My Kitchen Wars

by Betty Fussell

  As we moved up the ladder of class and competence, we graduated from plain pâtés to pâtés en croûte. It wasn’t enough to simply enclose one of our usual brandy-laden mixtures in a crust, or to shape the crust into a hinged oval pâté mold (moule à pâté). No, serious climbers had to first bone a duck, leaving the entire skin intact, then stuff it with truffles and pork and veal, stitch it with thread and a trussing needle, wrap it in pastry dough, and decorate it with little pastry fans cut with a cooky cutter to conceal the seam where we pinched the top and bottom pastry ovals together. A meat thermometer, inserted in a paper funnel through the dough and into the meat, told us when the meat was done. And since this was a dish for a cold buffet, we had then to chill the pâté, remove the top crust, take out the duck, take out its stitches, carve it into slices, and tuck it back into the crust. No sweat. See Julia’s Volume 1, pages 471 and following.

  Veau Prince Orloff was another display piece consumptive of enough money and time to garner status. This one, Julia assured us, could be made in the morning and reheated the same evening—provided you did nothing else all day. It required you to bone and tie a five-pound roast of veal, prepare a soubise of rice and onions, a duxelles of mushrooms, and a velouté from a roux enriched with heavy cream and a pinch of nutmeg. You pureed the soubise and the duxelles together to spread on each slice of the roasted meat, then covered the entire roast with thick sauce and grated Swiss cheese so that it would brown when you reheated it. The dish was so rich that after the first two mouthfuls you were ready to gag or go home, but these were headier times, less obsessed with cardiovascular health and liposuctioned bodies than with strutting your stuff with the best ingredients money could buy.

  In food terms, we middle Americans were all nouveaux riches, giddy with a cornucopia of goods and techniques that poured in from Europe, along with its refugees, after the Second World War. To put it another way, we didn’t know how poor we’d been until we hit it rich. Rich at the markets in terms of what we could buy, rich in the kitchen in terms of what we were now equipped to prepare. It was a time when more was better and a lot more was best. And so we overdressed our meals wildly and decked them out with too much flash. While the very notion of haute cuisine was new to us, to Europeans it was as old as haute culture, so we went bonkers over all things French. To cook French, eat French, drink French (California wines didn’t yet count, and couldn’t be mentioned in polite conversation unaccompanied by the word “varietal”) was to become versant in the civilized tongues of Europe as opposed to America’s barbaric yawp.

  The cocktail party with its baroque hors d’oeuvres evolved speedily into the rococo buffet. Julia choreographed the production, plotting the time of preparation for each stage of each dish, detailing what could be prepared ahead, what frozen, what chilled. We each felt we had Julia in our corner, and if your keenest rival led with a buffet of baked ham and roast turkey, you knew how to counter with a jambon persillé, presliced and molded into a beautiful green-flecked mountain, or a boned turkey stuffed with veal forcemeat larded with truffles. The more baronial the buffet, the better, and it didn’t matter a hoot if guests didn’t know or like what they were eating because they could always try something else. My tables were as overblown as a Manuelesque cathedral. No matter how reasonable my initial plan, I always made more dishes, and more, and more, to make sure there was always too much.

  Spendthrift of time, I took pride in multistepped preparation that extended over many days and required much special equipment. I delighted in galantines and ballottines because they demanded an artist’s patience and a surgeon’s skill to bone out the flesh of a chicken or turkey without breaking its skin, to stuff it and sew it and wrap it and poach it and weigh it and chill it and glaze it with stock. I jumped at the chance to sculpt a whole salmon or sea bass into a mammoth pastry crust decorated with scales and fins and mouth and eye, or to paint the snowy canvas of a chaud-froid chicken with a spring bouquet of vegetables cut paper-thin to resemble flowers. I reveled in piping the heart-shaped layers of a nutted meringue stacked with mocha and praline-flavored butter creams and enclosed in a bittersweet chocolate frosting, decorated with rosettes and leaves and swags pushed through the various metal tubes of a pastry bag.

  We didn’t count the weeks we spent on cassoulets, preparing what Julia called “the order of battle.” Yes, we made our own sausage cakes of spiced ground pork and Armagnac, and put up our own duck or goose confit months in advance to have it ready in its crock of fat, and teased our butcher into getting us a chunk of fresh bacon and fresh pork rind, and searched for imported French white beans and then for an earthenware casserole large enough to hold a pork loin, a shoulder of mutton, the confit, the chunk of bacon and rind, half a dozen sausage cakes, plus two quarts of beans and vegetables and wine and stock, covered with bread crumbs and pork fat to make a crust, which we dutifully pushed under every ten minutes during the baking because the crust, the crust, dear reader, was the measure of a true cassoulet.

  So many parties. So much art down the gullet. Cocktails with light hors d’oeuvres or with heavy hors d’oeuvres or with buffets, Sunday brunches and Sunday suppers, tailgate picnics and beer barbecues and football parties, Christmas Eve and all-night New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day parties. Hangover parties, birthday parties, political fund-raising and charity parties. Halloween and Thanksgiving and Easter and Boxing Day and Valentine’s Day and Fourth of July and Labor Day parties. Costume and theme parties, transatlantic shipboard farewell parties, and welcome-home-from-abroad parties. Formal and informal sit-down dinner parties for four, six, eight, twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight—but that was really pushing it. Each kind of party demanded its own props, choreography, costumes, mise-en-scène, and menus, at a time when women dressed for dinner in long dresses as a matter of course. Often the planning, as in Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, was more fun than the event, and you worked up such a head of steam getting ready for curtain time that the moment the first guest rang the bell you wanted to go upstairs and take off your clothes and go to bed.

  No event was too small to be sanctified by a party. We gave parties back to back: Farewell to the Cottage one month and At Home in the New House the next. The Farewell was to be an informal come-as-you-are party for our regular gang of eight to ten couples, because the rugs were already rolled, half the furniture was gone, and packing cases lined the walls. Perfect for a dancing party. So instead of finishing the packing, I cooked up a pissaladière niçoise, with pounds of onions sautéed with garlic and herbs, piled in a pastry shell and topped with anchovy filets and black olives. Then a gigot de pré-salé farci, since a boned lamb leg was easy to slice and its rice and kidney stuffing was splendidly exotic. And it was a pleasure to test your skill in cutting into the red flesh to locate the bones—pelvic, rump, knuckle, leg, shank, and tail—because you were learning about your own bones and how the ball joint fit into the hip and how the hipbone was connected to the tailbone and how flesh was covered with fat and fell. Charlotte aux pommes was a good finisher, with strips of white bread soaked in butter to line the charlotte mold filled with a thick puree of apples and apricot preserves and dark rum and more butter.

  Our Farewell Party was no big deal, but it turned into an all-nighter, what with the dancing and the euphoria, or maybe it was hysteria, of clearing out and starting over. We talked our last guest out the door around 5 a.m., his wife having given up and gone home hours before. So we were a bit groggy when Tucky woke us up at nine to say, “There’s a strange man in my bed.” Our guest, it turns out, had dropped his keys when he went to start his car and couldn’t find them, so he climbed through an open window above the kitchen sink, fell into the piles of dirty dishes, and made his way upstairs and into the first bed he saw. When we went into Tucky’s room, there he was, fully dressed and snoring away. That was when I remembered that we had six people coming for lunch.

  Our first At Home party on Lilac Lane was a big deal, home-cooked food and drink for two hundred
. It was a test to see if the flow flowed. While Paul tended bar in the kitchen and guests helped themselves at a secondary bar in the living room, I spread the dining table with a blockbuster array of Julia. At one end of the table, a suprêmes de volaille en chaud-froid, blanche neige, the breasts sliced and covered with jellied cream for a checkerboard of black truffles. At the other end, a mousseline de poisson, its texture as light as a quenelle, from a puree of scallops and wine and cream and white button mushrooms, shaped into a curved fish and beached on a bed of fresh tarragon. To fill the gaps between: a bowl of céleri-rave rémoulade, a plate of endives and artichokes à la grecque, a platter of asparagus, the stalks neatly skinned, the heads aligned and scarfed with a mayonnaise verte. There was room for a colorful ratatouille and a rice pilaf, baked with butter and minced onion in a Creuset casserole in good chicken stock that I’d made, of course, from scratch.

  Always I served two or three crusty French baguettes, sliced for convenience but baked only the day before, at home of course, in the professional black-trough tins Julia recommended, in my simulated baker’s oven, in which I created steam by dropping a hot brick into a roasting pan filled with an inch of water. I did not follow her suggestion of buying a piece of asbestos cement cut to the size of my baking rack to create a hot surface, but I did have a couple of leftover Mexican floor tiles, so I used those instead. You got 20 to 30 points for home-baked bread provided it was French or Italian; American loaves didn’t count. Croissants and brioche put you up 40 to 50 points, but such tricky doughs were better reserved for small parties. So was homemade pasta, which we cranked out first by hand and then with electric-powered machines, festooning our kitchens with strips of dough of every dimension, on every possible surface, including chair backs and countertops and even the pot rack once the clothes racks were full. The cats had a field day when I made pasta.

  Once we had established the mise-en-scène for our kitchen productions, we could focus on costumes. The world was our oyster. For our Moroccan Evening, I served a mountain of lamb and couscous to a circle of sultans and hareems, scented with rosewater and sitting cross-legged on the oriental rug in our library. Paula Wolfert’s Moroccan cookbook had given us instant expertise in preserved lemons, which you had to let ripen for thirty days, and in bisteeya, for which you roasted and boned a dozen squab, seasoning them with ginger and saffron and turmeric and cinnamon and ground almonds and beaten eggs and cupfuls of butter. It all took time, even if you used phyllo leaves for the pastry and knew you would never ever make a genuine warka leaf from scratch. But spending time, your most precious commodity, was the point. Like lust, it was an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

  We had New Year’s Champagne parties, Ragin’ Cajun Mardi Gras parties, Halloween Apple-Bobbing parties. Sam was not a party animal but Tucky was. She gave a Jaws party when the horror movie held our local theater hostage for two years (Peter Benchley was a near neighbor), and she later gave a Speakeasy party with a live jazz band to honor the bad old days before her time when drink was hard to get.

  For a long time, I was airborne by party dynamics, propelled by a group rhythm that seemed to obey principles of flight as mysterious as they were inevitable. There was that moment of suspension during the long slow taxi down the runway, the exhilaration when the party gathered speed and took off on its own and you could undo your seat belt and move around the cabin and laugh and drink wine instead of club soda and run up to the attic to the costume trunk to bring back an armful of funny hats so that everyone could be ridiculous and next day call up and say, “Hey, that was some party.” Professional chefs, I’d been told, sometimes compared the madness of their dinner-hour kitchens to combat, to the adrenaline-pumped frenzy and release of battle, followed by battle fatigue. Party rhythm was addictive in the same way.

  There was even a pleasure in cleaning up afterward. We went through house and yard the next day with an imaginary minesweeper, looking for shards of glass ground into the rug or hidden in the lawn. Ashtrays stinking of stale butts, ashes spilled onto tabletops, half-filled glasses left behind doors and under chairs, a plateful of chicken bones on the piano—even the wreckage had a kind of beauty because it had its place in the scheme of things. The ritual of cleansing was a purgation appropriate to a day of hangover, and it could take most of the day to rinse, load, wash, and empty the dishwasher over and over, until all the glasses, the china, the silverware, the pots and pans were squeaky clean and back in place. Often we fell into bed the second night even more exhausted than on the first.

  Those of us who had spent time and money mastering the art of competitive cooking in the sixties found our bowls and whisks suddenly obsolete in the seventies. Just as the Battle of Agincourt turned on the difference between the longbow and the short cannon, so our kitchen wars now turned on the introduction of a new weapon: the Cuisinart.

  Carl Sontheimer, an American engineer raised in France, had come across the Robot-Coupe, the Cuisinart’s predecessor, at a French cookery show in 1971 and redesigned it to make a foolproof tool for any home cook who loved brandade de morue or veal quenelles or scallop mousselines but found them a bitch to prepare. At one blow, it elevated our kitchens to a new level of refinement and eliminated half our lovingly accumulated equipment. Besides chopping, mincing, grinding, grating, slicing, and dicing, it could knead bread, mix brioche and biscuit and pastry dough, puree fruits and vegetables into sauces and sorbets, and whip eggs and oil into mayonnaise.

  The Cuisinart didn’t alter our ambitions. Indeed, it seduced us into ever more vainglorious attempts to re-create La Grand Cuisine Française in our humble American homes. By this time my bookshelf was packed with the works of nouvelle cuisine evangelists from Bocuse to Guérard. By this time we could buy imported into our own markets the French cheeses and charcuterie and pastries and breads that we’d once gone to France to obtain. Now we could refine our entertainments, as Louis XIV had done when dining privately in his chambers au petit couvert, by staging intimate dinners for six. With a few friends, we founded the Princeton Gastronomic Society, which centered on wines accumulated by one of our number during the bargain days of the sixties to be savored drop by costly drop in the boom days of the seventies. We would convene a couple of times each year, after weeks of consultation, to honor “les vins célèbres” with a menu to match.

  Our dinner menu for March 6, 1976, presented, in order, champagne to accompany a series of amuse-gueules; a Montrachet Bouchard 1966, paired with a mousse de crevettes, sauce Joinville; a Léoville-Las Cases 1959, for le gigot farci en croûtte; a salade d’endives as a refresher course, sans vin; a Richebourg Bouchard 1966 for les fromages choisis; a sorbet au citron for a second refresher; an Oppenheimer Schloss Müller-Thurgau Kabinett 1976 for les crêpes soufflés Grand Marnier, façon du château de Meyrargues; café; and, for the insatiable, eau de framboise. We were our own chamber opera. We dressed in black tie and dined by candlelight and held our glasses to the light to gaze at liquid that had appreciated to $100 a drop. I removed plates and presented each new platter in my red Thai silk home-designed and -executed gown as if I had spent the afternoon on my chaise, rereading the letters of Madame de Staël. But never was the woman who does her own work more appreciated or applauded for the moment of performance.

  That it was only a moment, however, had begun to matter. As with other labor-saving devices, the Cuisinart perversely created more work than it saved. It tempted us into extreme culinary acrobatics, into mousses and purees and coulis that once had been too hard to tackle. It pushed us beyond mayonnaise into hollandaise and béarnaise in restaurant quantities, because they were now so easy. It lured us ever deeper into the frozen terrain of granités and sorbets and ice creams, with their treacherous meltings and freezings. And it seduced us into pâte à choux and pâte brisée and pâte feuilletée, aerial acts we had never before dared, for fear of falling. But where had all the fun gone? This was hard physical labor, and for what?

  The more we embellished our Entertain
ments as a bulwark against time, the more the Real World as we had known it was in retreat. All the rules were changing. A new generation of boys did not march off to war without protest or evasion, and a new generation of girls said no to the kitchen. The rebellions of the sixties finally permeated even the most fortified walls. While we partied on, Rutgers at last rescinded its nepotism rules, and I finally got a part-time job teaching Shakespeare and Freshman English at Douglass.

  The dilemma of Douglass was typical of my own. As an all-women’s college, it had gained in stature during the preceding decade until it rivaled all-male Rutgers. Should it now push for coeducation, or should it affirm its own identity? An aggressively active feminist group had formed on campus, and as with other power movements of the sixties, it was either join on their terms or go to the wall. I hated their bullying, feared their anger, resented their arrogance. The ideologues of the feminist movement seemed to me as narrow and dogmatic as the Calvinists of my youth. My generation of women was betwixt and between, too young to fight in one kind of war, too old to fight in another. 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.

  True, equal opportunity had got me the job at Douglass that, inadvertently, saved Sam’s life. Just before Christmas, he was home from school for several days with fever. The doctor diagnosed flu and cautioned us not to worry. But the fever kept on and his nightmares became so intense that we moved him onto a cot in our bedroom so that we could comfort him when he woke at night screaming. I was teaching King Lear in New Brunswick when Paul noticed that Sam’s skin was turning green. He wrapped him in a blanket and drove him to the hospital, where he underwent surgery for a burst appendix. The war vet knew gangrene when he saw it.