My Kitchen Wars

by Betty Fussell

  “I don’t have anything to eat because Vittoria’s not here,” he said.

  “I’ll bring lunch,” I said.

  He finally understood. “Are you sure you want to do this? You’re not just getting revenge on Paul?” I had told him about Maggie.

  “I’m sure.”

  “I have a terrible feeling you’re going to hate me afterward.”

  “I have a terrible feeling I’m going to love you even if I hate you.”

  And I did, both, for a long time. It was the first of many lunches. We ate picnics outside and inside and all around the town. A decade earlier I had awakened to the sensuality of food and drink, to the aromas, the textures, the explosion of sensation in the nose and mouth and tongue and throat. Now I woke for the first time to the full sensuality of sex. I was as astonished by my body’s responses as I’d been by my discovery, on our first trip to France, of the eroticism of Brie so ripe it ran or of ham sliced so thin it was translucent.

  “How long do you have?” he’d asked that first time.

  “Only an hour,” I said.

  “Plenty of time,” he said, and smiled.

  I was insulted. All this extended prelude, all these years of horny desire, and it was going to climax with a five-minute wham, bang, thank you, ma’am? If I was going to sin, in deed and not just in thought, I wanted to sin big. This was adultery I was committing, premeditated and with knowledge aforethought, adultery in the first degree and not just a quick poke in the dark. I wanted God to know about it.

  Dave was taken aback by my passion. So was I—I who was always in public cool and self-controlled. I knew he had had many affairs in Europe, so I was not surprised by his skill, even as I relished it. This was an unknown world. Paul and I had been married for nearly a decade before we’d learned about The Clitoris and then only from a book, which Paul read first and then passed on to me. All that time I’d wondered exactly what a female orgasm was and whether I’d ever had one. Now my body felt like one of my meals, the interstices of ears like snails, the hollow of armpits like the hollow of a pitted avocado, the smooth valleys between thigh and groin like a sauce parisienne. “How absurd,” said my brain. “How divine,” said my body. I had flipped myself onto a white-hot grill, and no matter how guilty I felt I couldn’t get off. I was knowingly, willfully sinning, hurling myself on the coals to be seared until juices oozed from every pore, and yet I couldn’t stop. Head and body were at total war, and body was bound to win.

  I swore I’d never do it again, and in the same breath began to plan the next picnic. We had wonderful picnics. Dave brought the wine, I brought the goodies. This was my pâté period, inspired by the revolutionary recipes in Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook. By God, you didn’t have to make Grandmother’s ketchup-topped meat loaf, you could make an authentic French pâté in your own kitchen. I worked through Claiborne’s entire section of pâtés, beginning with one that doused a five-pound hare and three pounds of pork with a cup of cognac and moving on to one called Beau Séjour that mixed pork liver, salt pork, and boneless veal with a cup and a half of sherry and a cup of heavy cream. My favorite, however, was the Country Pâté that wrapped ground veal, pork shoulder, ham, pork livers, and garlic in a couple of pounds of fresh pork fat.

  There was still one remaining butcher on Nassau Street, who, thanks to Claiborne’s book, was being inundated by demands for exact quantities of different kinds of ground meats, some fine, some coarse, and for unprecedented quantities of pork fat. Fat was an aphrodisiac. Fine Liver Pâté called for buckets of heavy cream, pureed with bushels of chicken livers and chicken fat. Truffles, also sexy, were hurled with abandon. Truffled Pâté, in addition to the usual mix of ground meats and fat, called for cubed ham and tongue and chicken breasts and pistachio nuts and a fistful of chopped truffles. We bought tins of Urbani truffles in the same volume as we bought bottles of cognac and cartons of cream. It was a time for abandon, and the rich layered tastes of an unctuous pâté, underlined by a good Bordeaux, paired wine and food with the rich dark pairings of bodies.

  At high noon in the countryside around Princeton, it wasn’t easy to find romantic picnic spots for pairing that were safe from intrusion by other humans. Like characters in some steamy soap opera, Dave and I would drive separately to a parking lot somewhere, leave one car behind, and continue together, looking for public land that was private. No simple task—not in heavily populated New Jersey, anyway, where the attractive bits of countryside had long ago been swallowed up in private estates with electric fences and attack dogs. We were reduced to scrutinizing less attractive bits, like the strip of dense undergrowth that lined the Millstone River at the far end of town, near the sewage plant.

  Not an ideal spot, but on the other hand there was very little traffic and a car parked on the shoulder would not be noticed. A pair of white bodies entangled on a blanket deep in brush so thick you had to crawl in and out of it would not be visible at all. Picnickers who are determined to picnic will always find a spot somewhere. Ours was full of gnats and mosquitoes, even at high noon, and they were as hungry as we were. I had brought a particularly delicious picnic and had requested a bottle of chilled white wine because we were starting with buttermilk-battered deep-fried chicken—legs and thighs, for the sake of the juicy dark meat—then a salad of avocado and sweet onion and pear in a lime vinaigrette, to be eaten with forks on real plates. And then a quart of Jersey strawberries, topped with a few fraises de bois grown in my own garden. I had brought salt and pepper in small waxed-paper packets, and powdered sugar in a much larger packet for dipping strawberries. I brought everything, including corkscrew and cloth gingham napkins, in a wicker basket. Packing each item in the basket had been like putting garments on the body with the intense anticipation of taking each of them off.

  It was a hot but not sweltering day, and all went swimmingly until it was time to take off our clothes. We were in such a thick webbing of vegetation there wasn’t room to sit upright, so we had eaten lying down, propped on our elbows, as Greeks and Romans had done on their couches. And we had made love as no doubt they had too, only man to woman rather than man to man. But our blanket was small, and we kept rolling off into the greenery until rain dampened picnic spirits and our blanket and our piles of clothes, and we crawled back to the safety of the car. Next day, a discreet phone call from Dave to ask whether I’d noticed anything unusual on my person after yesterday, such as a pink rash. No, nothing, just lots of mosquito bites. Dave had not been so lucky. His nether regions back and front had broken out in a poison-ivy rash and he was hard put to explain to his wife how it had got there.

  Breaking out in sin did not cure my Puritan heart, but it gave shape to my war with myself. Dave, an American raised in Europe, had trouble understanding what all the fuss was about. He was puzzled why I was ferocious as a piranha at one moment and the next moment burst into tears. I was strung between desire and remorse, and of course in me the quandary took literary form. If I was stirring a soup, I would think of St. Augustine’s “cauldron of unholy loves.” If kneading bread, I’d think of Leontes’ “paddling palms and pinching fingers.” In my head a scarlet letter blazed. In my heart Christ’s words to the adulteress—“Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more”—were small comfort, because I knew that next week I’d go and sin some more. What Socrates preached was not true. Knowledge was not virtue, because I knew what I was doing, and I knew it was wrong.

  I began to understand people who had eating disorders. They were as obsessed with food and its image as I was with sex. I understood people who tried to give up smoking and couldn’t. I was one of those myself. I understood people who tried to give up drugs and couldn’t, even though the only drug we knew, nicotine aside, was booze, and we weren’t about to give that up. I played tug-of-war with Dave and myself, swearing and forswearing, for a biblical seven years. I had always wondered why everything happened in sevens—seven lean years, seven fat years, seven years for Jacob to get Leah, then Rachel,
seven golden candlesticks for St. John in his Revelation. The seven-year itch had turned into my seven-year sin. Maybe it filled the vacuum left by a disappeared God and Devil. Maybe I needed an interior drama to enliven the dullness of housewifery. Maybe it was the one arena in which I could star.

  Dave and Vittoria went off to Tuscany every summer, where Vittoria’s family had a villa, and where Dave picked up where he had left off with one village girl or another. “It has nothing to do with you and me,” he’d say. “I’m like a father to them.” An incestuous father, I muttered, jealous as hell. He was constantly falling in love with their innocence, their swelling bosoms, their budding knowledge, and it burned me up that I knew this about him and still couldn’t stop. A couple of weeks before he left for the summer, I could feel him begin to cool in order to make the transition easier, like a nomad packing up his winter tent. Sins must be punished, and if I was betraying my husband, Dave was betraying me with his summertime girls. He denied it, of course, but I could tell from his letters, guiltily received and even more guiltily written, mailed in secret, read in secret, torn into little bits and buried in the trash can, that his distance was not just a matter of geography.

  One summer we rented a house on an island in Greece through our American-Greek friends, who spent summers with a small colony of British converts to the Greek Orthodox Church. It was less Mariolatry that bound them together, however, than the fact that they could live more merrily in a place that was Not England. The leading convert was a former Oxford don who’d married a Greek villager, another was a remittance man with a title who kept a suitably small yacht and made love to his boat boys, a third was a widowed engineer who spent most of his time coaxing an English lawn to cover sand and rocks, until he persuaded the wife of the don to cover his bed.

  It was a cauldron of unholy loves British style, and we added our two cents’ worth of Americana to the pot. Life on the Greek isle was one long picnic, under the shade of an arbor of grapes during the hellishly hot days, under an arbor of stars during the nights. It was best to be outside, because an abandoned railroad track ran straight through our cement house from front to back, bisecting the kitchen with its butane-fueled burners.

  In front of the house, a rotting dock extended into the sea, and once a month we’d be woken at dawn by the thunder of machinery that hauled containers filled with rocks, on cables strung from the mountain behind our house to the sea in front. The rocks were bauxite, first mined during the war, when Mussolini’s troops had occupied the island and loaded the ore onto railroad cars on the tracks that now ran through the house. A black cargo ship hove to beyond the dock to await its load of bauxite to make the aluminum that once went into weapons and now went into pots and pans. We were sitting in the middle of a bauxite mine, which lent a special aroma to the heat that came down each day at noon and turned our “beach cottage” into an oven. I called the place On the Steps of Old Dachau.

  An excess of heat may be the reason I came to grief over mayonnaise in the railroad kitchen. For lunch we walked every day up the hill to a taverna perched in pines above the sea. Here Elena and Georgi fanned their charcoal grills to brisk heat in a tiny kitchen, while their two sons waited on tables set up under the grape arbor, next to pots of small-leafed basil. Here we comforted ourselves with eggs and potatoes fried in olive oil, crunched through ripe tomato and onion and olive salads, savored sweet, crisp octopus caught and tenderized that morning on the rocks, lifted herbed flesh from the bones of grouper or red mullet, slaked our thirst with chunks of red watermelon and spit out the seeds.

  On the day of my mayonnaise disaster, the McFarlanes were visiting. They’d driven down from Italy to stay with us for a week, and the visit was not going well. Dave had given few public signs of delight at our reunion, and was avoiding me in private. In the mornings, he’d been writing in a shed out back, where a donkey liked to nibble at the fig trees, while Paul wrote in a bedroom in front. That’s what the men I knew did. Men wrote, women cooked, in Greece as well as in New Jersey.

  This particular morning, I’d made a cup of Turkish coffee, metrio, and took it out to Dave. He thanked me, and that was it.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you have to say?”

  “I can’t talk to you now,” he said. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “You mean I’m interfering with your work?”

  “Exactly.”

  His work. Paul’s old refrain. But what about my work? Come to think of it, what was my work? To defer to the men in my life, both of them, to keep the children out of their way so that the writers could flex their minds and imaginations and pump words into sentences to lift paragraphs into heavier and heavier chapters. What was my work? To please the men in my life, both of them, with the small gifts that women like to give and that the men might or might not notice when they chose to stop work but that the woman knew was a little piece of her heart. Like making fresh mayonnaise for the lobster that we’d specially ordered the day before to eat at the taverna for lunch.

  I enjoyed the very thought of whipping together that golden tongue-coating cream tinged with lemon and basil and maybe some wild oregano. But the kitchen was very hot, and so was my anger at being dismissed. His work. All this time I had welcomed Dave’s love of women as a relief from Paul’s fear of them, and yet here I was, back in the box that said, “Don’t open ’til Xmas,” or whenever play time was instead of real time. In real time, as in war, men worked and women waited. And the truth of that knowledge made me wild.

  I took it out, unwittingly, on the mayonnaise. As we know, mayonnaise is based on a physical impossibility made possible by the hand of man. Oil and water do not mix except by circumventing their natures and forcing them together for a time before they revert to their true selves and break apart. The Hellmann’s mayonnaise my father placed on the dining table just to the north of his knife, so that he could readily slather it on his iceberg lettuce, his mashed potatoes, his scrambled eggs, his ground beef, his boiled fish, his fruited Jell-O, and his canned pineapple, was kept together for a supermarket length of time by chemical additions. But they were a cheat, and it showed in flavor and texture if you had ever tasted the real stuff.

  All you need for the real stuff is a patient hand and a cool heart, but I had neither when I set out to make mayonnaise for the lobster. I loved the olive oil we got in the village, so green and thick it looked like glass when I poured it. I picked some fat yellow lemons from the tree in the front courtyard. A wire basket of eggs kept as cool as they could on the windowsill of the kitchen. That’s all I’d need, except for salt and pepper and the basil I could pick from a pot in the yard and the oregano from a stroll a few yards further into the rocks.

  And of course I would need a bowl and a fork. The fork is important. Afterward I wondered whether my failure lay in the quality of the oil or some blemish in the fork. I’ve made mayonnaise hundreds of times, however, with no more than oil, egg, and lemon whipped together with a fork. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, and I must not fault the fork. Dave always referred to the gods, Roman and Greek, when speaking of his destiny. I was too Presbyterian for that. And also too dang mad.

  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. Oil, egg, and juice remained obdurately apart. Egg is supposed to help the oil and juice join hands by suspending one in the other in a kind of momentary truce. The temperature of all three must be the same, about as warm as a warm room, in order to create and maintain this perilous balance. But what if the warmth of the hand is such that it transmits that heat down the metal fork and curdles the egg? No matter how long I beat, the emulsion would not take. I threw it out and started over—fresh yolks, oil, lemon. No good. I was still working it and me into a froth when everyone took off up the hill wh
ere the lobsters waited. I said I’d follow them shortly, because, by God, I was not going to let a little egg and oil defeat me.

  A fourth, a fifth batch. I grew desperate. Finally I threw in the yolks of the remaining eggs, four of them at once, figuring I could add just a little oil and lemon for flavor and the thickness would be there in the quantity of yolks. This batch looked promising. I clapped on my broad straw hat and dark glasses to make my way up the hill in the blinding sun, and clapped a plate on my bowl to shelter it. When I reached the taverna, my group was already merry from the ouzo and retsina and the smoke of hissing lobsters on the grill and release from the morning’s work. My anger dissipated like smoke in a breeze and I removed the plate in triumph to show off my morning’s work. Eheu, as Homer’s Greeks were wont to say. The emulsion had broken en route, and clotted green and yellow oil lay like a pool of algae in the bowl.

  I didn’t need it for a sign, but it was one. When the emulsion worked, it was miraculous but temporary. Neither Dave nor I wanted to add preservatives to make it last. Later that week, we stayed up long after everyone else had gone to sleep, talking softly in the courtyard, drugged by the smell of night jasmine, stretched out on a pair of ancient deck chairs beneath the blameless stars. We could have made love but we didn’t. The sky was too big, its fires too remote. We were too small, and our embers too ashen.

  On impulse one night just before he and Vittoria were to leave, when clouds covered the moon, we snuck off into a scraggle of olive trees on the hillside and lay beneath them, kissing frantically and without much joy. There was an odd smell when we got up and brushed off our clothes. “Oh my God, goat shit,” Dave said. “We’ve just made love in a pile of goat shit.” We who’d played satyrs and fauns in the poison ivy of suburbia had finally pitched Love’s mansion, as Yeats said, in the place of excrement.