My Kitchen Wars
 Betty Fussell
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 1999 N. Pt Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux NY USA
  ISBN: 0865476039


Culinary memories from a woman in the battleground of her kitchen. As much about hunger - emotional, sexual & intellectual, as it is about food & its preparations. Humor at the cutting board, slapstick at the sink.

“Come in, come in. I've just made coffee and it smells, as good coffee should, of bitter chocolate. Don't mind the mess. It's always this way, because a kitchen is in the middle of things, in the middle of life, as I'm living it now, this moment, the detritus of the past heaped like a midden everywhere you look. That squat brown bean pot we got in 1949 for our first kitchen, in a Boston slum, when I didn't know beans about cooking.”

My Kitchen Wars is a war story. This time, though, the warrior is a woman & her field of battle is the kitchen. Her weapons - the batterie de cuisine of grills & squeezers & knives - evoke a lifetime's need to make dinner, love & war. With these implements, Betty Fussell pries open the past, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped & silenced by an era of domestic strife & global conflict, the Elysian Fields between World War II & Vietnam.

“When I chop onions and carrots, crush garlic, and hunt out meaty bones for my soup, I'm doing what I've done for decades and what women before me have done from the beginning of time, when they used stones instead of knives and ashes instead of pots...A wooden spoon links me to my grandmother in her apron and to the woman who taught Jacob to stir a mess of pottage...And so of arms and the woman I sing, while we drink our coffee, you and I...”

Betty Fussell has also written a love story. Even though she is liberated from the tyrannical puritanism of her family by a veteran of the “Good War,” a young writer named Paul Fussell, she soon finds herself captive again. Constrained by the roles of faculty wife & quad mother in the hierarchy of academia. Still, she hungers for both a life of the mind & carnal pleasures & her inner war to unite body & mind brings down her marriage. In a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver, Betty Fussell, emerges to cook another dinner & to tell her tale in this fierce & funny memoir.

“Dr. Spock was our ammunition against the totalitarianism of our parents. But Spock was only a book, after all, and the squirming, squalling creature in your arms kept you from a leisurely perusal of the index to find out if it was choking to death or having an epileptic fit or just trying to test your will. Anxiety is all I remember feeling for what seems like years at a time. My chronic nightmare was that I had left something at the supermarket and couldn't remember what. Oh my God, the baby!”

Come on in & set yourself down & relive those spastic, plastic decades when we were meant to wear white gloves to open a refrigerator & cooking was the way to the heart of the home.

Fast, frantic & often tartly funny, where the author will snap your funny bone & suck out the marrow even as she prepares you a satisfying feast!

More from Betty Fussell: Mabel: Hollywood's First I-Don't-Care Girl; Masters of American Cookery; I Hear America Cooking; Eating In; Food in Good Season; Home Plates; The Story of Corn; Crazy for Corn & Home Bistro
(02/04/01)

Rebecca