Betty Fussell

The kitchen is the heart of the home. It's the place where everyone ends up during a party. It's where the family gathers together. But the kitchen can be a battleground too, reflecting the state of the family. In Betty Fussell's memoir, My Kitchen Wars, the noted food writer and cookbook author takes on her early life and long marriage through the lens of food, kitchen tools, and cooking.

Fussell was born in the late 1920s. Her life and the food coming out of the kitchens of her homes, from show more 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. show less

We're all familiar with Paul Fussell, whose works about war and its effect on culture and vice versa are seminal. Betty Fussell provides an intimate look at a different kind of war: spousal. This is the story of her journey to independence and self-fulfillment.

She and Paul came from different sides of the track. His life was much more privileged, but she hungered for the same knowledge of literature. The kitchen -- she was to become a famous cook and writer -- held a morbid attraction to show more her. Forbidden to use the pressure cooker, it became an Olympic hurdle to conquer, and danger was part of the attraction, even as a friend of hers was killed years later when the stove blew up as she went to make breakfast "turning her into a cinder."

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." show less

My Kitchen Wars is a dense, furious and absorbing read by food journalist Betty Fussell. Smart and talented, she lived in the shadow of a"great man" in academia during the 1950's. She went from a loveless childhood to a difficult marriage and using cooking metaphors (The Invasion of Warring Blenders) she describes the skirmishes and outright battles that occurred between the sexes in post WWII middle class America regarding women's roles. As expected, Ms Fussell threw herself into making a show more home for her family by cooking sumptuous meals, decorating her large and historic home and taking care of the children yet Ms Fussell also wanted a career of her own. The cultural constrictions were formidable and the obstacles were real including, according to the author, a husband who mocked her ambitions and talent. So Ms Fussell cooked and cooked; she cooked like many middle and upper-middle class women in her generation. She cooked luxurious and elaborate meals which she describes in great, mouthwatering exhaustive detail and she learned about other food cultures through travel and reading. She also had a large social life with similar couples and had several affairs, as did her husband. What captured me about this book was the detailed narrative of her relationship to food and its role in sometimes subordinating and also freeing her (her articles are her entry into public life), the author's clear description of academic with its patriarchal bias and her longing to engage in a public intellectual life despite her gender. The descriptions of her aspirations and how she fought to satisfy them were moving; sad and furious and spirited. At the same time it is clearly Ms. Fussell's story with little attempt to help us understand her husband and why there was so little genuine connection and what part she played in this. I also thought that there was a whiff of homophobia in her describing her husband's gay affair as the reason for the end of the marriage as opposed to the many affairs that they both had all along. Despite this, I am thankful that Netgalley allowed me to review this compelling book for an honest review. show less

Fascinating. I think I expected more "kitchen" in the first 3/4 - she really doesn't get interested in or talk about food until much later in life - but she's a great storyteller. I have no idea how she survived with her husband for so long. I would have killed him the first time he told her she couldn't write. I need to find some of her cookbooks now.