Synopses & Reviews
My Kitchen Wars is a war story. This time, though, the warrior is a woman and the battleground is 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." My Kitchen Wars is also a love story; as Fussell is liberated from the tyrannical puritanism of her family by a vet of the "Good War," a young writer named Paul Fussell. But she soon finds herself captive, 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.
Review
"A memoir by a woman who measures out her life in kitchen utensils, from her father's orange-juice squeezer to an olive wood spoon used to stir 'the stockpot of memories' simmered here." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Food writer Fussell whips up a tartly funny history of post-World War II domesticity in this memoir of her marriage to cultural historian Paul Fussell." Bradley T. Johnson, Newsweek
Synopsis
My Kitchen Wars is a war story-but the warrior is a woman, the battleground is the kitchen, and the weapons are the batterie de cuisine with which Betty Fussell evokes her era's domestic battles. As much about hunger-emotional, sexual, intellectual-as it is about food, this fierce and funny memoir takes no prisoners.
Synopsis
"My Kitchen Wars is a war story-but the warrior is a woman, the battleground is the kitchen, and the weapons are the batterie de cuisine with which Betty Fussell evokes her era's domestic battles. As much about hunger-emotional, sexual, intellectual-as it is about food, this fierce and funny memoir takes no prisoners.
About the Author
Betty Fussell is the author of nine books. A contributor to publications including
The New York Times and
The New Yorker, she has lectured widely on food history. She lives in New York City.