My Kitchen Wars

by Betty Fussell

  Yeats’s Crazy Jane was as much cook as bawd because she knew that nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent. As tattered as I felt after Dave’s departure, I knew more about love and sex and mayonnaise than I ever dreamed possible from my place at my father’s table, to the right of his Hellmann’s jar.

  Attack by Whisk and Cuisinart

  I stood in the middle of our new kitchen and fiddled with the lights, dimming some and raising others to illuminate the croquembouche surrounded by a wreath of holly on the green baize tablecloth. I shooed Dexter-Margaret off the tiled counter because she was endangering the gingerbread house with her tail. Votive candles burning in red glasses lit the framed calligraphic menus on the wall that memorialized our meals at Lapérouse, Les Baux, Paul Bocuse, Les Troisgros, Fernand Point, so many medals on the chest of us gastronomic vets. Mexican tiles on the floor gleamed like old leather. Shiny copper pots on the rack above the butcher-block island warmed the oak cabinets and brightened the stainless-steel oven doors in the wall next to the Garland stove. The stage was set for Princeton’s Annual Christmas House Tour and we were perfect but for one thing. The croquembouche. The caramel was starting to melt, I could see it sweat. I dimmed the overhead spot. Forget the star of Bethlehem, candles would do.

  The move to the Party House on Lilac Lane had been a move across town, across caste, across marital divides, across national schisms. No peace on earth this Christmas. We were in the middle of a civil war that pitted husbands against wives, children against parents, friends against friends. War was in our living rooms every night and in our kitchens every day, as arguments and tempers rose. Many a dinner party ended with someone storming out into the night. The Vietnam War had polarized our small community, as it had others, and I’d become head of the local chapter of a national grassroots organization that called itself Negotiation Now. Those of us who’d been turned off by the radical extremes of both hawks and doves sought to persuade moderates to work for peace. When my group joined our local congressman in a major antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C.—chanting, as we marched past the FBI building on the Mall, “Fuck who? Fuck Hoover”—I realized with a shock that this was the first time since my marriage that I’d been away overnight from both Paul and the children.

  Negotiating with my fellow citizens by phone all day interfered with Entertaining as a Way of Life. Paul hated it and so did I, but Vietnam had made me fighting mad, mad enough to organize meetings and protests and petitions and fund-raising parties. Just when Negotiation Now was preparing to cash in its hard-won political clout at a Washington conference, however, we were preparing to move households. The friends I’d been working with couldn’t understand why I decided not to go to the conference. But the move was major for me, too, and Paul’s resentment too blatant to ignore or resist. My job was in the kitchen, not in the corridors of political power.

  We had grand designs for the new house, and we’d hired a pair of architects to make over the kitchen before we set foot in it. From the outset, however, it was clear that we and the architects were designing different stage sets. They saw the kitchen as a showcase of cleanliness for the housewife ruled by Efficiency. We saw it as a combination of French bistro and Provençal mas, a backdrop for Grand Entertainments. They wanted the geometry of the Bauhaus, we wanted French Provincial curves. They wanted Formica, we wanted tile. They wanted chrome, we wanted copper. “Why hire us if you don’t want an expert?” they asked in exasperation. “If you need dental work, wouldn’t you go to a dentist?”

  We won out on the mellow oak cabinets with indented moldings, on the glazed Mexican-tile counters and the unglazed terra-cotta floor tiles, which absorbed twelve coats of sealant until I resorted to deck varnish to give them that leathery look. The architects won out, thank God, on the hood, a plain black metal coffin inverted above the six-burner stove next to the commercial gas-fired lava-stoned grill. The hood disappeared as promised, large as it was, into the black background of stove and grill. The industrial exhaust fan of shiny chrome, big as a wheel base, was another matter, but at least it was outside, where its thunder warned the neighborhood what barbecue sauce we were spreading on which cut of pork or beef. We made sure to ask all our neighbors to the kitchen’s baptismal party.

  We had knocked down the wall between the dark hole of the kitchen and the dark hole of the dining room to create a “living center” for family, for friends, for parties. Flow is what we were after. Now kitchen flowed into dining area and bar and through French doors out onto a slate terrace. Or kitchen flowed into library and parlor and out through another set of French doors onto yet another terrace. By God, we thought, we can party two or three hundred people in this house.

  We’d managed to squeeze a hundred or so in for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres in the cottage, but only if the weather was good and we could uncork the house onto the minuscule terrace. Our gig there had been to invite an indiscriminate mass for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and to ask twenty or thirty hard-core partygoers to stay on for a giant pot of soup-stew kept warm on a back burner and a green salad kept cool on the porch in a dishpan. After word got around, it got harder to get people to leave and it also got harder to prepare a double menu of elaborate appetizers and “improvised” buffet because the hors d’oeuvres were not outside the works, dibs and dabs of cream cheese and Ritz crackers, but the Works themselves.

  Unending platters of hot appetizers were the first line of defense, a display of artillery designed to quell any criticism of dust under the piano or a dress cut too low. You could make hors d’oeuvres weeks ahead and freeze them until the time came to dazzle the assembled multitude with tiny cream puffs stuffed with creamed crab, mushroom caps stuffed with veal, Parmesan cheese straws, turnovers filled with Roquefort or Gruyère, grilled bacon wrapped round a chicken liver or a fig, canapés topped with cream cheese and salmon caviar, salami cornucopias filled with sherried Cheddar and skewered with a toothpick, Roquefort cheese balls rolled in chopped pecans, tiny tartlets filled with minced chicken livers in a thick béchamel. No labor was too intensive for such immediate rewards. I relished these secular feasts because they gave me the illusion of communion, and I cast as wide a net as possible to bring together communicants on an impulse that was half egalitarian, half ecumenical. As a friend once said, “A Fussell party is the only place in town where you can shake hands with your postman, your dentist, and your university president.”

  With a bigger house I had wanted a children’s playroom, big enough to include the Ping-Pong table, the foosball game, the air hockey board, the carom board, the pogo stick, the Hula-Hoops, the mounting boxes of board games that seldom got played, and the mini billiards table that I longed to buy. The long room stuck onto the back of the house by the previous owner had potential, but Paul commandeered it for his library. With a sinking feeling I agreed, on the promise that we would make a playroom out of the unfinished half of the attic, next to the finished half that was to be Sam’s room. We never finished the attic, of course, and it became the cats’ playroom as our children grew from tots to teenagers and huddled over their games and TV in a little sewing-and-ironing room on the second floor.

  When we gave parties, the kids could pass hors d’oeuvres or sit on the landing and watch the grown-ups, or they could put pillows over their heads to go to sleep when the dancing and drinking went on until dawn. Later on, I trained Tucky and her best pal, Hilary, to be official servers for us and eventually caterers for the dinner parties of our friends. Sam resisted any such recruiting. He kept to his room and made models of Godzilla and Frankenstein’s monster or practiced the trumpet until a heavy set of braces ruined his “lip.”

  In the living center, Paul and I divided the territory between food and drink. Paul’s drink space encompassed two sides of the dining area. One side held a built-in wine rack for wines drinkable now, which were the only kind we bought, and the other held a double-tiered cabinet of glass shelves lit from within in order to display glasses and bottle
s in all their shapes and colors the way real bars did. Around the corner was a built-in ice machine, a prized novelty that was always breaking down.

  My kitchen space included a butcher-block island with a deep sink and garbage disposal, pots hanging from a four-sided rack above, a marble counter for pastry making, a second sink and a dishwasher set into a long tiled counter, a professional stove and grill, a stainless-steel refrigerator, and custom-built cabinets designed to hold specialized items like a flour bin and a sugar bin beneath the pastry counter. A shallow vertical cabinet held spices and cans. Deep narrow drawers on rollers held linens, and a set of slots in the butcher block held trays. The counters were high enough for tall people. This kitchen had been thought about, in detail.

  The only trouble with this kitchen theater was that we both wanted to star in it. When Craig Claiborne and a photographer came down to do a story on it for The New York Times, we vied for their attention. The eighteenth-century scholar grappled with corkscrews, opening wine, while the Shakespearean—that was the hook of Claiborne’s story—grappled with a butterflied leg of lamb on the grill. “Sick,” remarked one of our academic colleagues on reading the piece in the Times, “they’re sick.”

  Sick maybe, showbiz absolutely. Here was a culinary cyclorama designed for happenings as theatrical as Allan Kaprow’s, where process was part of the show. Parties were no longer the pretext for sex, and sex no longer the subtext of food. Now food and drink were about power. And cooking—the one activity, besides tennis, in which housewives were encouraged to excel—had become a magnificent obsession.

  Dinner parties were important ammunition in the fierce competition among our husbands—and ourselves. While wives in sexy low-cut dresses were still a plus, now the aim was to look like a hot tomato while remaining cucumber-cool within. You had to keep cool to cook for, lay out, and clean up after parties that required weeks of preparation, parties that consumed infinite time and energy and passion in the one-upmanship of friends.

  A key rule of this demanding sport was that she who plays the hostess must also cook and serve. You were allowed some help for serving, but it was a cheat to hire cooking help, especially if you could afford to. If you didn’t cook it yourself, the food didn’t count. Anybody could hire a caterer. But not everybody could act, and you had first to be an actor in a ritually shared pretense. Pretend there’d been no labor, no expense, no fatigue, no sweat. All dishes, especially showpieces like soufflés, must appear as if by miracle, with a wave of Ariel’s wand. And although it was understood among the women guests that each would assist from time to time in shuttling dishes to and fro, no one knew better than we did who’d done the work, and just how much work it was.

  But it was work in the guise of leisure. What we were doing in our home kitchens had nothing to do with the calibrated hierarchies, from apprentice to chef, of the professional French kitchen. We weren’t about to go off and apprentice ourselves, as a later generation of Americans would, to the great chefs of Europe. Nor were we about to go off and enroll in professional cooking classes, although an occasional foray into Chinese or Indian or some other ethnic venue was permissible. At one point, a group of us used my kitchen for Chinese cooking classes taught by a pro we’d hired to come down once a week from New York. She couldn’t understand how we got through so much wine in the space of four short hours, because she didn’t realize we were having a party in the guise of a cooking class.

  The trick was to be a lady in the dining room, yet an amateur-pro in the kitchen. The distinctions between amateur, amateur-professional, and all-out professional were obscure but vital. An amateur was not skilled. And we were. But a professional was paid for his services. We were not. Like doing other good works inside and outside the house, cooking at any level had to be voluntary to count. To count, that is, in the class warfare that distinguished between blue and white collars for guys and pink and white aprons for gals. Pink signified Volunteer Hospital Aide, white signified cleaning lady. I never wore an apron while I cooked, partly to ease the oscillation between hostess and cook, but also to refuse the badge of household drudge.

  The solution to the drudge problem was to make cooking an art, or at the very least a craft, like watercolor painting, embroidery, pottery making, basket weaving, leather tooling, all those genteel accomplishments that distinguished the ladies who chatted in the parlors of Jane Austen from their servants. A lady could become extremely accomplished in any of these arts, even in writing novels, as long as no one took her work seriously or paid money for it, which was much the same thing. Our dinner parties were baroquely elaborated gifts, like the human-hair embroidery of weeping willows and cenotaphs that validated the gentility of Victorian hands.

  We didn’t want to be professional chefs. We wanted to be artists, and Julia was there to show us how cooking could be elevated to art. We’d called Julia Child by her Christian name the moment Mastering the Art of French Cooking appeared in 1961, because she seemed to be talking directly to us. In a very American way, she translated the tools of a traditionally male guild, as regimented and hierarchical as the military, into the milieu of “the servantless American cook,” the woman who does her own work. Overnight, she turned our amateur bouts into professional matches within the ropes of our own kitchens. She insisted that if we wanted to do the job right we must have professional tools, the batterie de cuisine of a French kitchen. We must equip ourselves the way a soldier must procure his rifle, a carpenter his hammer and saw, a violinist his fiddle and bow, a professor his Ph.D. She sent us scurrying to hotel and restaurant supply houses. She gave us courage to face down even the billy-goat gruff who inhabited the Bridge Company in Manhattan and to demand from him, in our most imperious suburban station-wagon voices, tin-lined copper pots with no less than one-eighth-inch-thick bottoms.

  This was no undertaking for the poor. Such equipment cost money, and we weren’t looking for bargains. All we wanted, like Jacqueline Kennedy, was the best. Julia warned us away from cheap pots. She taught us that a pot with a copper bottom less than one-eighth inch thick was worse than useless, which meant that a copper wash on stainless steel was there only for show. Out went the Revere Ware at the first Hospital Charity Sale. In came the costly thick copper pots, which were hell to polish if you actually used them to cook in, and which had tin linings that were hell to renew as the tin wore off and the copper came through and potentially poisoned any food that remained too long in the pot.

  In came the costly sets of Le Creuset, its heavy cast-iron glazed with red enamel outside and creamy white enamel within, each pot with its special purpose: oval casseroles (cocottes) with lids shaped to condense vapor on the roast inside, gratin dishes (plats à gratin) that would take broiler heat, saucepans (casseroles) with lips for pouring, chef’s skillets (poêles) with sloping sides for browning, sauté pans (sautoirs) with straight sides for frying. Never mind that you had to become instantly bilingual, at least in the kitchen. And never mind that some of the larger casseroles were so heavy they broke your back lifting them from the oven. No sacrifice was too great for the advancement of your husband’s career and of your own newfound Art.

  A complete batterie required specialty firearms like soup kettles (marmites), multidisked food mills (moulins), vegetable slicers (mandolines), double-handled chopping knives (hachoirs), wooden-rimmed drum sieves (tamis) for creating purees, straight boxwood rolling pins (rouleaux), olive pitters (chasse-noyaux), fine-meshed conical sieves (chinois), poultry shears for deboning chickens for galantines, larding needles (lardoires) for barding spaghetti-thin strips of pork fat through a roast, and a complete dud of a metal garlic press sold to the American market before we discovered we could do a better job with the side of a cleaver and the edge of a knife.

  We didn’t wait for Julia’s second volume of instruction to reinforce our initial emplacements. In the affluent sixties, gourmet stores sprouted like mushrooms in the wild. A campaign abroad to purchase arms in Elizabeth David’s shop off Sloane Square a
nd in Dehillerin’s near Les Halles was obligatory. On our own shores we had already procured a heavy-duty professional mixer, with its wire whip for egg whites, flat beater for pastry doughs, and dough hook for breads and brioches. Only with a mixer could you beat egg yolks with sugar until they formed “a slowly dissolving ribbon.” My KitchenAid mixer still stands like a veteran on my kitchen counter, wheezing when called upon to knead a stiff dough, but, like me, proud of long service.

  The one sure sign of a Serious Competitive Cook, however, was the copper bowl and wire whisk. You had to have at least one large unlined copper bowl (bassine) in which to beat egg whites with a wooden-handled balloon whisk (fouet), to foam what looked like snot into a shiny white satin mountain. The chemical reaction between copper and albumin was said to produce creamier and airier whites than could be produced in any other way. So we practiced the specified wrist action, necessary to keep shoulders and arms from aching, with the assiduity of a piano player practicing Bach. We hid our old handheld electric beaters in a drawer, where they pushed our manual Dover beaters to the rear.

  The showiest dish you could make with bowl and whisk was a soufflé, the pièce de résistance of our show-off menus and the emblem of our paradox. Literally, the French phrase meant the climax of a series, or a piece of artillery with staying power. A dessert soufflé was a good climax, all right, but its staying power was nil. It held only two or three minutes before collapse. And what was it, after all? An airy nothing, inflated for a momentary display as ephemeral as fireworks, leaving nothing behind but an image in the mind and a memory on the tongue. A soufflé was time’s victim, not its resister. And yet, and yet … even now I can taste the first soufflé au Grand Marnier we ever ate, at a small Michelin two-star restaurant in Paris, Chez Allard, and even now I can remember the pride with which I created the first one in my own kitchen, presenting it in all its quivering brown-crusted puffery before it collapsed within the buttered and sugared eight-cup porcelain mold.