Not Just Sugar and Spice

Food historian and scholar Betty Fussell, author of “The Story of Corn,” a Julia Child Cookbook Award winner, came of age during World War II. Her latest book, however, about the familiar domestic road taken by women of that generation, is no sentimental journey. Don’t be fooled by the title, either. “My Kitchen Wars” is imbued with no cozy, Erma Bombeck-ish twinkle. Fussell’s chronicle of her 30-year marriage to noted war historian and cultural critic Paul Fussell is a fierce, tart-tongued, sensual and juicily uninhibited odyssey of self-discovery and societal observation, inextricably linked with that most fundamental of human needs: food.

Fussell, in collaboration with director and stage and screen acting veteran Dorothy Lyman, is bringing her story to the stage; Lyman stars in the world premiere of the new one-woman play “My Kitchen Wars--A Marriage Digested,” opening Saturday at Hollywood’s 2nd Stage Theatre.

Question: In your book, food is the touchstone of your life: butter, chicken and eggs at your grandmother’s house, Ritz crackers and pimiento cheese in your collegedorm, a newlywed’s Lipton soup tuna casserole. And then that honeymoon lobster . . .

Answer: Food is a good index of other things that are happening, both personal and cultural. So lobster was a kind of exploration of totally exotic territory. And then it came to represent, because it is so succulent and fleshy and sexy, all of those things that shellfish does connote in many cultures.

Q: There’s a scene in your book where you dispatch a lobster with great gusto. It’s almost gleeful.

A: Oh, absolutely, at that moment, yes. But I really do feel that cooking, that everything to do in the food world, is as full of violence as it is of comfort and nostalgia, just as my kind of war was not heroic violence, but domesticity.

Lobster is just dramatic because so many people are squeamish about it, understandably, because the thing is very much alive, and then it’s dead.

And we don’t do chickens with our hands anymore the way my grandfather did. We’ve protected ourselves from that. And then we get the Save Our Lobster movements. What are you going to eat? Every carrot squeals when you rip it from the ground if you had but ears to hear it.

Q: The evolution of tools used for cooking became a part of your personal journey, too: your father’s pressure cooker, the Waring blender wedding gifts, the Weber grill, your Cuisinart--

A: --because they really are kitchen weapons. Women have a whole battery. This is an evolution from the fire and the tools of fire, and they became enormously, baroquely elaborated.

Q: You write of cooking as both brutality and civilization. The language can be brutal, certainly: grinding, gutting, chopping . . .

A: The language represents the action. The action itself is brutal. It’s just that we have removed ourselves from so much of the food chain, and so much of the food preparation chain, that we just get the la-di-da on top.

Q: When you went to college, you discovered another world.

A: Not everybody grew up as Calvinistically repressed intellectually as I did. But it meant that the discovery was all the more exciting--as [in] discovering lobster. The world of the flesh was one kind [of discovery]; discovering the mind was enormously exciting, remains exciting. I’m forever grateful to Pomona [College].

Q: For many women, freedom is being able to stay out of the kitchen. You wanted to be more than a satellite to your husband’s literary life, yet you didn’t identify with 1960s feminism. Why not?

A: The women I knew, their voices were so shrill and so angry and dogmatic, I thought, this is not my battle.

Q: Later, though, you did break through your own constraints.

A: Right, and you’re getting at something that’s very good, and complicated: my own feelings on this. I wanted to do it my way, if I could find the way. The oversimplification of the [feminist] argument bothered me. I think I also felt, and still feel, complicated emotions about the guys of the generation of my husband’s [who fought in World War II]. I will always feel a debt of gratitude there.

Q: What have the challenges been in bringing your book to the stage? There are so many sensual images.

A: But it’s a narrative, so the challenge is to put words into action. I’m a theater nut, so this is not foreign territory to me. So, I realized that you have to have a different kind of immediacy of response.

Q: Were you involved in what will be used on stage?

A: I presented three or four versions on the basis of what Dorothy responded to personally. It’s been a long collaboration. Even though we’re in different parts of the world [Fussell lives in New York], we’re both so much on the same wavelength, it’s easy for me to say, yeah, I see that she doesn’t want this and why she would select that.

Q: What scenes will be included?

A: It opens spectacularly with the lobster [she laughs]. She will be cooking a lobster bisque throughout--I love the idea of having lobster bisque perfuming the air.

Q: What is food to you today?

A: Food is reality. It’s a reality check and it’s a reality bliss. It’s the thrill of being alive in the world every time you eat a meal.

* “My Kitchen Wars--A Marriage Digested” opens Saturday at 8 p.m. at the 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood, playing Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 and 7 p.m. through Feb. 18. $20.