Food and sex, sex and food. Are there any two subjects so fascinating to us voyeurs, so intricately intertwined?  “Hunger, like lust in action, is savage, extreme, rude, cruel,” Betty Fussell writes in the opening of her memoir My Kitchen Wars. The two seem to define Fussell’s life and she writes about them with both passion and despair. Fussell holds back nothing and she is indeed “savage, extreme, rude, and cruel,” and oh are we the readers the luckier for it.

Published in 1999, the memoir eloquently captures the struggle of the domestic versus the intellectual. Fussell reveled in the kitchen, creating masterpieces worthy of three-star chefs. Yet she struggled against her husband and society to become respected as an intellectual and an academic. In many ways this book is simply revenge on a domineering ex-husband (who published his own memoir three years prior to hers). And as such, it is absolutely juicy reading.

Fussell, a noted cookbook author and food historian, recounts her life from the literal beginning—her birth—through the disastrous finish of a thirty-plus year marriage to historian Paul Fussell, which ended when she found him in bed with one of his male students. Her earliest years are tainted with the death of her mother, which for years Fussell believed was due to an accidental poisoning and, only learned much later, was most likely a suicide. But the memories that stand out most in her mind are those of gastronomic pleasures: Even as a toddler, Fussell discovered the sensual delight of food, when she devoured a pound of butter “as golden as an orange and as smooth and velvety as ice cream.” She writes longingly, “It got slippery in my hands, creamed my mouth, melted on my tongue, and ran down my throat.” Not long after, her father remarried a battleax of a woman and when it was time for Fussell to go to college, she was delighted to escape.

College was a time of freedom for Fussell, even though as a woman on campus during World War II, the restrictions were great. She fought for the right to wear pants to class, had a curfew,  and was required to be an “exemplar of Gracious Living.”  But here she rediscovered the pleasure of eating, which had been diminished by her stepmother who monitored even her chewing; she required Fussell to “Fletcherize” her meat, chewing it fifty times per bite.

During college, she met Paul Fussell, an intellectual, a veteran, and the man she would eventually marry. Their marriage abounded with tension—her desire to learn; his desire to have a wife who followed him and kept house. She yearned for a PhD and a chance to teach, both of which were extremely difficult for women. Interestingly, though, for all her struggles, she never identified as a feminist. “The ideologues of the feminist movement seemed to me as narrow and dogmatic as the Calvinists of my youth,” she writes. “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.”

Throughout this history of her life, Fussell weaves in threads of American culture in the latter half of the twentieth century: those battles of feminism in which she chose not to fight, the development of American cuisine, the pretensions of academia and the literati. Images of an era past—transatlantic luxury liners, years abroad in England and France, wife-swapping, debauchery—fill her pages. Her meals along the way reflect her status in life. She writes, “Food was an index of how far we’d moved into the fleshpots of Dionysus, leaving behind the restraints of Apollo.”

Hard to picture Nigella Lawson or Julia Child ambivalent about their kitchens. Not so Fussell. In the kitchen is where her emotions played out. Her relationship with her kitchen was fraught and the battle metaphors that litter her book are apropos. Her cooking highs included supremes de volaille en chaud-froid, blanche neige, and mousseline de poisson. ; the low occurred at the nadir of her marriage, when she bought fried chicken and potato salad and a party guest was heard to say, “She’s supposed to be such a great cook and this is the crap she serves?”  When she tires of her husband’s peccadilloes, Fussell takes on a lover of her own. When her affair sours, so does her cooking: “I  took it out, unwittingly, on the mayonnaise…. I started whipping two orange egg yolks with salt and lemon juice and began to add the green oil, slowly, teardrop by teardrop, like a woman in pain who is reluctant to show it. I added the oil so slowly my wrist was getting tired long before anything came together, because nothing did.” And, yet within food, she also finds salvation, for “the kitchen is the one place in which we’re all required to begin again, each day, at ground zero—reborn after the death of sleep to feed the gut, brain, and soul by daily murder and redemption.”

Food and sex, sex and food. With eloquent writing, Fussell marries the two and leaves us with a better understanding of the changes played out in kitchens across the country. Along the way, she dishes extraordinary meals…as well as the dirt. And it’s all absolutely delicious.

*****

My Kitchen Wars, by Betty Fussell, North Point Press, 256 pages