My Kitchen Wars - Hardcover

Fussell, Betty Harper

3.39

266 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786226978 ISBN 13: 9780786226979

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2000

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A veteran of the era's domestic battles takes no prisoners in a fierce and funny memoir.

My Kitchen Wars is a war story, but the warrior is a woman, and the battleground is the kitchen. Her weapons-the batterie de cuisine of grills and squeezers and knives-evoke a lifelong need to make dinner, love, and war. With these implements, Betty Fussell pries open the past, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped but also silenced by an era of global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam. This is also a love story, as Fussell is liberated from the tyrannical puritanism of her family by a veteran of the "Good War," a young writer named Paul Fussell. But in the role of bride, Fussell finds herself captive as faculty wife and mother. She hungers for both a life of the mind and carnal pleasures. Her inner war to unite body and intellect brings down the marriage, in a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver. Yet Fussell, however bloodied, emerges to cook another dinner and to tell this blackly comic tale.

Betty Fussell is the author of nine books, including The Story of Corn (NPP, 1999). A contributor to publications ranging from The New York Times to the Journal of Gastronomy, she has lectured widely on food history. She lives in New York City.

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Review:

She may be a cookbook author, but Betty Fussell's extra-tart autobiography is no ordinary gastronomic memoir. For starters, her attitude toward cooking ("the one activity, besides tennis, in which housewives were encouraged to excel") is decidedly ambivalent. A chapter entitled "Attack by Whisk and Cuisinart" paints a devastating portrait of entertaining as a competitive sport, in which women who spend weeks planning and executing elaborate dinner parties must "pretend there'd been no labor, no expense, no fatigue, no sweat ... the aim was to look like a hot tomato while remaining cucumber-cool." For another thing, anyone with Fussell's gift for apt metaphor should enjoy chapters like "To Arms with Squeezer and Slicer," or "Invasion of the Waring Blenders," whose titles wittily encapsulate their content and would be wasted on mere recipes or recollections of Chefs I Have Known. Instead, she limns the experience of a generation of women who flung themselves into domesticity after World War II with mixed results, which in the author's case included an ultimately failed marriage to cultural historian Paul Fussell (who is not treated gently here). Smart, funny, even appetizing at times, her book takes one woman's story as a case study of the role food plays in our lives and in our culture. --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Betty Fussell has lectured widely on food and food history and won the 2008 James Beard Award for “Magazine Feature Writing with Recipes.” She is the author of eleven books, including Masters of American Cookery: M. F. K. Fisher, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child (available in a Bison Books edition), The Story of Corn, and Raising Steaks. Laura Shapiro is the author of Julia Child (winner of the Literary Book Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals) and several other books.

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