My Kitchen Wars
by Betty Fussell '48
North Point Press, 1999
240 pp., $23.00
Food Fight
By Anita Comtois Moore
In this largely unsentimental memoir, Betty Fussell '48 recounts a life at once at odds with itself yet resolute in finding its own voice. Although infused and informed by kitchen life, My Kitchen Wars is, in fact, about much more. It is about the gritty stuff of life that shapes and refines us all, and Fussell takes no prisoners in telling her own story.
Born into a generation that came of age in the America of World War II, Fussell tells the story of her life from her birth in Riverside, California, through her college days at Pomona, her life as wife and mother and finally as an independent woman and writer. During this journey, her personal, inner wars are described in the context of society as it marched through the eras of World War II and post-World War II, the Eisenhower years and the Cold War, the feminist movement and, of course, the Julia Child years.
She was born into an austere family with an emotionally delicate mother who had committed suicide by the time her daughter was two. When she tells of her father marrying the local old-maid chiropractor a few years later, Fussell describes a childhood where she felt "trapped like a piece of Swiss steak inside my father's favorite newfangled kitchen instrument, the pressure cooker."
When Fussell left to attend Pomona in 1944, she found a whole new world where "To be able to open any kind of soft drink with an experienced flip of the wrist was to open the mouths of new worlds. ... For me, no campus revolution was bigger than the change in what and how I ate."
After college, she married Pasadena-bred Paul Fussell '45, a man who, she says, "demanded a mate smart enough and educated enough to understand his discourse, but ... Victorian that he was, subservience." She marks the beginning of their marriage by describing one of the gifts they received, saying, "It was June 1949, and the Waring blender celebrated not just the end of the war, when technical ingenuity could once again be applied to the domestic front, but the end of Prohibition, for this was a machine designed to mix drinks."
Early in their marriage, when Paul was doing graduate work at Harvard, she decided to study for a master's degree at Radcliffe, being careful to stay "three steps behind, like a Chinese wife." This was perhaps her first step, albeit cautiously taken, outside the constraints of her marriage.
After the birth of their first child, she describes the move to Rutgers where in their new home, "we converted a maid's room into a nursery for the baby and a narrow ironing room into a study for me. We converted the parlor that adjoined the kitchen into a study for Paul," a telling statement on family priorities. By now, the simple entertaining they had begun at Harvard became "dinner parties that suited our love of theatrics," with "lavish buffets, consisting of platters of cold meats and American cheeses, potato salads, macaroni salads, tomato aspics, pumpernickel and rye breads, cake-mix cakes with ready-mix gloopy frostings, or desserts like canned shredded pineapple with walnuts and whipped cream."
After stays in Germany and England, the family returned to Rutgers, where they began giving dinner parties to entice the Princeton literary set.
"Paul's ticket of entrance was his own sharp wit and literary acumen. Mine was a well-packaged and intelligent sex object who gave good value as a hostess." This was the era of the Cold War, when "If the Jerrys didn't get you, the atom bomb would. Today was it, and we wanted to gather all the rosebuds we could find, now. ... It was an era good for kissing and flirting without anything happening at all. Except, of course, it did."
It was during this time, she says, that both began having affairs. Fussell describes her own this way: "Now my body felt like one of my meals, the interstices of ears like snails, the hollow of armpits like the hollow of a pitted avocado, the smooth valleys between thigh and groin like a sauce parisienne. ... I had flipped myself onto a white-hot grill, and no matter how guilty I felt I couldn't get off. I was knowingly, willfully sinning, hurling myself on the coals to be seared until juices oozed from every pore, and yet I couldn't stop. Head and body were at total war, and body was bound to win." Although the affair lasted for seven years, it was not until much later the marriage dissolved.
By the early '60s, Fussell was beginning to understand kitchen life as art: "We didn't want to be professional chefs. We wanted to be artists, and Julia was there to show us how cooking could be elevated to art." It was a time when "The cocktail party with its baroque hors d'oeuvres evolved speedily into the rococo buffet." By the mid '70s, however, Fussell reports that "For a decade we'd concocted a living theater in the kitchen of our dreams, but now the fabric of our vision was melting into thin, thin air."
It was at the same time that Fussell was beginning to grapple with the challenges of what she describes as "the new feminism." Like so many women of her generation (and the next, for that matter), she appreciated the opportunities but could not fully reconcile them with a past that had been informed largely by caretaking, so she took on both, "doing double the work in the same amount of time." And, she reports, "We were showing signs of battle fatigue as the conflicts of the era raged on, not only between generations and genders but on the home front."
In the early '80s, she began full-time graduate work, despite the fact that "I knew my full-time job was to take care of Paul, and anything else was moonlighting." By the time she finished her Ph.D. and was beginning to write articles about food for The New York Times, she had learned that "To write I would have to remove myself from the very air that surrounded Paul and me."
In describing the events that led to their final break, Fussell seems compelled not to spare the reader the slightest unpleasant detail.
While consistent with the honesty that informs her work, the narration seems to take a turn toward vindictiveness. At the same time, however, it may be that she is trying to give the reader an understanding of what it took to make her leave. As she says of what she learned at that time: "There would be no more tears, no more fear of drowning, no more shouldering alone the backpack of guilt for everything that went wrong with our journey. From now on we would go separately. The truth had divided us, but the truth had made us free."
In describing her life, Fussell shows us how adversity refined her art so that by the age of 53 she had comfortably found her own voice. "I knew I could put words together, if I worked at it, just as I could put ingredients together on a plate. Patience at the typewriter was surely as important as patience at the stove, and painstaking detail was what any art was about."
In the end, her book reveals a life of resilience honed at the jaws of a perfect marriage of adversity, with a great sparring partner with whom she sharpened her intellect and built the broad life experience that defines her today, understanding that "The kitchen mediates between power and submission and love and hate and all the other dynamics of living and dying, day by day."
