Betty Fussell – författare

Although My Kitchen Wars is a war story, this time the warrior is a woman and the battleground the kitchen. Her weapons—the batterie de cuisine of grills and squeezers and knives—evoke a lifetime's need to make dinner, love, and war. By prying open the past with these implements, Betty Fussell gives voice to a generation of women whose stories were shaped and yet simultaneously silenced by an era of domestic strife and global conflict, from World War II to Vietnam. My Kitchen Wars also is a love story, recounting Fussell's liberation from the tyrannical Puritanism of her family by a veteran of the "Good War," a young writer named Paul Fussell. But she soon finds herself captive again, constrained by the roles of faculty wife and mother. Still, she cannot stop hungering for both a life of the mind and carnal pleasures. Her inner war to unite body and mind brings down the marriage in a denouement as brutal as the whack of a cleaver. Yet Fussell, however bruised, emerges to cook another dinner and to tell her tale in this fierce and funny memoir. My Kitchen Wars was adapted into a one-woman play performed in Hollywood and New York.

Ever since American soldiers returned home after World War II with a passion for pâté and escargots instead of pork and beans, our preferences have moved from cooked to raw, from canned to fresh, from bland to savory, from water to wine. And guiding us through our culinary revolution have been four of the world's finest food experts: Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, James Beard, and M. F. K. Fisher. In Masters of American Cookery, Betty Fussell demonstrates vividly how each of these chefs has made a unique and invaluable contribution to the American way of cooking and eating. In more than two hundred recipes—in chapters on appetizers, soups, salads, sauces, meats, poultry, fish, breads, cheeses and wines, and desserts—Fussell shares the artistry of these culinary masters. She also traces the evolution of each dish and provides insightful, often witty asides about the origins of the recipes. In the tradition of Waverley Root and M. F. K. Fisher herself, Fussell has combined elements of history, memoir, and the cookbook to create a food lover's delight. As entertaining as it is instructive, Masters of American Cookery belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about good food. Fussell provides a preface for this Bison Books edition.

A fierce and funny memoir of kitchen and bedroom from James Beard Award winner Betty Fussell A survivor of the domestic revolutions that turned American television sets from Leave It to Beaver to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Julia Child’s The French Chef, food historian and journalist Betty Fussell has spotlighted the changes in American culture through food over the last half century in nearly a dozen books. 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.My Kitchen Wars is a revelation of the author’s lifelong love affair with food—cooking it, eating it, and sharing it—no matter where or with whom she finds herself. From Princeton to Heidelberg and from London to Provence, Fussell ladles out food, sex, and travel with her wooden spoon, welcoming all who come to the table.

Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She’s not just the award-winning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation’s Journalism Award who was inducted into their “Who’s Who of American Food and Beverage” in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years’ worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Vogue.This is a woman who at eighty-two years old (and despite being half-blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for the New York Times Magazine.) She got her deer.This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty-one year old bride, because "housewifery wasn''t enough."Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.