Food for Thought on Love, Marriage, Life

For Betty Fussell, an accomplished culinary writer (and, apparently, a fabulous cook), food is the metaphor for love and sex and the leitmotif that runs throughout her life and this memoir. “Food had infiltrated my heart, seduced my brain, and ravished my senses.” Fussell writes. “Food conjugates my past and future and keeps me centered in the present, in my body, in my animal self.” But food--and the art of preparing it--are also, as Fussell’s title implies, sites of conflict, strife, loss. Cooking, like love, can be a bloody business.

“My Kitchen Wars” is an account of the author’s 30-year marriage to the acclaimed historian Paul Fussell. It is also a social history, albeit a modest and personal one, of the domestic changes that wracked the generation that came of age during World War II. Indeed, it is illuminating to learn just how completely that good war defined the lives of the Fussells. Thus, when the feminist movement emerges in the late 1960s, Betty--despite her thwarted aspirations--pulls back: “My generation of women was betwixt and between, too young to fight in one kind of war, too old to fight in another. Men as a group were not our enemies, they had saved our lives, and in gratitude we protected theirs, often at the expense of our own.”

Betty meets Paul right after the war and “fell in love the way girls did in movies, from the way he looked.” Paul’s love of literature is equally compelling: “I was a willing acolyte, with Paul as my priest.” They soon marry, and the inarticulate terms of their partnership were in no way unusual: She was “to be pretty but not recklessly beautiful, . . . to be intelligent but not to have a mind of her own, . . . to be available for sex when wanted but not to want it on her own.” He was to make his way in the world and produce a meaningful body of scholarship. Betty’s “real work . . . was to take care of Paul”; all else was “moonlighting.”

This was, perhaps, not the most auspicious arrangement for a woman who translated Horace’s odes into English “for the hell of it,” and whose reaction to a miscarriage was to teach herself ancient Greek. Yet both Paul and Betty were good at their jobs. Paul--a truly talented historian (and author of “The Great War and Modern Memory”)--made his way up the academic ladder, aided by Betty, “a well-packaged and intelligent sex object who gave good value as a hostess.” It was a wonderful life, what with Paul’s brilliant career, Betty’s lavish dinner parties, the beautiful house in Princeton, the lovely children, the frequent trips abroad.

There was just one hitch: Betty felt she was dying. The problem, she makes clear, was not Paul--though this book is sometimes angry, it is not bitter--but, rather, the Faustian bargain into which Betty had entered at the very beginning. The center could not hold because, ultimately, Betty wanted to be the subject of her own life rather than the handmaid of her husband’s. And so, in a furious, funny, sad denouement, it all crumbles (complete with infidelities on both sides). But to view “My Kitchen Wars” as the story of a failed marriage is to miss the essential point; it is, rather, the story of a marriage that fulfilled its inherently inegalitarian aims all too well.

Lobsters, the author tells us, are her favorite food because they “play a crucial role in the domestic crises of my life.” Toward the end of this book, Fussell remembers her various lobster dinners--starting with the one on her honeymoon--and muses, “The flavor [is] intensified by all those intervening years and sorrows and angers and fears, which great Neptune’s ocean cannot wash clean because the sea is as full of salt as of other things and when you ope your legs to the sea you embrace not just your dreams but all that is.”