My Kitchen Wars

by Betty Fussell

  “Drive fast,” I urged Paul, “or I’m not going to make it.” When we reached the villa and I stepped from the car, I exploded in both directions. Paul had to carry me into the house and into the downstairs john, where the Delft porcelain toilet and sink were adventitiously cheek by jowl. I stayed there until all my insides were out, then crawled up the stairs and passed out on the bathroom floor. I woke up in bed, where I stayed for a week, with Madou hovering over me with now a cup of bouillon, now a cup of tea, and whenever I opened my mouth another teaspoon of Fernet Branca. She was doctor and nurse, and although I had no idea what a crise de foie was, I recognized a severe but not fatal case of shellfish poisoning. That meant the worst was over.

  I stayed clear of crayfish the rest of our time in France, but when we came back to the States the thought of never again tasting lobster was unbearable. I speculated that my reaction was not to the shellfish itself but to what it might have fed on off the coast of North Africa, which exported large numbers of crayfish to France. The next time Paul ordered a Maine lobster, I took a chance, took a bite, and suffered nary a twinge. I sent a thank-you up to God. I would not have to sacrifice lobster as punishment for my sins. A week of purgation had been penance enough.

  In the mid-seventies, we decided to have one last fling on a transatlantic liner, and this time to do it in style, first class on the SS France. But the first night’s dinner, for which we’d dressed with exquisite care and paraded down the staircase of the dining room with movie-star panache, was a disaster. A miserable fruit cocktail, a dried-out turbot, a shriveled slice of turkey ballottine, a fatigued cheese served with saltines. Sal-tines! Paul took it as a personal affront. I remonstrated with the maître d’hôtel that the meal was execrable. “Comment?” he inquired, puzzled. I repeated the word. “Ah, exe-crable,” he repeated, with the accent on the penultimate syllable, laughing and nodding in agreement. “Mais oui, mais oui, madame, execrable.”

  The joke was on us. Even though it was possible to order special dishes off the menu, the quenelles de brochet were rubbery, the saumon au beurre blanc mushy, the gigot d’agneau stringy as old tennis shoes. Only the drink was reliable, for which you paid extra, of course, and heavily. Our table companions were no comfort when they bragged that the meals they’d had on TWA were far superior to anything they’d had at Lasserre. After dinner the bars were empty, and in the once spiffy Café d’Atlantique the hired pianist played “To Dream the Impossible Dream” to a sole listener, a school librarian in brown chiffon.

  Our swan song to the sea voyage was a Swan cruise from Southampton to Nice, to which we’d been invited by Kingsley and Jane, who’d been invited in turn by the writer Anthony Powell and his wife, Lady Violet. I figured afterward that the Powells had wanted the Amises along as security against intruders, and the Amises had wanted us there to distract them from their disintegrating marriage. We were a set of nesting lifesavers, but none of us were safe on our Journey to Disaster aboard the MTS Orpheus, with port stops along the western coast of Europe—Brittany, Spain, Portugal—until the ship reached its home port in Nice, from where it could take off on its regular Hellenic route along the eastern Mediterranean.

  We descended to D deck, D for Dionysus, D for Dungeon, back where we’d begun on the Liberté, just above the vibrating propeller screws, but at least the noise dampened the shouting of the Amises in the cabin next to ours. The “welcome dinner” was a tip-off: canned fruit cocktail, library paste soup, drip-dried fish, greasy duck, unripe tomatoes, melted ice cream. The Powells, I noted, took fruit cup and soup and went straight to ice cream. Wine was extra, of course, and the Powells’ rule was that each couple was to order and pay for its own bottle. The dining room, “Lounge of the Muses,” was a depressing rackety room of low ceilings and loud voices, in which the harried Greek waiters slapped down course after course of inedibles, followed by the hot-water drink labeled “coffee” and the warm-water drink labeled “tea.” The Powells had already established one corner of the lounge as their private gathering place for drinks before and after dinner. No matter how foul the food, you could always wash it away with strong brandy.

  Whenever we landed, we ran for the nearest bar or market or sidewalk café to stock up on provender, it didn’t matter what—a Breton cake, a baguette, a bottle of rum, Ricard, hard cider, gin. If we were to be met by a bus for a sightseeing excursion to some distinguished cathedral or castle, explicated by our distinguished Oxford lecturer, inevitably the bus failed to come or left us off at the wrong place or broke down or ran out of gas.

  We were an Erasmian Ship of Fools, characters who might have been drawn by the satiric pen of a Powell or Amis in a particularly vicious mood—the fat fish-lipped Vicar traveling with a doddering Church Lady; the middle-aged Spinster Son in raveled sweater traveling with his roly-poly Mum, whose bottom he had to push up the bus steps with his hands; the Siren, who looked like a transvestite in her cowboy hat and pointy bra; the Bête Noire who worried endlessly about exchange rates and whether the Spanish would take Portuguese escudos; the bright-eyed Ship’s Doctor who told of two corpses they had to put on ice during the last cruise and take off at night, because people don’t like deaths at sea; the Aussie Dwarf, a real one, who turned out to be headmistress of a reputable American girls’ prep school; the Texan Couple with matching peroxide hair, gold jewelry, and purple sunglasses; the white-bearded Masseur with two Young Boys in tow like fishes on a line; the Country Squire and Wife whose son was affianced to a Connecticut Divorcée whom they feared would not know what she was in for, “marrying into a family of the distinction of the Blofields of Blofield House”; and then there was the aristocratic Lady Violet herself with her lavender voice and her watercolors and her Perfect Companion, Tony, constantly amused and amusing, with very large teeth and such exquisite manners that he would ask the ladies before eating an apple, “Do you mind if I bite?”

  After the debacle of the banquet celebrating the Queen Mum’s eightieth birthday (overcooked fish in lemon-water sauce, beef in brown gravy so tough that it could be neither cut nor chewed, a salad without dressing, ice cream with raspberry jam), I became somewhat more sympathetic to the Breakfast Lady, who had brought with her from England her own plastic tub of cooked oatmeal and a two-quart jar of homemade marmalade. She put up seventy or eighty pounds of marmalade a year, she said, but she and her husband ate less of it now than before the war, when they’d had high tea every night at six.

  It was a relief to disembark in the Old Port at Nice, where we’d once embarked with the children on a converted P & O boat in January for an overnight trip to Corsica. The sea had been so wild and stormy that night that even if we’d not all been seasick, we’d have had to stick to our bunks anyway, because our cabin was awash in salt water. Now it was August, and we were late landing. All the hotels were booked and the tour agents, despite promises, had failed to find us a room. The Amises were taking a train that afternoon to Bordeaux, then to Paris and London, but we were to spend the night in Nice before flying home. We finally landed a suite at the Albert Premier that we couldn’t afford. But at least the Amises could stash their many bags there while we had a last lunch. We ate omelettes and french fries and cheese and drank bottles of red wine at our old favorite outdoor snack bar, Queenie’s, and were glad that the trip was over. None of us were sure what it had been for, but it was clear that more than the trip was over.

  The scene at the train station in search of the Bordeaux Rapide was a final comedy of errors as we humped Kingsley’s bags, bottles of booze clanking, from quai to quai until we located their carriage. Jane had said that morning as we slid past the ports of the Côte d’Azur how many happy memories she had of this particular coast. “You’re lucky,” Kingsley had said. “I have no happy memories.” I was reminded of what Jane had said to me earlier when I’d excused some outrage by remarking, “You must remember we’re not in England now.” “Oh yes, we are,” she’d replied. “We’re always in England.”

  After they l
eft, Paul and I took the long walk up to Chemin des Pins, looking for the Villa les Marguerites, but all the villas were gone, long replaced by massive high-rises with balconies, from one of which a pair of elderly women with dyed hair looked down at us with open hostility. Chez Puget, however, was still on rue Deloye, where Madame still rested her bosom on the cashier’s podium. We reserved a table for dinner and walked along the Promenade des Anglais. The pebbled beach sported a number of topless girls sunning their breasts, another change. A row of elderly men watched silently from their deck chairs as a dark Niçois kissed passionately the breasts of a buxom blonde.

  At Chez Puget that evening, the soupe de poisson was as excellent as before, topped with the same mustard-yellow rouille. The poularde de Bresse en crème was served with the same caramel sauce of old, and the squared roast potatoes and needle-thin haricots verts were still served on separate plates. We drank a costly Chablis, Grand Cru 1967. We lingered over our cafés filtrés and noted that the Puget son and daughter were not in evidence. All the waiters were old men, and Madame Puget did not recognize either our name or our faces. Ce n’est plus pareil.

  That night, I found it impossible to sleep. Horns blared and sirens hee-hawed along the Baie des Anges. From the garden below the hotel, a rock concert was in full boom and, once it ended, freaked-out speedsters began to voice their hallucinations. I was still awake at dawn when a pale sun turned the sea powder blue and the moon, shaped like a croissant, faded behind an apron of rosy clouds.

  Cold Cleavers

  Lobsters seemed to play a crucial role in the domestic crises of my life and perhaps that’s why they are my favorite food. Should I find myself on Death Row, for a Last Meal I would probably request the lobster boiled or steamed. But the deepest sea flavor is in the shell, rather than in the tender, sweet, juicy, buttery flesh. The big advantage of lobster bisque, which begins with pulverized lobster shells, is that it offers up the deep-sea essence already distilled, requiring you to do no more than lift spoon to mouth.

  The cook, however, must lift a cleaver. A single well-aimed blow severs chest from tail and brings a merciful and instantaneous death. Then, with a pair of serrated poultry shears, you cut open the chest in order to expose and save the strangely green and squishy liver—named “tomalley” by the natives of French Guiana and for no good reason the name stuck—and the lumpy black mess of eggs that fortunately turn pink when cooked and in English are appropriately named “coral.” All these interior vitals, except for the head sac and ganglia and the long dark line of the intestine, go into the pot.

  With your cleaver, you smash the legs and crack the claws, then flame them with the tail in cognac and butter and oil until they turn bright orange, then you simmer them in wine and herbs and a few chopped vegetables. The lobster meat you extract and save for garnish. It’s the shells you want, and they go into a blender, to be pulverized coarsely before simmering in fish stock. Once you’ve strained out the shells, you add the tomalley and coral and any leaked lobster juices and smooth them out in the blender, and if you’re like me you add quite a lot of heavy cream. As you savor your lobster bisque, spoonful by spoonful, you recite the mantra, “No omelettes without broken eggs, no bisques without decapitated lobsters.”

  I admit that this does not explain why, in 1980, I began to sleep with the cleaver under my pillow. But neither can I say just when the end began, which must mean there were many beginnings that made the end inevitable but kept it invisible. Did the end begin when I returned to graduate school at Rutgers in 1970? Did it begin in 1975, when Paul won a number of prestigious awards for his book on World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, which catapulted him out of the narrow pigeon coop of English literature and onto the postwar cultural landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic? Or did it begin during our trip to India in 1977, when Paul returned to London because he’d had enough of a place he hated and I stayed on alone because I couldn’t get enough of a place I loved? Certainly it had begun by the following year when for the first time I said no to a trip he wanted to take to Southeast Asia, not because I didn’t want to go but because the timing meant I would have had to quit my job. And certainly it was a sure thing by the time I forced a family vacation on the four of us in 1980, trying to mend by a trip to Capri for our thirty-first wedding anniversary what soon broke down for good.

  I went back to college the same decade Tucky and Sam graduated from college. In theory I now had time to do graduate work full-time, but in practice I knew that my full-time job was to take care of Paul, and anything else was moonlighting. There would be other problems. All my potential mentors at Rutgers were already friends. Worse, I was pushing my way into Paul’s professional world, an amateur intent on turning pro. It made for some bizarre moments, particularly when I taught English at Rutgers for a couple of years while writing my thesis and sharing Paul’s office. Rutgers was a bad idea all around, but Princeton took only full-time grad students and I knew that a daily commute to Columbia or NYU, even if they let me attend part-time, would be out of the question.

  The real question was: what did I want a Ph.D. for? I thought it was because I didn’t want to be a private first class for the rest of my life. Paul had confessed once that what he liked about the academy was that it was like the Army: the ranks were set and you worked your way up until you got to the top. No surprises as long as you obeyed the rules and kept your buttons polished. But you don’t join the Army as a non-com at forty-five and expect to be a major at fifty, or even sixty, or at all. I told myself I needed the degree in order to get a permanent teaching job, but I wasn’t scrutinizing either the job market or the sand in my hourglass. Secretly, I think I wanted validation for all those years spent as an academic wife with no identity tag of my own, no credit given and none taken. I wanted a Girl Scout merit badge for work well done.

  Instead, Paul reaped the merit badges for his prize-winning book, and I faded like an old Polaroid. I grew resentful, but not, as Paul assumed, because I was jealous of his fame. I had wanted something simpler and subtler, some sign of recognition from him that his achievement, which was real and admirable, was the result of labor shared. The writing, the research, the sensibility, the work itself were all his, of course, but I had given him a gift he had used and discarded without thought. I had given him time. From the beginning I had freed him from all the secretarial and familial and social chores that unravel concentrated work, The Work. His work was my work, a trap I’d walked into as hungrily as a lobster with eyes on the baited prize. I’d walked in of my own volition, eager to support my mate with whole heart, like Dorothea her Casaubon, in Middlemarch, for the sake of The Key to All Mythologies.

  But Dorotheas a century later were making new claims on time, their own and other people’s, and new claims on education and work. The further they and other “minorities” invaded the universities, the more veterans like Paul stiffened their resistance. At home, we resumed our old gender debate full force. He no longer argued for the natural superiority of men—He for God only, she for God in him—but rather for the order of merit: To the worthy go the spoils—and somehow the worthy were always male.

  Naturally Paul’s resistance fired my determination to win some prize, however meager, in the only game he valued, the only game I knew how to play. But returning to boring lectures and interminable reading lists and footnoted papers was like sitting down to leftovers of a meal I’d begun twenty years earlier. I fell asleep rereading The Faerie Queene, which had once upon a time kept me up all night. I chafed under instructors half my age, or so ancient they were doddering, or under ex-hippie types who smoked pot with pet students and played games of psychological manipulation. And the truth was I still could not write a clear and logical expository essay. I was working against the grain of my thinking, which was not sequential, and my desire, which was to imitate the works I read, not analyze them.

  Once I had my prize, the kind you can hang on your office wall, I had no office, and no job. Rutgers was done wit
h part-time instruction. I sent out dozens of letters to nearby institutions offering my services, but got only one reply, by phone. I was out at the time, and when the caller asked if I would be available to teach a Shakespeare course, Paul explained that we were going to spend the fall semester in London. He forgot all about the call until the next day, when he mentioned it offhandedly. If I really wanted to teach more than anything, it was clear I’d have to leave Paul. But still I chose to stay.

  This time our London apartment was owned by a corporation in Yemen that had rented it before it was finished, as if it ever would be. It was without heat and without furniture, save a minimal stove, and so badly constructed that when I went to open a window one day the entire frame came out in my hands and I had to holler for help to keep it and me from falling to the sidewalk below and smashing into a thousand pieces.

  I was glad to escape in November to India, which I had always longed to see. Paul was appalled by everything there was to be appalled by, the filth, noise, stench, beggars, cows, cobras, cripples, dung, corpses, chaos. The strangeness that made him want to flee enthralled me. Most of my time was spent trying to get tickets from one place to the next no matter what it took, and it took a very great deal of time and patience and elbowing, but the sensuous overkill of the place was as exhilarating as my first discovery of the sensuality of food. I couldn’t believe our luck at arriving in Calcutta during the Feast of Kali. We watched as a priest sacrificed a goat before a temple and worshippers bathed in its blood. God in the streets! Paul cut his trip short, and I stayed on by myself, traveling through southern India by train, shuffling into dark temples with thousands of redolent bodies to crowd against a primeval stone lingam in the blackness.