Culinary memoirs have been piling up like flapjacks in recent years, but Fussell’s beautifully written little book avoids the sentimental cliches of the genre. We know food is love already. What Fussell wants to tell us about is war. The marriage she describes here was a battleground, although the combatants tried to believe that because they ate together, they were on the same side. Her psyche, of course, was another battleground. Was she her own woman, or Paul’s? Steeped as she is in the emotional complexity and powerful symbolism of the meals she prepared, she describes them with all her senses blazing. “A single well-aimed blow severs chest from tail and brings a merciful and instantaneous death,” she writes, on the subject of lobsters. A few paragraphs later, she reports that late in her marriage she began sleeping with a cleaver under her pillow but didn’t quite know why.
Paul’s theory of the sexes served him well: his 1975 book, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” made him a star. Back in the kitchen, Betty tended the pots and the children with a rage that stayed on simmer way too long. When Paul hit a midlife crisis that called for inexplicably close friendships with young men, she put her fears on simmer, too. Then she found him in the study one night, wrapped around a male student. Those pots boiled over at last.
After their house was sold, Fussell cooked one last meal there, a huge brunch for 75 friends. She wanted to replant the battlefield with a fine memory. Then she moved out, happily. Today she’s a successful author specializing in cookbooks and the social history of food. Yes, she still cooks, but her culinary mission has changed. It’s writing, not fighting.
