A child of the Depression, Ms. Fussell's earliest food memories were of the stupefyingly simple meals served at her grandmother's table--applesauce made without seasoning, gorging on pure butter. Repressed by her family's religious and social beliefs, life improved not at all with the addition of a stepmother. A tearful adolescence followed, with freedom only arriving with the escape to college during the World War II years. Ms. Fussell relates the drinking and sexual escapades of herself and her friends as though they were truly shocking, rather than typical coming-of-age rituals. Soon after graduation, she marries veteran Paul Fussell, despite strong feelings of ambivalence.
This ambivalence is Betty Fussell's key characteristic, one that merely strengthens as she matures. She begins to cook and to keep house, as one might well expect from a housewife of this generation. She studies a homemade cookbook (a wedding gift) as though preparing for an exam. Goes back to school for her master's degree, against her husband's objections, apparently. Acts a little, has two children. Discovers, along with her generation, the delights of Julia Child, and begins to go quietly mad in her kitchen. Frighteningly elaborate dinner parties are thrown, requiring weeks of preparation, all in the spirit of cut-throat competition not only with the other wives but with her husband. Sure, he's acquiring some measure of fame in his career, but can he master a souffle?
Alongside the frenetic activity in the kitchen, she goes back to school again, has an affair, ignores (for awhile) her husband's affairs, and finds herself as a cookbook author. At no point in this life is anything described as joyful. The hours she spent on appetizers were apparently all resented ones, and the expertise she gained from doing so she denigrates when she isn't making a living from it. I couldn't find a moment when either her husband or her children gave her a sparkling moment, and her educational goals seem to have been pursued more in the spirit of rebelling against the housewife's lot than in a true love for her subject. A strange book, all done--one wonders why she so readily divulges her dislike for nearly everything. An interesting cultural history of an unhappy, though accomplished, housewife of the post-World War II generation, however.
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