narrative voice is distinctive but a bit distant as she shares savory tidbits from her life. She doesn't flinch from telling the unsavory bits either, straightforwardly discussing her own long affair, the heavy drinking and shifting mores of the time, unveiling the pettiness of the private academic life, discussing the sexual politics and the frustrating restrictions on women in the 50s and 60s, taking (perhaps deserved) potshots at Paul, and exposing his sexual predilections. Some of this could come off as salacious but it is so matter-of-factly presented that it doesn't. There are some hints of depressing pretentiousness in the writing but mostly what comes across is the awakening of a smart, resilient woman who fights her kitchen wars and ultimately gains her independence through the surprising power of words and food.