My Kitchen Wars

This is a terrific memoir, intelligent and bitchy and gripping.

As I read this book, my mouth dropped open more and more---not so much because of all the mouth-watering food descriptions, as because it seems like a tale from another time, as remote from my own as Chaucer's stories. Betty Fussell is original and engaging; her work is detailed and sensuous like that of the medieval bard. At one point she quotes an even more famous bard, Shakespeare, "An expense of spirit in a waste of shame," referring to the obsessive amount of time and energy she and her faculty-wife peers spent on their elaborate party meals. One doesn't have to be overly perceptive to realize how good food became such a priority in her life, as she tells us how all the food was "mush" in her childhood; or to realize that, however odd it may seem, she was relieved, even "euphoric"(her own word) at the loss of her third and last baby, since from an early age, she lacked a loving mother herself. Most of her book is about the postWWII era, an anomaly in American life, a time of great prosperity when even English professors made very good money and were able to acquire large, lovely houses and to make frequent trips to live for months at a time in Europe. Denied a career of her own in those pre-feminist times, she poured her efforts into cooking and became an "amateur" expert. (She even moaned the invention of the Cuisinart food processor, which made obsolete all those whisks and grates and sieves she had worked so hard to collect.) In an era of outwardly conservative conformity, she tells us of the troubled marriages and casual adulteries that seemed to be the norm in her circle. She had her heart broken twice: By a writer with whom she carried on an affair that lasted years, and by her husband, whom she caught in a homosexual encounter with one of his students. I love my Cuisinart. I have been a "faculty wife" now for as long as she was, and, like all my friends, my time has been taken up with wider causes than gourmet wooden spoons and garlic presses. Yet my heart goes out to this articulate woman, born less than twenty years before I was, whose life was so constrained and frustrating. There is a wrenching sadness about this book, despite the easy and prosperous era of its setting.

The three reviews which precede mine are superb and capture the essence of this startling and engaging autobiography. Having once been starry-eyed about the groves of academe, I thank my lucky stars that I did not invest more money and energy in order to gain access to a realm so pretentious and shallow, despite the number of books read per person.As an undergraduate at Lehigh University, in 1980 I sat across from Paul Fussell at a luncheon in his honor (he was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar). I was sleep-deprived, whiny, impatient, and highly critical of the conversations at my table, which were neither erudite nor particularly (it seemed to me) honest. "Mr. Fussell, what do academia and pastoral poetry both have in common?" I finally asked him. "They're both filled with crooks" was my snotty answer.After reading MY KITCHEN WARS, I am, in retrospect, not particularly pentitent about my adolescent insolence.

Betty Fussell published her first book, a biography of actress Mabel Normand, in 1982 at the age of 55. Now 72, she has just released her 10th, a memoir titled My Kitchen Wars. In between, she has produced a highly respected body of work in the fields of food and cooking -- two vastly different subjects, as readers of her hands-on cookbooks and her scholarly food histories will testify.My Kitchen Wars, a soul-baring, major departure from her earlier books, is sure to become a favorite among her current fans, and likely to reap a new crop of admirers. The compact 238-page volume skillfully weaves American history, food lore, literary anecdotes, motherhood, and an unsparing look at the discriminatory, male-dominated world of academia in the postwar U.S. The theme of food runs through the book like a golden thread, and there are even a few recipes sewn into the fabric. My Kitchen Wars is at once instructive, entertaining, heart-rending, and eventually uplifting.The book begins rather slowly, with a tracing of Fussell's family roots back to the 18th century. The tempo picks up when Fussell describes her emotionally scarred childhood in Southern California during the Great Depression, and the narrative becomes truly absorbing when Fussell recounts her teenage years in World War II. From that point on, the book traces a familiar theme -- the coming of age in the 1940s and '50s -- but does so with rare insight and brutal honesty, letting us glimpse the era through new eyes. Fussell's experiences, despite their remarkableness, were paralleled by those of a whole generation of American women, and many will identify with her struggles to raise a family and boost her husband's career, while living an intellectual life of her own, against constant obstacles.At an estimated 70,000 to 75,000 words, the book's only disappointment is that it is too short; one can easily imagine it twice as long, with no letdown in quality. From what Fussell tells of her writing habits, it seems likely that she DID write a book twice as long, and that it was whittled down by editors. But with Fussell in her writing prime, we can expect more gems from her prolific pen before long.Almost as an afterthought, I should mention for those unfamiliar with Fussell's background that she was married for more than 30 years to Paul Fussell, the noted historian, writer, and social critic. His 1975 work, The Great War and Modern Memory, is often considered one of the finest nonfiction books written by an American this century. Betty Fussell reveals him in all his contradictions and complexities, and he does not come off well. To her credit, she is hardly kinder to herself, unabashedly describing her long- standing adultery that speeded the marriage breakup.Despite her crucial support of her husband's career -- typing and correcting his manuscripts, offering improvements, and freeing him from worldly chores so that he could excel as a college professor and w