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My Kitchen Wars
Although My Kitchen Wars is a war story, this time the warrior is a woman and the battleground the kitchen. Her weapons—the batterie de cuisine of grills and squeezers and knives—evoke a lifetime’s need to make dinner, love, and war. By prying open the past with these implements, Betty Fussell gives voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped and yet simultaneously silenced by an era of domestic strife and global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam.
My Kitchen Wars also is a love story, recounting Fussell’s liberation from the tyrannical Puritanism of her family by a veteran of the “Good War,” a young writer named Paul Fussell. But she soon finds herself captive again, constrained by the roles of faculty wife and mother. Still, she cannot stop hungering for both a life of the mind and carnal pleasures. Her inner war to unite body and mind brings down the marriage in a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver. Yet Fussell, however bruised, emerges to cook another dinner and to tell her tale in this fierce and funny memoir. My Kitchen Wars was adapted into a one-woman play performed in Hollywood and New York.
My Kitchen Wars also is a love story, recounting Fussell’s liberation from the tyrannical Puritanism of her family by a veteran of the “Good War,” a young writer named Paul Fussell. But she soon finds herself captive again, constrained by the roles of faculty wife and mother. Still, she cannot stop hungering for both a life of the mind and carnal pleasures. Her inner war to unite body and mind brings down the marriage in a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver. Yet Fussell, however bruised, emerges to cook another dinner and to tell her tale in this fierce and funny memoir. My Kitchen Wars was adapted into a one-woman play performed in Hollywood and New York.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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480 people want to read
About the author
Betty Fussell
25 books51 followersBetty Harper Fussell is an award-winning American writer and is the author of eleven books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history and memoir. Over the last 50 years, her essays on food, travel and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Vogue, Food & Wine, Metropolitan Home and Gastronomica. Her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book is Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef, and she is now working on How to Cook a Coyote: A Manual of Survival in NYC.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
May 31, 2010
It's not that Betty Fussell's life - blighted middle class child, academic wife, dinner party thrower, scholar manqué, handmaiden to the career of Paul Fussell, journalist and author - is undeserving of its own memoir, although it probably is. It's more that her writing isn't strong enough to sustain it. Typical sentence: While wives in sexy low-cut dresses were still a plus, now the aim was to look like a hot tomato while remaining cucumber-cool within. Large chunks of the book are written in the first person plural, where the "we" are either the fellow Princeton professors and spouses of the Fussells' social circle, or women and mothers of the 60s and 70s. This has the effect of making her storytelling less intimate, as if her life isn't so much her own microhistory as it is a reflection of whatever grand social and political currents swirled around her. More and more our Entertainments rang as hollow as the voice of Richard Nixon and as false as the windows with geranium-filled window boxes that city officials had painted on the walls of crumbling slums.
When she does write about actual cuisine, it's not always appetizing. Homemade mayonnaise is "that golden tongue-coating cream," which makes it sound like she forgot to brush her teeth and then slept for twelve hours. The chapter titles are ridiculous: Annihilation by Pressure Cooker, Blitzed by Bottle Caps and Screws, Ambushed by Rack and Tong. The dissolution of her marriage - Paul Fussell was emotionally selfish, demeaned all her attempts to become an independent scholar or writer, and, oh yes, discovered he was something of a pederast (but still wanted to live with her because he needed female care and companionship!) - is compressed into the penultimate chapter, but does make for interesting reading, as does their early friendship with the slightly unbalanced Maggie Roth, who had just been deserted by Philip.
When she does write about actual cuisine, it's not always appetizing. Homemade mayonnaise is "that golden tongue-coating cream," which makes it sound like she forgot to brush her teeth and then slept for twelve hours. The chapter titles are ridiculous: Annihilation by Pressure Cooker, Blitzed by Bottle Caps and Screws, Ambushed by Rack and Tong. The dissolution of her marriage - Paul Fussell was emotionally selfish, demeaned all her attempts to become an independent scholar or writer, and, oh yes, discovered he was something of a pederast (but still wanted to live with her because he needed female care and companionship!) - is compressed into the penultimate chapter, but does make for interesting reading, as does their early friendship with the slightly unbalanced Maggie Roth, who had just been deserted by Philip.
December 28, 2009
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 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."
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 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."
July 4, 2017
Betty Fussell is a good writer. My Kitchen Wars is a good autobiography. This is her story about her growth from a hard scrabble family into the middle then upper classes. Her story is intimate and honest and very much a mirror of what was possible in America from the 1930’s into the late 20th century. I did not always like what I was reading. It is hard to be too sympathetic about a woman whose biggest problem was following the highest fashions in cooking. But this is a compelling view both of this woman’s growth and how she learned to handle problems without herself becoming a victim. Hers is a point of view worth your attention. Hers is a writing style that will engage you. Recommended.
I came to Betty Fussell via her husband, World War II fighting soldier, academician and author Paul Fussell. I admit to a sense of voyeurism attendant to my decision to read about his private life from the POV of his wife. To get that part out of the way: They had both experienced something of American life from the depression years through World War II and into the highly class mobile world of post-World War II. She more so than he.
Theirs was a mostly post war romance. She had been more of a student than a party girl but very much effected by patriotism and a sense of debt towards the fighting men and later the returning vets. Her generation had a vague notion of what it was to be shell shocked and almost no idea of PTSD. She was aware that those who had ‘been there’ deserved special attention and many needed special handling. For her Paul had these issues but was also a scholar from whom she could learn and respect.
Marriage to Paul Fussell gradually brought them into a world of greater physical comfort. Somehow they always wound up in inferior housing. She would profess something of a confusing preference for these homes. She performed the duties of the professor’s wife and the author’s husband but always with some degree of resentment.
The couple would follow most of the trends of their social group and popular culture but… and with Betty there is always a ‘but’, she seems to be separate and resentful of her activity.
Exactly when she begins her career as a writer and a home chef, ala Julia Child is somewhat vague. From the very beginning she is clear, excited and sensual about her connection with cooking, but is not clear when she began to establish her standing as a person apart from family and her husband’s reputation. That Kitchen Wars was written during her 70s is clear from the book. That it was her 10th book is not so clear.
Betty Fussell can be cranky and arch. Too often she indicates her growing frustrations and assumes that you get it. This can make her sound like a person, who having achieved more physical and financial security than most people wants pity because her life is no more perfect than it is. What I think is her intention is that you travel her road to the realization that she can be responsible for her happiness, once she takes that responsibility.
There is something of the many, many books by women, usually American, usually of this or the following generation telling this same story. But many women did travel this same road. In My Kitchen Wars, Betty Fussell tells her version. Her specifics and her writing skills make this a worth the read book.
I came to Betty Fussell via her husband, World War II fighting soldier, academician and author Paul Fussell. I admit to a sense of voyeurism attendant to my decision to read about his private life from the POV of his wife. To get that part out of the way: They had both experienced something of American life from the depression years through World War II and into the highly class mobile world of post-World War II. She more so than he.
Theirs was a mostly post war romance. She had been more of a student than a party girl but very much effected by patriotism and a sense of debt towards the fighting men and later the returning vets. Her generation had a vague notion of what it was to be shell shocked and almost no idea of PTSD. She was aware that those who had ‘been there’ deserved special attention and many needed special handling. For her Paul had these issues but was also a scholar from whom she could learn and respect.
Marriage to Paul Fussell gradually brought them into a world of greater physical comfort. Somehow they always wound up in inferior housing. She would profess something of a confusing preference for these homes. She performed the duties of the professor’s wife and the author’s husband but always with some degree of resentment.
The couple would follow most of the trends of their social group and popular culture but… and with Betty there is always a ‘but’, she seems to be separate and resentful of her activity.
Exactly when she begins her career as a writer and a home chef, ala Julia Child is somewhat vague. From the very beginning she is clear, excited and sensual about her connection with cooking, but is not clear when she began to establish her standing as a person apart from family and her husband’s reputation. That Kitchen Wars was written during her 70s is clear from the book. That it was her 10th book is not so clear.
Betty Fussell can be cranky and arch. Too often she indicates her growing frustrations and assumes that you get it. This can make her sound like a person, who having achieved more physical and financial security than most people wants pity because her life is no more perfect than it is. What I think is her intention is that you travel her road to the realization that she can be responsible for her happiness, once she takes that responsibility.
There is something of the many, many books by women, usually American, usually of this or the following generation telling this same story. But many women did travel this same road. In My Kitchen Wars, Betty Fussell tells her version. Her specifics and her writing skills make this a worth the read book.
June 26, 2017
Fussell's My Kitchen Wars is one of the most uncomfortable book that I've ever read. The analogy of kitchen and food as hostile and warlike denys the essential goodness of that place, and of food as love. Fussell's dispassionate telling of her puritanical upbringing followed by 30 years of conscious or unconscious unhappiness married to Paul Fussell is hard to imagine. The dust jacket cover is symbolic of her life, a huge fork imprisoning a young women with a 1950s hairstyle and kitchen cloth surround.
Like Betty Fussell, I am the spouse of an academic, but my life is ever so much different than hers. Betty Fussell's generation came of age between the wars, with many of the constraints and limitations that that period imposed on women. Her adult life transitioned from poor student Velveeta cheese dip to successful academic elaborate entertainments, parallelling the maturation of American cuisine and food culture.
Betty Fussell might have been writing of me when she says something like it's no wonder that the next generation of women slammed the door on the kitchen and became doctors and lawyers. She chose at first, to try and compete in her husband's domain, one that he was ever so better trained and experienced in. It took her half a lifetime to find her own way and revel in her own talents. How different from my path, shaped thanks to gifted and generous family and the women who came before me.
I began my undergraduate degree at Rutgers College the first year that the college accepted women, instead of referring them to Douglas. Paul Fussell taught at Rutgers while I was there though I never cared to study history, thank goodness. I remember Rutgers faculty who lived in Princeton and felt superior for it. I remember how few women were in the academic ranks any higher than instructor. I remember some of the male students commenting on faculty and administrators who were known to favor young boys, seeking them out in the Ratskeller and down by the railroad. Betty Fussell adds another layer of memory to my time in New Brunswick, and my adult life as it is unfolding.
--Ashland Mystery
Like Betty Fussell, I am the spouse of an academic, but my life is ever so much different than hers. Betty Fussell's generation came of age between the wars, with many of the constraints and limitations that that period imposed on women. Her adult life transitioned from poor student Velveeta cheese dip to successful academic elaborate entertainments, parallelling the maturation of American cuisine and food culture.
Betty Fussell might have been writing of me when she says something like it's no wonder that the next generation of women slammed the door on the kitchen and became doctors and lawyers. She chose at first, to try and compete in her husband's domain, one that he was ever so better trained and experienced in. It took her half a lifetime to find her own way and revel in her own talents. How different from my path, shaped thanks to gifted and generous family and the women who came before me.
I began my undergraduate degree at Rutgers College the first year that the college accepted women, instead of referring them to Douglas. Paul Fussell taught at Rutgers while I was there though I never cared to study history, thank goodness. I remember Rutgers faculty who lived in Princeton and felt superior for it. I remember how few women were in the academic ranks any higher than instructor. I remember some of the male students commenting on faculty and administrators who were known to favor young boys, seeking them out in the Ratskeller and down by the railroad. Betty Fussell adds another layer of memory to my time in New Brunswick, and my adult life as it is unfolding.
--Ashland Mystery
October 21, 2015
Parts of this book were wonderful. When Fussell talks about food, her passion shines through and her writing is almost poetic. The same is true of her studies when the reader can sense some level of pure excitement from academic pursuits. Her stories about the battles between women to out-do one another in the kitchen in the 60s were fabulous, as was her description of her new house.
However, much of the reading is simply not as engaging as it should be. The material is there - tough childhood in a family of fundamentalists, pompous husband, interesting academic circles, problem pregnancies, birth of children, struggle for a career, loads of travel. Unfortunately I sensed no vibrancy or life when she told all of those stories. In fact, at times it really felt as if she didn't want to be sharing the story. I understand parts of her life were extremely difficult and that such sharing must be difficult, but if an author doesn't want to share private or painful parts of life then perhaps a tell-all memoir isn't the appropriate format. I do think it was a major mistake to go so far back on her family tree at the start of the second chapter; I nearly stopped reading right there.
Ultimately I'm glad I continued. I did find it interesting to read about the life of a woman who lived through a time when gender expectations were so very different.
While she attempted to wind the thread of food throughout the book, she wasn't always successful. Occasionally the thread just vanished altogether or felt unnaturally forced so I'm not sure "My Kitchen Wars" is the title I would have chosen.
Fussel's husband always told her she couldn't write and that simply isn't true. When she is excited about her topic, her writing is beautiful. I don't think this memoir reflects her abilities to the fullest.
However, much of the reading is simply not as engaging as it should be. The material is there - tough childhood in a family of fundamentalists, pompous husband, interesting academic circles, problem pregnancies, birth of children, struggle for a career, loads of travel. Unfortunately I sensed no vibrancy or life when she told all of those stories. In fact, at times it really felt as if she didn't want to be sharing the story. I understand parts of her life were extremely difficult and that such sharing must be difficult, but if an author doesn't want to share private or painful parts of life then perhaps a tell-all memoir isn't the appropriate format. I do think it was a major mistake to go so far back on her family tree at the start of the second chapter; I nearly stopped reading right there.
Ultimately I'm glad I continued. I did find it interesting to read about the life of a woman who lived through a time when gender expectations were so very different.
While she attempted to wind the thread of food throughout the book, she wasn't always successful. Occasionally the thread just vanished altogether or felt unnaturally forced so I'm not sure "My Kitchen Wars" is the title I would have chosen.
Fussel's husband always told her she couldn't write and that simply isn't true. When she is excited about her topic, her writing is beautiful. I don't think this memoir reflects her abilities to the fullest.
September 15, 2015
With my love of memoirs still running high after Head Case and Squirting Milk at Chameleons, I wanted to start right in with another memoir. This one was a bit harder to read than the last few memoirs have been for me - most likely because so much of her story, maybe even all of it, takes place before I was even born.
As a child of the 80s, it was hard to relate to the problems of a child growing up during The Great Depression. But once Betty's story reached her college years and marriage, I began to connect more to her story. How can a woman not see some of herself in the lives of others living her story.
The biggest problem I had with reading this novel was that Fussell is, as she said herself- "Given to metaphor more than logic, I sometimes feared there was something wrong with my brain that made the simplest declarative sentence as tricky as a souffle."
Overall though, I did like this book. It just took me longer to get into than any of the memoirs I've read previously. I'd recommend this book to people my age as a glimpse into the life of a wife and mother during the 50s and 60s, as well as to the older set as a way to reconnect with your past, no matter how different it may be than Fussell's.
As a child of the 80s, it was hard to relate to the problems of a child growing up during The Great Depression. But once Betty's story reached her college years and marriage, I began to connect more to her story. How can a woman not see some of herself in the lives of others living her story.
The biggest problem I had with reading this novel was that Fussell is, as she said herself- "Given to metaphor more than logic, I sometimes feared there was something wrong with my brain that made the simplest declarative sentence as tricky as a souffle."
Overall though, I did like this book. It just took me longer to get into than any of the memoirs I've read previously. I'd recommend this book to people my age as a glimpse into the life of a wife and mother during the 50s and 60s, as well as to the older set as a way to reconnect with your past, no matter how different it may be than Fussell's.
June 1, 2013
Take roughly equal parts foodie confessional, Feminine Mystique, and Who's Afraid of Viriginia Woolf; shake; add some kiss-and-tell bitters at the end and serve on the rocks. It's a memorable, distinctive cocktail of a book. But it leaves me with a longing for something else as a chaser -- something wholesome and unpretentious, like an orange or a slice of bread.
January 10, 2010
I wasn't expecting to be blown away by this food memoir, but I got really into Betty Fussell's tale of academia, adultery and food nerdery. She's feisty!
November 2, 2013
I read this book when it first came out so this was a second reading for me. Betty Fussell provides a look at living the life of an academic's wife post-WWII. As Paul Fussell rises in the collegiate community, Betty, no intellectual light-weight herself, clears the path for his writing and studies by handling most of the household duties including ever more complex forays into french cookery. I admit to a little eye-rolling as she describes doing translations for fun and sanity while taking care of a baby in a cramped apartment. The reader is never allowed to forget that the Fussells are intellectuals. I also wondered what the kids were up to as Paul and Betty partied their way from the '50's through the '70's but parents did tend to leave kids to their own devices back then, or at least that's what I remember from my childhood. It is easy to dismiss this book as a self-indulgent missile aimed directly at Paul Fussell's back, but Betty manages to get in her snipes while still presenting a snapshot of a particular segment of America at a significant time in our history. Fussell's book is the reality behind Cheever and Yates. Or for the younger set, "Mad Men." They left the depression and two world wars behind and drunkenly drove their smoke-laden Fords into a shiny, happy future and, for a while, it was true.
March 8, 2009
Smoothly-written memoir combining foodie history and feminist history. It was particularly interesting to get a different generational context than yet another Boomer. It's a complete (and bizarre) coincidence that I read this right after a book by her ex-husband, who probably didn't care very much for this. But as tell-alls go, it was refreshingly low-key. A really different era. Except for the cheap travel to Europe, I'm glad I missed it.
June 10, 2011
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.
July 9, 2008
i really loved this. taking the idea of the cooking/the kitchen= love, and turning it into cooking/the kitchen=a battlefield worked really well for me. her writing was interesting and beautiful.
February 24, 2024
I saw mention of this book at another forum, in reference to her (ex) husband, Paul Fussell. As I'd appreciated his book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, thought I'd give her story a try. Unusually, the middle proved easier than the start and finish to me.
I suppose memoirs should start at the beginning, but the details of her mother's death when Betty was an infant went on a bit much for me. Food was not part of her strict religious background, so the lure of the postwar culinary boom was partly a reaction to that. She was able to attend a secular university (that met with her family's approval), where she met Paul. Her details of that time closely resemble stories from my mother, slightly younger than Betty.
The couple faces a bit of resistance from Paul's WASP New England family, but it's overcome. Betty does a great job of showing daily life for a professor's wife, which I felt related to educated couples of the period. She, of course, follows Julia Child's latest recipes, with dinner parties a regular feature of their lives. It all seemed so "normal" for her, including the support (grunt) work on Paul's professorial duties.
Later, by the time the children were grown, things were not so "normal" indeed. She comes to realize that the glass ceiling of academia that had held her back was cracking. A good time to work on her own capabilities. I'm going to say that Paul proved ... emotionally unstable at that time as well. At one point early on she relates an incident that foreshadowed this, bur the couple were enjoying their symbiotic co-dependency at the time.
There was a bit of name-dropping at times, but their life was what it was. She admits that they fell for the "everything European must be superior" trap, again it was what it was. That aside, she tells her story well using relevant examples. Despite the sexism, she makes an effort to be an interesting person among other interesting people.
I'm glad I read it, and recommend it for those who think they might like it.
I suppose memoirs should start at the beginning, but the details of her mother's death when Betty was an infant went on a bit much for me. Food was not part of her strict religious background, so the lure of the postwar culinary boom was partly a reaction to that. She was able to attend a secular university (that met with her family's approval), where she met Paul. Her details of that time closely resemble stories from my mother, slightly younger than Betty.
The couple faces a bit of resistance from Paul's WASP New England family, but it's overcome. Betty does a great job of showing daily life for a professor's wife, which I felt related to educated couples of the period. She, of course, follows Julia Child's latest recipes, with dinner parties a regular feature of their lives. It all seemed so "normal" for her, including the support (grunt) work on Paul's professorial duties.
Later, by the time the children were grown, things were not so "normal" indeed. She comes to realize that the glass ceiling of academia that had held her back was cracking. A good time to work on her own capabilities. I'm going to say that Paul proved ... emotionally unstable at that time as well. At one point early on she relates an incident that foreshadowed this, bur the couple were enjoying their symbiotic co-dependency at the time.
There was a bit of name-dropping at times, but their life was what it was. She admits that they fell for the "everything European must be superior" trap, again it was what it was. That aside, she tells her story well using relevant examples. Despite the sexism, she makes an effort to be an interesting person among other interesting people.
I'm glad I read it, and recommend it for those who think they might like it.
February 5, 2020
+ p88 These were women from whom I learned by osmosis what I'd begun to learn by lecture at graduate school. My mind was still like the empty bowl of the bleder, begging to be filled, and what ingredients were to be had! From Roz [Rosemond Tuve],metaphor as a mode of perception, a way of knowing...
p150 You could make hors d'oeuvres weeks ahead and freeze them until the time came to dazzle the assembled multitude with tiny cream puffs stuffed with creamed crab, mushroom caps stuffed with veal, Parmesan cheese straws, turnovers filled with Roquefort or Gruyere, grilled bacon wrapped round a chicken liver or a fig, canapes topped with cream cheese and salmon caviar, salami cornucopias filled with sherried Cheddar and skewered with a toothpick, Roquefort cheese balls rolled in chopped pecans, tiny tartlets filled with minced chicken livers in a thick bechamel.
p222 "...the auction at which I had acquired the turquoise-and-beige Kazak rug, bigger than anyone else wanted, lucky for us. The extendable table came from a two-story warehouse of Victorian junk in New Brunswick when Victoriana could be had for a player-piano song. The settee we'd gotten at a New Jersey farm near Ringoes, where an old woman sat rocking on the porch that was auctioned out from under her as she watched the current of her life seep into the hands of strangers. I had seen another woman cry when her set of imitation Chippendale chairs--the pride of a dining-room suite lovingly dusted over the years, as children axed and grown-ups waned, until even the kitchen was too big to eat in--was sold for twenty-five dollars for the lot. I knew that my pleasure in these bargains was purchased at the cost of someone else's pain, and that part of the price was the responsibility for cherishing the object of someone else's affections."
p150 You could make hors d'oeuvres weeks ahead and freeze them until the time came to dazzle the assembled multitude with tiny cream puffs stuffed with creamed crab, mushroom caps stuffed with veal, Parmesan cheese straws, turnovers filled with Roquefort or Gruyere, grilled bacon wrapped round a chicken liver or a fig, canapes topped with cream cheese and salmon caviar, salami cornucopias filled with sherried Cheddar and skewered with a toothpick, Roquefort cheese balls rolled in chopped pecans, tiny tartlets filled with minced chicken livers in a thick bechamel.
p222 "...the auction at which I had acquired the turquoise-and-beige Kazak rug, bigger than anyone else wanted, lucky for us. The extendable table came from a two-story warehouse of Victorian junk in New Brunswick when Victoriana could be had for a player-piano song. The settee we'd gotten at a New Jersey farm near Ringoes, where an old woman sat rocking on the porch that was auctioned out from under her as she watched the current of her life seep into the hands of strangers. I had seen another woman cry when her set of imitation Chippendale chairs--the pride of a dining-room suite lovingly dusted over the years, as children axed and grown-ups waned, until even the kitchen was too big to eat in--was sold for twenty-five dollars for the lot. I knew that my pleasure in these bargains was purchased at the cost of someone else's pain, and that part of the price was the responsibility for cherishing the object of someone else's affections."
January 29, 2021
Couldn't ever feel like I liked the protagonist. She really enjoyed drinking, that is the only thing she shows real enthusiasm for, and kind of badmouthing others. I think she was attempting to write a feminist masterpiece, but the whole thing falls flat.
I didn't actually finish this book as it didn't meet my criteria for not being garbage. So maybe the last third got much better, but I doubt it.
She hates being a mother, although she just hires out most mothering. She uses plenty of unnecessary profanity, and she is never funny. Her husband took her all over Europe, pays for nice houses, etc, and all she does is complain about him and eventually divorce him. She took all of the pleasure of being a spoiled wife for granted and just is a totally unsympathetic character.
And yes, this is based on her real life, but some people with much blander lives manage to write them entertaining.
I didn't actually finish this book as it didn't meet my criteria for not being garbage. So maybe the last third got much better, but I doubt it.
She hates being a mother, although she just hires out most mothering. She uses plenty of unnecessary profanity, and she is never funny. Her husband took her all over Europe, pays for nice houses, etc, and all she does is complain about him and eventually divorce him. She took all of the pleasure of being a spoiled wife for granted and just is a totally unsympathetic character.
And yes, this is based on her real life, but some people with much blander lives manage to write them entertaining.
February 20, 2017
FANTASTIC. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and related to it in more than a few ways. Clear, honest, she doesn't pull any punches. I highly recommend it, especially to anyone who is attempting to turn, look back - no matter what point you are in life - and be honest about what you've not been willing to examine.
April 22, 2020
There's some racism in the begining that was hard to get through but I think very much have to read it with a grain of salt- like a product of its environment you know? but if you get past that it was a good read. Felt like a glimpse into American upper class in the 1960s. I'm glad I stuck it out.
March 3, 2023
This is an excellent autobiography, honestly written and a good insight into 1930s America and beyond. Betty has an engaging way of writing that is both engaging and interesting. Her connection with cooking is infectious and her character comes through on each page. I recommend this read.
April 21, 2023
This book isn't quite what I expected it to be, but after I read it I wanted to write a thank you note to Ms Fussell for having written it. They aren't just *your* kitchen wars, ma'am; they are *our* kitchen wars.
June 6, 2016
Food writer Betty Fussell's memoir, "My Kitchen Wars", was originally in 1999. I was just offered it as a Kindle ebook for $2.99 and decided to take chance on it. I found it interesting and more reflective than many memoirs are. Memoirs are a strange breed of book; the author can basically write anything they want about themselves. Unlike a biography, in general, memoirs are not "fact-checked". The "facts" being presented by the memoir-writer are as "correct", as "remembered".
Betty Fussell was the first wife of historian and essayist, Paul Fussell. They met after WW2 when both were students at Pomona College in California. Paul was a returning GI, from a prominent Pasadena family, while Betty was from a middle-class background. Her mother had died under suspicious circumstances when Betty was a toddler. Betty and Paul married young and together climbed thel academic ladder as Paul both taught and wrote at Rutgers and Princeton. Paul was the famous one; Betty was the help-meet, who raised the kids and made life outside the classroom "easier" for him. She also cooked. She cooked using Julia Child's methods and entertained the Fussell's friends in their Princeton home. Betty became famous in her own right as an author of cookbooks and travel books. Their marriage ended, Betty began her life anew, and she eventually wrote this memoir.
Betty Fussell's memoir is that of a woman who is trapped in the mores of the times in which she lives. Brought up strictly by a religious father, step-mother, and grandparents, she attends college during the WW2 years, with the attendant, "can't go too far" sexual rules. The 1950's and 60's, with the post-war casting off of many of those rules, find middle-class life much more fun with married adults now experiencing a whole lot of hanky-panky. "Key" parties and sneaking off to the bushes are in style and Betty Fussell finds herself tempted by other men. She succumbs...as does Paul.
How "honest" is Betty Fussell in her memoir? She's fairly open with the facts - not always flattering about either her or her husband - but the writing is not mean-spirited. She writes about her first 72 or so years of life and I'm willing to bet that her life was not much different than other women who lead lives in a secondary position to their husbands. "Secondary"...until they burst out their bubble, as Betty Fussell does.
Betty Fussell was the first wife of historian and essayist, Paul Fussell. They met after WW2 when both were students at Pomona College in California. Paul was a returning GI, from a prominent Pasadena family, while Betty was from a middle-class background. Her mother had died under suspicious circumstances when Betty was a toddler. Betty and Paul married young and together climbed thel academic ladder as Paul both taught and wrote at Rutgers and Princeton. Paul was the famous one; Betty was the help-meet, who raised the kids and made life outside the classroom "easier" for him. She also cooked. She cooked using Julia Child's methods and entertained the Fussell's friends in their Princeton home. Betty became famous in her own right as an author of cookbooks and travel books. Their marriage ended, Betty began her life anew, and she eventually wrote this memoir.
Betty Fussell's memoir is that of a woman who is trapped in the mores of the times in which she lives. Brought up strictly by a religious father, step-mother, and grandparents, she attends college during the WW2 years, with the attendant, "can't go too far" sexual rules. The 1950's and 60's, with the post-war casting off of many of those rules, find middle-class life much more fun with married adults now experiencing a whole lot of hanky-panky. "Key" parties and sneaking off to the bushes are in style and Betty Fussell finds herself tempted by other men. She succumbs...as does Paul.
How "honest" is Betty Fussell in her memoir? She's fairly open with the facts - not always flattering about either her or her husband - but the writing is not mean-spirited. She writes about her first 72 or so years of life and I'm willing to bet that her life was not much different than other women who lead lives in a secondary position to their husbands. "Secondary"...until they burst out their bubble, as Betty Fussell does.
March 15, 2015
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 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.
December 17, 2016
Kitchen Wars and Domestic Battles
This was an interesting memoir by Betty Fussell. I must admit that I had no idea who she is. Ms. Fussell is primarily a food writer and this book was written in 1999. It was also performed as a one-woman show on Broadway. I would like to see that play. In fact, I think I may have enjoyed this book more as an audiobook or as a play. Some things are better performed than read.
Kitchen Wars is Ms. Fussell's life from childhood, to marriage, and through divorce. Her mother dies when she is quite young and she and her brother are raised by various family members until their father remarries. They do not like their step-mother. Ms. Fussell escapes to college as the men are coming home from WWII. She meets and marries a GI, despite some read flags. Paul Fussell is a writer and war historian. They travel to Europe several times. They eventually settle down to raise their children and Paul's career advances. Ms. Fussell also wants to further her education and career, but is careful to pick something where she will not be competing with her husband and his ego. He belittles and criticizes her work anyway. The Fussell's have flirtations and affairs. They throw fabulous dinner parties, attended by famous writers. The marriage ends.
All of these events are told amidst the backdrop of food. Glorious food! Ms. Fussell talks about the changes in kitchen equipment and the impact of Julia Child. The dinner party was a competitive event. At the same time, you had to give the appearance of effortlessness. In addition to being about food, this book is also about the role of upper middle-class women from the 1940's through the 1970's. The book is well written and at times humorous. I gave it only four stars because I felt that Ms. Fussell was keeping the reader at a safe distance. I never fully connected with her. I suspect it may seem more intimate as a play.
This was an interesting memoir by Betty Fussell. I must admit that I had no idea who she is. Ms. Fussell is primarily a food writer and this book was written in 1999. It was also performed as a one-woman show on Broadway. I would like to see that play. In fact, I think I may have enjoyed this book more as an audiobook or as a play. Some things are better performed than read.
Kitchen Wars is Ms. Fussell's life from childhood, to marriage, and through divorce. Her mother dies when she is quite young and she and her brother are raised by various family members until their father remarries. They do not like their step-mother. Ms. Fussell escapes to college as the men are coming home from WWII. She meets and marries a GI, despite some read flags. Paul Fussell is a writer and war historian. They travel to Europe several times. They eventually settle down to raise their children and Paul's career advances. Ms. Fussell also wants to further her education and career, but is careful to pick something where she will not be competing with her husband and his ego. He belittles and criticizes her work anyway. The Fussell's have flirtations and affairs. They throw fabulous dinner parties, attended by famous writers. The marriage ends.
All of these events are told amidst the backdrop of food. Glorious food! Ms. Fussell talks about the changes in kitchen equipment and the impact of Julia Child. The dinner party was a competitive event. At the same time, you had to give the appearance of effortlessness. In addition to being about food, this book is also about the role of upper middle-class women from the 1940's through the 1970's. The book is well written and at times humorous. I gave it only four stars because I felt that Ms. Fussell was keeping the reader at a safe distance. I never fully connected with her. I suspect it may seem more intimate as a play.
April 22, 2013
i loved reading this. Betty is Paul Fussell's ex-wife, and she describes wonderfully how it felt to be a smart and well-educated woman in the post-war 50s in the academic setting when women simply weren't hired in academia. She and other smart women turned to Entertaining as a Competitive Sport. "No event was too small to be sanctified by a party" (including an At-Home for 200 people). "So many parties. So much art down the gullet."
she also writes about the couple's eventual separation, which came after she got a teaching job (times had changed) and spent part of each week in NY to write.
"Paul couldn't understand why I didn't rent an office in Princeton. Then I could write during the day and come home each night. And of course pick up groceries on the way home and cook them up and have a few friends over for drinks and get into knockdown fights disguised as intellectual discussions--the usual routine. He couldn't understand that if I didn't break the routine, the routine would break me. I yearned to create something permanent, something concrete, to have something to show at the end of a few decades' hard work. Instead of making a loaf of bread that might keep for a week, I wanted to make a book that would last for years. I wanted a longer shelf life."
Well, she has gotten it!
a realy pleasure to read.
she also writes about the couple's eventual separation, which came after she got a teaching job (times had changed) and spent part of each week in NY to write.
"Paul couldn't understand why I didn't rent an office in Princeton. Then I could write during the day and come home each night. And of course pick up groceries on the way home and cook them up and have a few friends over for drinks and get into knockdown fights disguised as intellectual discussions--the usual routine. He couldn't understand that if I didn't break the routine, the routine would break me. I yearned to create something permanent, something concrete, to have something to show at the end of a few decades' hard work. Instead of making a loaf of bread that might keep for a week, I wanted to make a book that would last for years. I wanted a longer shelf life."
Well, she has gotten it!
a realy pleasure to read.
May 29, 2015
I'm so glad that I read this book.
Although Betty Fussell was born 50 years before me, I saw myself struggling with the same issues she struggled with in trying to have both career and family. I found her very honest in describing how enthusiastically and easily she accepted her role as a wife (that did not work for pay), how she dealt with being a less than equal partner in her marriage, and how she was not without fault in the death of her marriage. I wondered what it would be like to make the same choice and discard my career that demands 60+ hours a week so that I can have dinner with my family every night and not be so exhausted in general. Would I ultimately resent throwing away my career and hate my husband? 'Having it all' sure is exhausting but I guess having less is no picnic either. I was given this book by Netgalley for an honest review
Although Betty Fussell was born 50 years before me, I saw myself struggling with the same issues she struggled with in trying to have both career and family. I found her very honest in describing how enthusiastically and easily she accepted her role as a wife (that did not work for pay), how she dealt with being a less than equal partner in her marriage, and how she was not without fault in the death of her marriage. I wondered what it would be like to make the same choice and discard my career that demands 60+ hours a week so that I can have dinner with my family every night and not be so exhausted in general. Would I ultimately resent throwing away my career and hate my husband? 'Having it all' sure is exhausting but I guess having less is no picnic either. I was given this book by Netgalley for an honest review
May 20, 2009
*Spoiler alert*
As a person who loves food and memoirs, I thought this book was great. My beef (ha) with it is the way it dealt with homosexuality. A woman and her husband spend the duration of their 30-year marriage engaging in heteronormative adultery that both are aware of and seemingly ok with, but suddenly the husband has a sexual encounter with a male student and the marriage is over? The absolute finality of this decision despite all the previous transgressions makes this reader uneasy, but the narrator's utter repulsion and skirting of the use of the word "gay," are downright homophobic. Historical context cannot be blamed, either: the marriage may have begun in the 50's, but by the 80's/90's, a well-read literary icon should've known better.
As a person who loves food and memoirs, I thought this book was great. My beef (ha) with it is the way it dealt with homosexuality. A woman and her husband spend the duration of their 30-year marriage engaging in heteronormative adultery that both are aware of and seemingly ok with, but suddenly the husband has a sexual encounter with a male student and the marriage is over? The absolute finality of this decision despite all the previous transgressions makes this reader uneasy, but the narrator's utter repulsion and skirting of the use of the word "gay," are downright homophobic. Historical context cannot be blamed, either: the marriage may have begun in the 50's, but by the 80's/90's, a well-read literary icon should've known better.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 29, 2013
This memoir covers a rather large swath of Betty Fussell's life and she paints a vivid picture of the many conflicts and challenges she had, all loosely centered around food, eating and her struggle to find her place - in her marriage and as a woman. She eventually does and at the end of the book settles into her work as a food critic, cookbook author and contributor to several publications, all centered around food. Her writing style is an entertaining read although her long lists of French dishes and party menus start to slow down the action and I found myself cruising past them. If you're interested in the life of academics (Betty's husband) and have any interest in living abroad, (she did several times - England, Germany and France) you may enjoy this title.
Read
January 25, 2014Picked this for the Beyond the Library book discussion group that I lead for my library, the Itasca Community Library, and got very mixed reviews. With my luck, the few women who actually liked it could not make the meeting. Those who were there did not seem to care for Fussell's style or could not relate to her story. Granted, it seemed like she wrote it just to be able to make her better-known husband Paul look like a jerk ... but there were also many other insightful nuggets into the '50s and '60s, particularly about women's roles and their place in the kitchen and academe. Most fascinating, for me, were the essays on academic wives who discovered Julia Child and indulged in entertaining with delicious, competitive fervor. Fussell is well-known in the food writing world.
February 15, 2015
"I was glad for the new doors opened by affirmative action, but I found it impossible to shut them firmly behind me. I had invested too much in my decades of caretaking, which despite its frustrations had meaning to me. I couldn't simply exchange one role for another, so like countless other women I took on both, doing double the work in the same amount of time."
AND
"I yearned to create something permanent, something concrete, to have something to show at the end of a few decades' hard work. Instead of making a loaf of bread that might keep for a week, I wanted to make a book that would last for years. I wanted a longer shelf life."
AND
"I yearned to create something permanent, something concrete, to have something to show at the end of a few decades' hard work. Instead of making a loaf of bread that might keep for a week, I wanted to make a book that would last for years. I wanted a longer shelf life."
March 31, 2009
I really wanted to like this book. I really wanted the reviewers to be wrong. This is one of those times I don't get my wish. This could have been a good book if Fussell wasn't so unpleasant. Her moments of happiness and affirmation are few and far between. Granted, she comes by her dourness via her miserable family, but having survived it, I wanted her to show a glimmer of hope here and there and eventually come out at the end all-conquering and powerful. Instead, she seems satisfied to have revealed everyone who ever did her wrong, and revel in that alone.
October 13, 2008
I didn't care for this book. It said it was a humorous memior, but I found it pretensious, boring, and kind of sad. There were a few parts I chuckled at, but the author seemed to busy trying to impress the reader with how much literature and classic authors she's read, how many trips she took over seas, and how much french cooking she knew. I just couldn't relate to her. Not my type of book. Others would probably like it.
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