My Kitchen Wars - Hardcover

Fussell, Betty Harper

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865475776 ISBN 13: 9780865475779

Publisher: North Point Pr, 1999

Synopsis

A darkly comic memoir of the "kitchen wars" traces one woman's struggles in the post-war period as she wages war on the Puritanism of her upbringing and the social strictures preventing her from a host of pleasures, both carnal and professional

About this title

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: North Point Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0865475776
• ISBN 13: 9780865475779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 238