My Kitchen Wars

This fierce and funny memoir of kitchen and bedroom from the James Beard award winner Betty Fussell charts the changes in American social culture through the medium of food.

In this witty and candid autobiographical mock epic, Fussell survives a motherless household during the Great Depression, gets married to the well-known writer and war historian Paul Fussell after World War II, goes through a divorce, and finally escapes to New York City in her mid-fifties, batterie de cuisine intact. Nearly twenty years on from that marital upheaval, Fussell still appears to want to extract her pound of flesh from an ex husband who she accuses of 'rolling around on a couch, buck naked with a male student.' Her husband didn't take (this accusation) laying down and responded with his own memoir which alleged that his marriage was instead ended by a combination of alcoholism and two people growing apart against a backdrop of seismic social change.

I sympathise with Betty though as I read on through accounts of casual cruelty, deliberate belittling and the hundred and one ways in which we help love to die. Her dismissal of the feminist movement as 'narrow and dogmatic' is a little harder to forgive though especially in the light of her apparent failure to understand how the issues that bedevilled her marriage were part of a wider struggle for women to gain recognition for their own achievements instead of through the prism of wifely support.

As the book moves on, we see Betty's involvement with, and love of food, as emblematic of American culinary history and innovation as she motors through an account of mastering the Cuisinart, a device that helped untie the cords binding housewives so closely to their kitchens, to talking about bowel health (she was an exponent of the Fletcher method of chewing food) to her eventual expertise in all things gustatory.

And we have sexual appetites too with Kingsley Amis accosting and propositioning her in the bathroom. a seven year affair with a colleague and Maggie, the wine soaked wife of Philip Roth crawling into her bed, only to be rebuffed.We learn that her husband loved a day glo pant (as in underwear) and grew narcissistically obsessed with them (can you think of a more seventies image than that? Pure Boogie Nights). Fussell ladles out the food, the sex, the travel and the travails. Juicily.