TTT

Interviewee:  Betty Fussell     						          Session #1

Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					     New York City

Date:  March 18, 2009


Q:  This is Judith Weinraub.  I’m sitting with Betty Fussell in her apartment in Greenwich Village, and it is March 18th.  Good morning, Betty.

Fussell:  Good morning, Judy.

Q:  Why don’t we start, please, with your telling me a little bit about the circumstances of your childhood, where you grew up, your parents. And why don’t we go—

Fussell:  Since I live in an 1840 Presbyterian church, former Presbyterian Church, it is, to me, the irony of ironies, because what conditioned my first sixteen years of life was that I was a strict Calvinist Presbyterian.  That’s going to matter about everything, particularly food.  1927, when I was born in Riverside, that part of southern California was entirely colonized by Midwesterners.  That means they brought their food traditions with them, their food biases, their sense of colonic irrigation, their need for reducing all foods to liquid, etc.

Q:  Wait.  Go back about that.  You mean they came with the conviction that colonic irrigation was a good thing, a necessary thing?

Fussell:  Yes.  They brought with them the whole baggage of the Kellogg Sanitarium, everything that happened in the Midwest in terms of Puritan food extremities and all.  They were part of their time, that’s all, and they were farmers who were very happy to get off the farm, because this wave of this particular group of Scot Presbyterians, which means they were—Scotch-Irish, which means they were entirely Scot, not a drop of Irish blood, unfortunately, but they’re called Irish because this group of lowland Scots put down in Londonderry on their way to America.  This is the early part of the nineteenth century.  Half of these Kennedys, Erskines, Stevensons, half of them went straight on from the Port of Philadelphia to the Midwest, the other half went down into the Appalachians.  The Appalachian group all became bootleggers during Prohibition.  The ones who went to the Midwest all became complete teetotalers, but this is a very cranky group of people.

Q:  How so?

Fussell:  Reading their histories you can see, because when we get to something like John Knox and the Presbyterian Church, from then on there are schisms within schisms of sects breaking off, because they each want their rules, their own rules.

Q:  From then on meaning approximately when?

Fussell:  John Knox, seventeenth century.  The great break from the traditional Church of England, which, of course, was the break from the Catholic traditions.  So these are rebellious people who were also poor, these are crofters.  Although every Scotch-Irish person that I know traces his ancestry to Robert the Bruce, it’s all nonsense.  [laughs]  On the other hand, they’re good survivors.  So this has nothing to do with the tradition of colonic irrigations that they brought, but they’re a tough breed, let’s put it that way.

Q:  And your particular family came from what part of that?

Fussell:  They came from Ohio and Nebraska and Kansas.

Q:  I mean what strain of that thinking; is what I meant.

Fussell:  They were all intermarried.  It’s a tribe.  They’re all intermarried.  Erskines, Harpers would have been west of England, but it comes out of a similar time and similar group.  Stevensons, Scottish again, Kennedys, these are all the Protestant, Protestants in America.  So it was that wave of immigration that preceded the big urban from Europe, from Eastern Europe, the Jewish, the Irish, etc.  So, early nineteenth century as opposed to late nineteenth century.
	There was a depression, which will be relevant because one of the first farm depressions was toward the end of the twenties.  So all of these folk in the Midwest kept pushing further west when it would seem that the farmland is not making them money, any money in Nebraska, then, keep going.
Both sides of my grandparents, maternal and paternal, ended up in Greeley, Colorado, at the same time.  That was a mass natural western extension.  That’s the end of the prairies.  Then come the Rockies.  So they met, my parents, mother a music teacher who didn’t get married until she was about thirty-five, father a biology, botany teacher as he became.  When they met, my father had the image of pushing on to California, which was a part of his time, because in World War I he had actually seen the Pacific Ocean, in San Francisco.  So these are all very typical of their time.

Q:  I was interested in your mother because she had trained in New York and—

Fussell:  But only at a Bible school briefly.  I mean, she was adventurous in that she had gone from the Midwest to the East, which most people hadn’t, but she was unusual also in being interested in the arts, which none of the rest of them were.  They were all science, doctors, ministers, if they were going into something other than farming, and most of them did.

Q:  But in terms of her marrying your father and his choices in life, that was perfectly normal, or was it?

Fussell:  Do you mean to have—what would be abnormal here?

Q:  Well, I guess giving up any sense of what the arts represented and the East.

Fussell:  She wasn’t ready to stay in the East.  She was here for schooling and good work schooling.  The Alma White Bible School is part of the—but I don’t think she ever imagined she was going to establish herself separately.  Because what would she make money at?  Teaching without family?  I mean, all these people had thirteen kids on all sides, you know, everybody.  So these huge extended families and they all pitched in to take care of each other.
	When she was in school, she had a nervous breakdown, so that was unusual.  Again, so she had to go back to the Midwest and be taken care of.

Q:  What did a nervous breakdown mean then?

Fussell:  It was a word that was used until what?  We started talking about manic depressive and now we talk about bipolar.  It’s all the same thing, a generic term for a highly alert nervous system that has highs and lows.

Q:  So what situation was she feeling about herself when she met and married your father?

Fussell:  Since she was a teacher at the Colorado State Teachers College, which was then Greeley State Teachers College, it became Colorado State Teachers College, put on the map by John Michener, who was an alumnus.
So my father at this point had returned there to take his M.A., and my mother was teaching piano there in her mid thirties.  That meant she was a terrific old maid nobody married and not bound for marriage, partly because she was frail.  So she was sort of exempt.  I don’t know how they fell in love and got married, but they did, and whisked off to my father’s first job in Mill Valley, where I wished he’d stayed.  Mount Tamalpais, he used to tell me, he’d talk about.  He loved the countryside, as I understand why that would have suited himself as a botanist just perfectly.
They had their first child in Colorado and moved that baby with them to Mill Valley, where he taught at a high school.  They then had another child who died within the year, year and a half, and evidently that tipped my mother back over into the manic depressive, whatever.  They had then moved to southern California, where her parents had already moved because of one of those other children, her sister, my Aunt Lyda, her sister Lyda had moved there.
So you can see all of these trends, trains, how people go.  That was in Glendale.  This wasn’t in the same town, but it wasn’t far away.  So they landed in an orange ranch.  They must have put money down on an orange ranch, where they built a garage and that’s where I lived when I was first born.

Q:  A garage?

Fussell:  A garage in the orange grove, because the garage was supposed to be before they built the little house.  This is right outside of town in Bloomington, so that land would have been cheap.  Also it was by the cement plant, which made it even cheaper.
	So after my mother died when I was two, my father’s parents moved from Greeley, Colorado, to take care of my brother and me on the orange ranch, but my grandfather was also an osteopathic doctor, so he had an office in town.  Osteopathy is part of this great Midwest health.  You could be a chiropractor or you could be an osteopath.

Q:  He was, as well as his second wife?

Fussell:  He was far before his—no, this is my grandfather.  And because he was an osteopathic doctor, there were quite a few in that town, as there would be because it’s of Midwestern origin and Midwestern settled.  But it’s another example of the kind of rebelliousness of this tribe.  They hated medical doctors, they were part of the enemy, the eastern establishment potpourri, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  They were all in the same package of who you hate, who the demons are.
	So there were quite a few osteopaths, and in that osteopathic office was a woman who would have been a feminist without knowing it.  Again, she was in her late thirties or maybe forty.  I’m sure my father was desperate to find someone to take care of the children because he wasn’t going to do that, men don’t do that, and he was teaching, but you know, it’s just unthinkable, so he first brought his parents. 
My grandfather introduced the woman who was sharing his office, Elizabeth Blake, and so they got married, but we continued to live with my grandparents because this was a career woman, which was very rare.  She wasn’t going to alter her doctoring career for anything like children.  So we continued to live with the grandparents.

Q:  I guess I did read this, but why did he think she would take care of the children?

Fussell:  I think, as is easy for me to understand, “Oh, how wonderful, we’ll get married.  She will be a mother, even though we have my parents to really take care of them.  But all children need a mother and that would be convenient for everybody.”

Q:  Interesting.

Fussell:  Do I think he didn’t know her very well?  Yes, he married within a year, so he was desperate, and for himself, I think, and I think desperately full of guilt too.

Q:  You were very, very young.  Do you have any sense of what the food was like when you were that little?

Fussell:  Zero.  I don’t remember anything until I was about three.  Except for the butter; did remember the butter.  Remember being on the farm in Gilcrest where the grandparents had taken us.  We were shipped off immediately after her death, Bobby to another aunt in Colorado, and me to the grandparents in Gilcrest, which was a farm, which I have wonderful photos of, which I’ve actually visited, but it’s now—guess what?  It’s a feedlot.  Isn’t that nice?  So is Greeley.  Greeley is one of the country’s major feedlots, or has been until Nebraska and Kansas took it over. 

Q:  So when does your memory pick up of life either with your grandparents or with this reassembled family?

Fussell:  Well, except for this one moment on the farm when I do remember, or I remember being told about it, crawling across the farm floor and opening the icebox and getting a pound of butter and eating it.  That stuck in my memory because I really do love butter.  Okay, sounds logical to me.  Then I don’t remember anything until moving to [unclear], when we just ate very simple food, but that would be the food of the time.  So, Ovaltine and cornmeal mush and toast with brown sugar on it, which my grandpa loved, and milk.  Sunday supper was always that.  My grandmother loved burned toast, so she would deliberately burn it and then scrape off some of the charcoal.

Q:  This was with your grandparents, not after your father remarried?

Fussell:  We kept on living with the grandparents, so that marriage had nothing to do with us until later, the kids.  They were our parents, the grandparents.

Q:  How long did that last?

Fussell:  We had to go live with the parents, the real parents, when I was six.  So that would have lasted two to three to four to five to six, I guess four years.  Then the grandparents, we all moved in to the parents’ house, because Grandma was sick and she could no longer take care of us and she really needed help.  I guess her son helped her.  I’m trying to think, because the kids, we would have been no good in helping her physically, but I think she went to bed for a while.

Q:  Then who would have been, to use a contemporary word, parenting the two of you?

Fussell:  Well, Father did all the cooking, which was an interesting arrangement.  The stepmother never cooked.  Father was used to cooking because he was a farm boy and he did, in the summer, all the canning, he did just like a farmer, and because it was California, you got good produce still.  We would go to Hemet and get peaches and cherries.  This was before agribusiness, but, ah, California was a paradise of natural-growing fruit trees.  We had in our yard a fig tree and a kumquat.  We didn’t have apricot trees, but neighbors did.  Pomegranates we had.  Of course you did.  I mean, you know, it’s California.  The oranges, because those were navel oranges, this was the first winter orange in this country, so that was very exciting.  But where else would it be?  Of course it would be in California.

Q:  At that point when you all reassembled, what did you look like?  How big were you?  Do you have a sense of that?

Fussell:  Sure, thousands of photographs.  Short and fat, little round—

Q:  Really?

Fussell:  I mean, five years old, I’m a butterball in a little sunbonnet, I’m Midwestern.  Hundreds of photographs.  I don’t have any immediately to hand off, but I do have thousands.

Q:  Was there anybody who actually paid attention to you as a girl and the needs of a girl growing up?

Fussell:  It was certainly complicated.  The grandparents very quickly—we were all living together.  Everybody hated each other.  The grandparents did not get along with the stepmother.  The stepmother, as I’ve depicted her, is a kind of witch, but that’s what she remains in my head, one of the most unlovely, unloving people I have ever known.  So I have not been able to revise my childhood memories of this.  She certainly didn’t want to be bothered with children and she didn’t have any idea what to do with them, not a clue.  She had two sisters.  One of them, Aunt Minnie, was wonderful, had kids, knew exactly, but this one was not Aunt Minnie.
On the other hand, the stepmother was under great constraints by the Presbyterian grandfather, who was an Elder, and that meant something.  So they were very critical of her always.  They set the rules on how to bring up the children and that was very strictly, and she, of course, probably doubled that.  The difference between was that the grandparents were really full of love and the stepmother was not.

Q:  The grandparents full of love toward—

Fussell:  Toward the children.  Yes, they really loved us.  The stepmother did not.  My father just stepped back and out of it.  He was a very remote kind of person anyway.  He just let other people do it.

Q:  Do you have any specific memories of your personal interaction with her?

Fussell:  With her?

Q:  Yes.

Fussell:  Oh, sure.

Q:  I mean, where you could like give me a little story, a little report of what dealing with her was like?

Fussell:  Yes.  I was terrified of her.  She had a very short temper and a very sharp temper, and my father was exactly the opposite; no emotion was ever expressed.  You had no idea what he was saying or feeling, but he was a kindly man in there somewhere, it just wasn’t expressed.  Grandparents were kindly and very patient as grandparents are apt to be, but she was quick and sharp.  And she had her office in the house, so you had to stay away from the middle of the house, living room, the treating room, which is her office.  She must have done that at some point to save money, because she had the office downtown, but at some point she moved into the house.  Then they had a sign out front, Elizabeth Harper, D.O., and that’s where my brother and I got the word “D.O.”  Then behind that was the dining room.  Behind that was the kitchen.

Q:  And D.O., excuse me, was doctor of osteopathy?

Fussell:  Yes.  If I wanted to do anything, I had to ask her permission and I would rehearse.  My brother and I had adjoining bedrooms upstairs.  My brother’s four years older, and we were not close.  He didn’t want to bother with me, you know; I’m too young.  I’m too young.  Besides which, unfortunately for him, my grandparents babied me because I was a girl, and therefore I did what they said, and they bullied him because he was a boy and he rebelled.

Q:  You referred to rehearsing.  What kinds of things would you rehearse?

Fussell:  I would rehearse if I wanted to—this would be, let’s say, when I’m about getting on in elementary school, perhaps, and wanted to have a friend over.  Okay.  I would rehearse what I was going to say and how I was going to ask it and what was maybe the best time to approach her.  I’d listen to see what she was doing downstairs and all, see if I could pick up on her mood and then I would go down and ask her, “Could I have Shirley come over to play tomorrow after school?”
You never knew what her response would be.  She could snap your head off and say, “No, you haven’t even cleaned your room,” blah, blah, blah.
“Okay, okay, okay.”
Then you run back up to your room in tears.  You could never solve when was a good time to approach her.  It was just sheer will and enjoyment of her power, absolutely, and she had a lot of power.

Q:  Did she have any role in how you all ate or didn’t eat?

Fussell:  Only in the sense that she was ready to give you an enema after the meal.

Q:  Explain that a little bit.

Fussell:  Father prepares.  She was sort of in charge of the enema-giving, which was rigorous and frequent.

Q:  Immediately after a meal?

Fussell:  Not immediately, but if there’s any stomach complaint of any kind, it’s time for an enema.  So, of course, you learned not to complain about anything.  She had no interest in food whatsoever, except for her notion of what good healthy food was.  You were never to have—her notions—you were never to have cucumbers and cherries at the same time.  If you had that by mistake, before you knew it, she would bawl you out.  There was a whole world of things that you were never to put in your mouth.

Q:  What would cucumbers and cherries have resulted in?  What inhospitable—

Fussell:  Oh, gas, bad intestinal upheavals.  I think you were supposed to never have cucumbers and milk either.  I can’t remember why that is a—

Q:  Those cucumbers.  [laughs]

Fussell:  Those cucumbers, and they were frequent.  We could grow them in our yard when the victory gardens came along, but they were cheap.  

Q:  What about the Fletcherizing?

Fussell:  Everyone was Fletcherizing then of our particular ilk.  I remember it as doing it in the thirties.  Of course, that’s when I was a kid.  I think it started in the twenties and it became faddish.  Who was I just talking to, said, “Can you believe it?  We had to chew a hundred times.”
	I said, “Oh, my god.  You too?”  I can’t remember where that person was from, but it wasn’t just Midwest.  It had taken over as a faddy thing and taken over seriously in families like mine, where the whole life of the food was centered on the digestive tract and its dangers.  You know, you apply a whole Calvinist theology.  If the body is impure to begin with, you’re trying to reduce the body at all times to spirit, because bodies are bad.  Anything physical is bad, then everything that goes with that, including emotions, including desires.  Okay, physical is out.

Q:  Could you explain, for example, so you’re at the dinner table.  Paint the picture for me of what that was like with the instruction that you had to chew away.

Fussell:  At the dinner table we all, after the prayer given by Grandfather, often very lengthy, we sat there in silence and chewed.  Nobody talked.  Chewed.  Or you could ask, “Could I have another helping of—” blank, blank.  Nothing was discussed.  Everything was taboo.  Religion was taboo.  No one had any social consciousness whatsoever, so politics were taboo.  There wasn’t any.

Q:  All right.  So you’re chewing.  What was on your plate in front of you?

Fussell:  Typically in about the mid-thirties, as I remember the evolution of this, first there would be canned peaches that father had made during the summer, which we could then open.  That would be a big treat for dessert.  There was almost always a fruit dessert.  Anything else was too costly and nobody knew how to make it and my father had no interest in it.  That quickly became replaced by Del Monte.  My father adored Del Monte peaches because he didn’t have to make them.  They were so nice and sweet and sliced and slippery, you know.
If you were having an occasion of some kind, ice cream was often in the icebox.  These were literally iceboxes.  The iceman came, and because Riverside is quite hot, the iceman had to come every day in the summer or everything would go to pot.
Otherwise, the food, in the depression we really barely had enough to eat.  Often a dinner would be scrambled eggs and small portions.  That would be a protein, but people liked that because it was soft; you didn’t have to chew it as long.

Q:  So the scrambled eggs would be put on everybody’s individual plate?

Fussell:  No, it would be a platter and passed away, and you would be warned not to take too big of a piece.  A piece.  Too big a spoon.  There was always toast.  There was always bread.  It was always store-bought bread, of course.  Let’s see.  It’s pre-Wonder bread days, but there was certainly—Safeway was our major store forever, as I remember.  Safeway must have started pretty early.  That would have been the best deals and they had a lot of stuff.  We seldom had fish.  Because we were not Catholics, we didn’t have catfish on Friday.  When fish was cooked, it was ghastly. It would be a filet of some kind just radically overcooked so it’s white mush.

Q:  Did you have to cut anything into small pieces prior to Fletcherizing?

Fussell:  Well, you could spoon it.  You can spoon all of our foods.  The meat was boiled until it was spoonable.  A cheap cut of lamb on the bone would boil for several hours, together with some beans that would boil for several hours, potatoes that would boil for—potatoes tend to be soft anyway.  Crispy was not in the category of taste, not, not, except we did have cereal.  So we had shredded wheat and grape nuts, which I didn’t like.  I liked shredded wheat.  Cornflakes, didn’t like cornflakes because they got mushy, so that crispness got lost.  Oh, and puffed rice was in there in the thirties.  Cereals would have been a good thing, I mean, so we all had cereal for breakfast.

Q:  Did you all eat breakfast together?

Fussell:  I think we did.  We got up at five-thirty.  Dad had to prepare to get to class, which would have been at eight, but he wanted a lot of preparation time and he had to drive to his school.  I went to a grammar school that was just down the block, so I could walk to that, but my brother had to walk up another hill.  So, yes, so we allowed plenty of time.  But it really was, it was farmers’ time; that’s when they got up.  We went to bed then at eight-thirty, nine-thirty.

Q:  So if you had to describe your attitude toward food at that time, how would you characterize it?

Fussell:  Hated sitting down at the dinner table, because it was silent and full of tension, all the things unsaid.  Longed for treats, but I would help create those by making pretty pictures if we had a salad.  So that could be the canned pineapple ring with the little banana, you know, the phallic banana.

Q:  You were making pretty pictures with the food?

Fussell:  Right.  So that’s the sort of thing I was allowed to do.  Liked that.  By the time of Home Ec classes, that would be junior high, that’s later, then you could actually take a hand in making applesauce.  That was fun.  I loved the ability to make something at home, but I would not have ever been allowed to if it hadn’t been a class assignment.

Q:  I guess what I’m getting at, their approach to food didn’t seem to take with you.

Fussell:  Food was what you got through.  Food was fodder.  I remember intensely things that I loved to eat, like root beer floats.  Treats like that, treats.  I like cornmeal mush with brown sugar and milk.  So there are a lot of textures I like.  The table, to me, represented something once in a while you could make pretty for Thanksgiving or Christmas.  So it’s the prettification of the table that I looked forward to, not certainly the daily grind, not the chew.  [laughs]
	When I was invited to friends’ houses infrequently, when I was I was just astonished at what other people ate that was not like this, really astonished and humiliated because chewing a lamb chop took me a very long time.
	Eskimo Pies were around.  So those little special treats when the ice cream man came by.  And the best thing, I think, in my youth was the U-No bars at movie theaters, because I was allowed to go to the Saturday matinee at movies.

Q:  What was the U-No bar?

Fussell:  A U-No bar was a little one, as opposed to the bigger Mars bars and Snickers.  What it was, was, in fact, a kind of chocolate ganache.  We didn’t know what that was.  It was just creamy and smooth and intense, and it was half the size of a Mars or Snickers, but realizing its intensity, if you went at it very slowly, you could make it last the entire movie.  Of course, by that time it had melted entirely all over your hands, but it didn’t matter.  So that was an absolutely memorable taste.
Loved angel food cake.  Did that come yet?  That was very rare.  How did we get that?  Maybe from a bakery, because it certainly wasn’t made at home.  It was premix time.  I don’t remember other cakes, and I don’t remember people making cookies.  So I think we were getting some store-bought in Safeway, some store-bought cookies.

Q:  When you wrote that there were not special occasions other than Christmas and Thanksgiving and things like that, it interested me that later on in life then you entertained a lot, a lot.

Fussell:  Yes, that would make sense.  [laughs]

Q:  Tell me why it would make sense.

Fussell:  This was an anti and totally asocial family.  Social life resided in the church, not at home.  We never had a dinner party.  There were no friends.  So that didn’t exist.  The only social contacts you were to have, the center of your social life, was to be church, and this is tricky because it meant if I met somebody at school who was not a member of my church, then probably the D.O. said, “No, no, you can’t have it.”  They’re very strict on this.
	At church there would be good church suppers.  Ooh, I loved those.  Hey, there was food.  Casseroles, people would bring things, rice puddings, corn on the cob.  Those were very good.

Q:  Did you bring along, or did you family bring along, any sense of, I don’t know, I don’t want to use a word like “guilt” especially, but that it was inappropriate or wrong to take pleasure in those foods?

Fussell:  Oh yes, everything.

Q:  I mean, you tell me.

Fussell:  Everything was guilt.  Guilt ruled.  Everything that brought you pleasure was guilty you were guilty of, no matter what.  So there’s only one emotion that was allowable, which was guilt.  [laughs]  And that emotion was cultivated.  That’s not hard to instill in kids anyway, at all possible levels.

Q:  So I guess the church suppers, like what you’ve written about, about your summer vacation food with your father, that would have provided at least an awareness of other possibilities of what—

Fussell:  Summer vacation down at Long Beach?

Q:  Yes.

Fussell:  Was that it?  I don’t remember.

Q:  You talked about how you could have different foods then, whether they were purchased at some roadside stand or—

Fussell:  Okay, I guess I’m thinking of the canning period, because it would be vacation for my father off teaching.  Okay.  Included in that is fieldtrip, fieldtrip food, which as a botanist, biologist he would go off to the desert, so my love of the desert comes entirely through my father, where we would drive into the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, etc., and collect plants at different times of the year, especially spring.  Spring and fall is the best.  And always have to bring sandwiches from home, because there wasn’t anything there.  So we got to have a thermos full of Ovaltine and fried egg sandwiches.  I can eat those to this day with white bread.

Q:  Who made those?

Fussell:  It would have been my father.

Q:  Were you ever allowed, before you went to college, into the kitchen to make food yourself?

Fussell:  My brother and I did the cleaning.  Yes, we washed the dishes.  I wasn’t allowed to wash; I was allowed to dry.  My brother washed.

Q:  But cooking, not even assembling a sandwich?

Fussell:  I think we would have had to ask permission to use the peanut butter.  There was a little larder adjoining the—you had to ask permission for everything.  So, “Can I take some butter out and make myself a peanut butter sandwich?”  If you found someone to ask, that would be okay; otherwise, not.

Q:  This really didn’t change until you went to college, or was there a time prior to that?

Fussell:  It did not change until I went to college.  When I went to college, I knew it was going to be different and better.  I guess I write somewhere I would have run away from home by the time I was twelve, but I had zero, had nothing, and I’d seen all those movies.  I knew that if you set out with a handkerchief on a stick, you weren’t going to make it.  You’d be returned with the police, and then you’d really have it.  Then you’d really get it.  So I bided my time.  I said, “The moment I get to college, I’m never going to come back.”  Of course, I had to come back for summers, etc., etc., but, and in effect that’s what I did, I graduated early and then left and didn’t come back.

Q:  Did you have girlfriends that you could in any way discuss these feelings with?

Fussell:  I had one really close friend who was an outsider like me.  Her parents were mining engineers and they had left her with the grandmother.  So she was raised by a grandmother.  We became total best friends, and that lasted until five years ago when she died in New York, that we had each other all those years, which was a very great thing.  She didn’t get married and have a family, but she had a very early television career, so she really blossomed.  She had nice parents, though; they were just absent parents.

Q:  Did you ever eat together, the two of you?

Fussell:  Yes, and Gran, her Gran, was a good cook and her Gran was from the East and had been married to a doctor, so she was very sophisticated.  That’s where I had the first lamb chop.  Ooh, meat you had to cut with a knife.  How did you do that?  Gran and Pat would laugh at me hysterically as I chewed and chewed and chewed, because I had to get that meat down that you never had.  They would have, oh, broiled tomatoes.  Gran would have had an English-based palate.  That was very exciting.  There would always be something nice.  They would have a fresh salad of some kind, like cut-up vegetables.  We never had anything but iceberg.  They would have had some kind of dessert that would have been sophisticated to me.  I wonder what that would have been?  They might have had a mousse or chocolate pudding or something other than—our puddings were always Jello or Junket.

Q:  I have a brief memory of Junket.  That was a really creepy food.

Fussell:  Yes, it had its non-chewable texture.  [laughs] 
And when I got to college, though, that was the first real break.  I’m cheating a little, because I had my Aunt Lyda, who was one of the thirteen children of the Kennedys, and that was my mother’s, real mother’s, sister.  That sister took care of my Grandma Kennedy, who pretended to be an invalid for the last twenty-five, thirty years of her life, but who absolutely ruled the roost in that way.

Q:  When you say you were cheating, cheating how?

Fussell:  Because Aunt Lyda was a cook.  She was a good cook.  So I had real food at Aunt Lyda’s.  She made things like, not Danish, but pecan sweet rolls, you know, just simple sweet rolls.  She made biscuits.  She made soups.  Good cook.  Now, she’s out of the same kind of background.

Q:  How often would you have been with her?

Fussell:  We would get to go two weeks in the summer sometimes, not every summer, but often.  This was really because the grandparents wanted to see us, but also because Aunt Lyda really loved children.  She had three daughters of her own.  They were older than us, but this was a happy family, so that was happy, really happy to be with.  The older cousins babied my brother and me just wonderfully.  That was exciting.  Aunt Lyda had birds, huge cages outside of birds, so beautiful.
My grandfather had been a carpenter forever and a douser when they were also in the Midwest.  He would just discover water and dig wells.  Grandmother had been an early woman in the church, and, of course, very much a teetotaler, but she was a commanding creature.  We were all a little bit afraid of her, but I loved her.  She was wonderful.

Q:  When you were anticipating going to college, what was your imagined view of what your freedom would be like?

Fussell:  I would be out of prison.  I knew I was in prison.  I was not allowed to have a bicycle.  I was not allowed to be off on my own.  I was not allowed to have dates.  They were carefully discouraged, in effect, too dangerous.  So I knew I was in prison and I just couldn’t wait to escape.
And it really by happenstance worked this way, my best friend and I got to go to the same college.  We didn’t pick it, but my parents wouldn’t let me go to Berkeley, where I wanted to go.  That was too far away.  My friend, Pat, I think had wanted to go to Stanford and didn’t quite have the grades to get in.  So we ended up in the same college, which was a great boon, and joined the same girl gang instantly, which came from all over southern California, except one girl from Chicago and another from another from Peoria.

Q:  How big was the school?

Fussell:  This is Pomona College, so there were a total of eight hundred.  My high school was more like fifteen hundred.  So I was scaling down, but it was a very different place.  Formal dinners every night.  That was an extraordinary thing; we had to dress up.  Almost real food was served, as opposed to the daily lunch at cafeteria where it was glop.

Q:  What did that almost real food—

Fussell:  I think we had a something meat and like a baked potato, and there would have been courses.  These were served dinners with candlelight.  So we would have three courses.  The first course we’d have a soup or a salad.  In California, salad always comes first.  So a soup or a salad and then our main—but this is wartime, so we’re not eating much in the way of meat.  We’re eating a lot of vegetables, but we’re in California, so we’re getting some pretty good vegetables, not just canned ones.  Dessert was always ice cream, because Pomona College had been bequested a lifetime supply of ice cream by some rich man who thought that the one thing college students would really want is ice cream, and he was right.  We all caught “the freshmen five.”  We all put on at least five pounds.  I think I put on ten.  Because you could have seconds.  You could ask for seconds and get them.

Q:  You couldn’t have done that at home?

Fussell:  No.

Q:  I’m just checking.

Fussell:  What a silly question.  [laughs]  Breakfast, I remember, you could have a soft-boiled egg or a hard-boiled egg.  I mean, that was a refinement.  We had never ever had anything at home but hard-boiled eggs, except when you were sick, then somebody would make you a soft-boiled egg.

Q:  So on the scale of freedoms that you experienced in this school, I’m wondering where food would have ranked, but also what other kinds of freedoms.

Fussell:  Food was not an unmitigated freedom, because you had to dress for dinner and that was a bore at the mood we were in, as we are now—I was sixteen, but most of my pals were seventeen, and there were no men, and this is the middle of the war, so a bit restive with pretending that we’re ladies from the 1930s in our painted-on lines, because there aren’t nylons.

Q:  You would have to paint on those lines for dinner at school?

Fussell:  Yes.  Oh yes.

Q:  Oh, my.

Fussell:  Because we had to have hose.  If you don’t have hose, you paint on your line.

Q:  I see.  For some reason I thought that was when you left school, but not—that’s interesting.

Fussell:  No, because you had to wear stockings.  That was the dean’s rule.  So it’s still full of rules.

Q:  Hilarious.

Fussell:  The first year was still the euphoria of breaking out of one kind of prison.  By the end of that year, or rather second year—no, it was by the end of that year, because I was breaking rules at Harwood, the rules, the parietal rules, for the girls, there were guys on campus, they were all 4F, but they were treated entirely differently in another part of campus.  They got great food.  They got steaks.  Whatever good food there was, they got, and in abundance.  They could always have seconds.  They ate an entirely different menu.  Some of us waited up there from time to time for money, and that was Frary Dining Hall.  So we got to eat what they ate when we got up there.

Q:  Explain that.  I don’t quite understand how that would have happened.  You got to go up there if you could pay?

Fussell:  No, to be waitresses.  To work.  To work as campus services.  Then our eyes were open to the gender distinctions between the glop girls were served and the real food boys were served.  That was a shock.  So euphoria was being constantly mitigated.
Then there were the rules about coming in.  I think as freshmen we had to come in, be in the dorm by something like ten-thirty.  The guys could be out all night.  Girls had to do their own dormitory cleaning.  Boys got maids.  There was a whole lot that we couldn’t quite put together in our heads, but we knew that boys were different because they were all soldiers off serving in the war and we weren’t.

Q:  The boys who were not 4F?

Fussell:  The boys who were not 4F, who would have been at college.  So our sense of gender was conditioned entirely by the war.  Boys fight, girls stay home.  So of course they need protein, as indeed they did.  So of course we give up our butter, our meat.

Q:  But wait.  If these boys were 4F, then they wouldn’t have gone off to fight.

Fussell:  No, but I mean they were still treated as—you know, they were boys.

Q:  I know.  I just found it hard to balance that.

Fussell:  There’s no problem.  They played football, they’re the big men on campus, they get the jobs.  They run things.  They’re boys.  [laughs] 
Q:  One second here.

Fussell:  The generation of the forties.  The Depression conditioned the thirties, the war conditioned the forties, and that’s when the real shocks, the real divisions came in that will—no generation will repeat that.  That will never be the same.  We can have another depression.  We’re not going to have that first shock of huge numbers of our boys going to war without any participation of anybody else except to stay still.

Q:  There obviously were other freedoms, though, that you must have felt exhilarated by.

Fussell:  What the main freedom was was intellectually.  Ah!  Ideas, ideas.  So for the first time ever, I found a source to question the Calvinist theology I was raised with, and I had the great joy of instantly becoming a philosophy major.  Ah!  [laughs]

Q:  I was too.  I’m not sure it was the world’s best idea, but nevertheless, it was thrilling.

Fussell:  It was thrilling.  My classes were, for the most part, as opposed to high school classes, I was just—I hated things like chemistry.  I memorized.  I was good at memorizing quickly, so I could always get A’s in this stuff.  I never understood a word and had no context for it and didn’t care.  I just wanted to get through it.  I helped my boyfriend get through.  He wasn’t a boyfriend.  I tried to bribe the big, gorgeous black football hero, because we were good about blacks because southern California had a lot of middle-class blacks.  What we were bad at were, we had no Jews.  Zero.  No Jews until the war.

Q:  That’s interesting.  But racial intermixing was okay?

Fussell:  It depended.  Black was okay.  Mexican was not.  Mexican was not.  They were the bottom, but they were the immigrants.  They lived in their own town, Casa Blanca, but they came to school.  But none of us would have even talked to them, except I had when I was younger, my friend Juanita, who lived around the corner.  So this was not engrained, but it was just the older you got, the clearer it was that blacks were okay.  Catholics were not.  Italians were not, thereby.  You can’t date him; he’s a Catholic.  So everyone has his own peculiar structure, and this was the structure of the Midwest transported to California at that time.

Q:  Would your own family have asked you about your dates, or would they have acknowledged it was even happening?

Fussell:  Oh, it was all a matter of permission, often denied.  So, yeah, asked and investigated.  Since my father taught at high school, he could find out anything he wanted to about any high school boy.

Q:  Did you ever avoid asking?

Fussell:  Did I ever sneak out?

Q:  Yes.

Fussell:  No, because I couldn’t get back in.  I mean, did I have a key to the house?  No, and I would have had to climb up stairs.

Q:  Now, what about at college?

Fussell:  College was different.  I mean, college is not home, so what’s the question on this?

Q:  So in college you could see whoever you felt like and whoever was available?

Fussell:  Sure, but I mean, you wouldn’t—oh, of course, of course, and that was a huge freedom.  Yes, dating.  Dating, huge freedom.  The problem there was the parietal rules of having to be in by ten-thirty, so you’d see people very fleetingly and have to run home.

Q:  I see that you did become Phi Beta Kappa.  Did that surprise you that you had this incredible intellectual capacity?

Fussell:  No, because I didn’t think of it as an intellectual capacity.  What that was was that I had been trained to be a good student and I was.  I knew how to be a good student.

Q:  You were trained at home or where?

Fussell:  Oh, yes, yes, yes.  I was a good student, my brother was the bad.  I knew how to work hard and focus.  I didn’t learn what I should have learned, but I knew how to get good grades and I knew how to work steadily.

Q:  So you did not have a sense of inferiority on that score at all?

Fussell:  That’s a little bit complicated and interesting to me. I knew where I stood with my high school friends.  There was a category of Merit Scholars.  I think I was a Merit Scholar at the end.  But I knew I wasn’t like my good friend Tomiko Ito, who went off to a Japanese prison camp, of course, a concentration camp.  I knew who the really smart ones were.  Paul Trotta, who was an Italian Catholic.  They had a sense of intellectual motivation, retention that I didn’t have.  I was a kind of fun-and-games girl with my pal.  We did all the high school plays, we staged the dramas, we’d get out of schoolwork to sit around and write our yearly musicals, in which we’d perform and direct.  That’s the stuff we loved.  We loved all the extracurricular stuff.  We’d play hooky and go down to the movies.  I was not a part of the intellectual band, but I was smart enough and worked enough to always get rewarded as if I were.
	The same thing when I got to college.  I knew I could pick up things quickly, but I knew I was not intellectually as brilliant as blank, blank, blank, and blank.  So I had great respect for people who were smarter than I was.

Q:  Were there a lot of people who were smarter than you?

Fussell:  Yeah.  I was really bad with numbers.  There were lots of things I couldn’t do.  I had zero math abilities.

Q:  That was way before any thinking that there were different kinds of intelligence.

Fussell:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  What I realize now, what I have is a metaphoric intelligence.  I mean, I thought in images, so I could move my mind very quickly and jump all kinds of gaps.  I was not a good analyzer.  So in philosophy, because it’s California, I would get to write short stories or little fictional stories for my exams in philosophy instead of having to do a real analysis you know, catch the spirit of the philosopher John Mills, and recast that in a way that says that’s the way I understand it and it’s a way to approach it.  So I had a wonderful philosophy professor who let me do that.  The moment I’d done all those courses and had to go into symbolic logic, oh, no, no, no, don’t like that, hated the abstraction.  So I’m not good with abstract systems.  So I think I always knew who I was intellectually, but I didn’t want to be intellectual.  I wanted to be a glamour girl.  I wanted to be a musical comedy star, always.  So I had to conceal that, had to conceal the smarts, always, through college.  Painful.

Q:  When did those first desires to perform emerge in you?

Fussell:  From the beginning, from the beginning, and that’s movies, I mean, because that was the art form available.  So, Shirley Temple.  Oh, we’re of an age, “Mama, why can’t I have a tap dance lesson?”
	“Because it’s evil to dance.”
	“Why can’t I have curls?  I’m blonde, but I can’t have curls.”
	“Because we wear pigtails.”
	I did adore Shirley Temple.

Q:  You must have been quite a looker, actually.  I mean, I doubt that you had a sense of that then, but—

Fussell:  When I got to high school, it’s time for Betty Grable, so these were our models, and the models were right there always in front of us.  So we would make the bouffant hairdos and try to look like that.  Good, clean, blonde American girls we wanted to look like, on the screen.

Q:  That desire to perform seems to have been there in the beginning and continued.

Fussell:  And the one thing that strikes me now looking back, benefited enormously by the John Dewey system of education.

Q:  Tell me what you mean.

Fussell:  Where the bad thing is you don’t learn a lot about factual content; you learn process and creative freedom.  So instead of memorizing Longfellow’s Evangeline, we created, we made a little mockup of Evangeline in the swamp, escaping.  So you’d make a little cardboard three-dimensional.  I loved everything to do with drawing and painting, and I drew all the time, painted all the time.  And I was doing music all the time, because I was supposed to be a piano player like my mama.  Unfortunately, my hands were not nearly as good as my stepmother’s, who could ripple off the keys ever so much better than I could, but I loved playing the piano.  I’m the only person I know who is still taking piano lessons through high school.  I think the furthest I got to was Beethoven’s Pathetique, and I could play the first movement magnificently, the second movement wretchedly because it required technical skills.

Q:  When would it have been that you would have begun to take responsibility for actual cooking your own food?

Fussell:  The first time I did it, I didn’t even remember, but all my college friends did, one of our dorms, we had a little subsidiary kitchen that you could use for what, I suppose heating up coffee.  At one point, I thought, okay, well, I’ll give a luncheon.  We’ll have scrambled eggs for luncheon.  So I did a scrambled egg luncheon for about eight good friends.  I can’t remember the occasion.  I remember the pleasure of doing that and knowing I could do that.  Everybody loved the party, so I must have created a party.  Friends now, same friends, say, “Well, don’t you remember you always did the cooking?  Remember those scrambled eggs?”  I didn’t really remember it that way, but okay, okay, I guess I wanted to make food.

Q:  Did you also want to create, I don’t know, an event with the party, a kind of performance event?  How would you have seen that?

Fussell:  I would have seen the whole thing as an event.  I’m not just giving them scrambled eggs; I’m giving them some kind of a brunch.  It must have been a brunch.  We shall have a homemade brunch.  So I must have bought some good Danish or something, you know.  The idea was to have a party.  We did have plenty of Ritz cracker and cheesy parties, but that doesn’t count.

Q:  Meanwhile, did your stepmother and father have any idea of the party-ridden life that you were leading?

Fussell:  They had no idea of my life in any form, and I was very careful to keep it from them.  I got the lead part of Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth when I was a sophomore, and had my very first cigarette.  Had to learn to smoke to do it, and I was terrified that they would hear about this play and want to come see it, because if they saw it, they would see me smoking on stage and there would be a fit.  So I did everything to keep that kind of knowledge from them.
In a weird way, most of my friends by this time were drinking because they learned to drink beer in high school, and they had cocktails, beer and cocktails, I mean things like whiskey sours, etc.  I was by far the least sophisticated of anybody I knew.

Q:  Still I might add, a delicious taste sensation, the whiskey sour.  [laughs]

Fussell:  Yes, yes, once I learned, but I was determined not to drink just because I could.  I was determined not to just say, “Because I can drink alcohol and my parents think it’s a sin, now I’m going to drink it because I can.”  So for a year, until I think my second year, I didn’t.
Yes, I dated.  I was pinned to a fraternity—by the sophomore year the vets were coming back.  The world changed.  Whew.  My first vet boyfriend, he happened to be a teetotaler; he happened to drink milk.  So to the utter scorn of all of my friends, we drank milk while everybody was getting tight on beer, beer and jug wine.  So those were the drinks of choice.
At the end of that, when we broke up, I said, “Well, nuts to this milk at parties,” and that’s when I had my first wine, my first drink of wine, and I took to it.  I took to wine and beer, actually, but particularly the wine and experienced all those things that you do if you don’t know anything about alcohol.  So you get drunk and pass out and all that stuff.  Bad training.

Q:  What kind of life did your parents think you were leading, or did they care, or what?

Fussell:  Let me think.  Did they care?  I think my father just kept himself remote from thinking about it.  Okay, because, poor dear, he had to drive a taxi in the summers in order to help supply money.  So, yes, he wanted to make sure I got a good education, because he knew the importance of that.

Q:  Well, that’s important.

Fussell:  Oh yeah.  Oh yeah.  No, no, no, I have lots of gratitude to him.  He didn’t do it for my brother, however, so I was the one who got favored there.  Stepmother was always wary of everything and always jealous of any rewards that came my way, so I was careful to keep all that from her too.

Q:  At what point did you consciously begin to take pleasure in cooking or eating, and/or eating food, do you remember that?

Fussell:  When we ate out at college, that’s when I took pleasure in the food itself, and that was going—I think I mentioned it—to Lucy’s.  The first spaghetti, the first taste of garlic in a spaghetti sauce, the first Italian bread, a French loaf.  And garlic bread, we just adored.  Never had anything like that.  But it was also the whole occasion of eating out that was great, in the restaurant.  Restaurants were costly, so the local one was called the Mish, but that would have been mostly everything from milkshakes to—they must have served liquor.

Q:  So this would have been when, when you had the first spaghetti, garlic bread, that sort of thing?

Fussell:  This would be, let’s say, freshmen, sophomore, junior.  Freshmen, sophomore, this was beginning, yes, food is part of that, and always connected with liquor, because Claremont was a dry town, so you had to go outside.  So the Mish couldn’t have had liquor.  You had to go outside town, up on the highway to get liquor, and therefore it’s very much associated, the Sage Hen, a good steak.  Why was it good?  Because you’d just had two old-fashioneds.  The vets had had five martinis, you know.  The correlative of that was Lupe’s, the little Mexican joint, where you would get absolutely sopped on beer and have really good menudo, that kind of thing.

Q:  At this point, preparing that food wasn’t something that had occurred to you as an important goal?

Fussell:  No, because, (a), there were no kitchens, I mean, no place to.  It didn’t even occur to me.  Didn’t miss it, never had it, except at Aunt Lyda’s, but she did the cooking, I never did any cooking.

Q:  What made you want to go to New York?

Fussell:  Graduation from college.

Q:  It’s not the only choice after graduation, after all.  [laughs]

Fussell:  Well, if you’ve listened to the train every night, hopefully every night, in a little town like Riverside, and had dreams of getting out, your dreams get bigger and bigger.  My real dream was going to Europe.  That was movies.  That was Shirley Temple in Heidi, but really off there.  That was cheese.  That cheese and bread looked good.  [laughs]  I have strong images of the Heidi.  I know that whetted my appetite for being in another country.  I’m in a desert.  Where do I want to be?  I want to be in green hills with little sheep.
	So the dream of going abroad was, of course, long thwarted by the war, and the moment the war was over, those troop ships were filled with students and people like me who wanted to get there as quickly as possible on youth hostel trips and everything else.  That’s what I was saving my money to get onto, and New York was to be a stopping point.  I would save my money until I had enough to get on a hostel trip, and instead, you know, I had thirty dollars coming to New York.  So that’s not going to take you very far.  You have to look way ahead.
So I met my husband, Paul Fussell, who had been a college sweetheart for a year before he broke it off.  So we met in New York because he was at Harvard and therefore stayed.  Part of his seduction was, “Well, marry me because we’ll go off to Europe on a honeymoon.”
	“Okay.”  [laughs]
	Well, that got delayed.  “When are we going to Europe?”
	“Oh, I’ve spent that money on your ring and my ring.”
	“Okay, okay, okay.”
	So we did get married in Cambridge while he was doing his Ph.D.
But the cooking, we went off to Cape Cod for the honeymoon.  I had still not done any cooking.  This terrible flat I was in in New York, which belonged to somebody else and I had rented the bedroom, cooking was really prohibited on their little tiny stove.  So in any case, I wasn’t skilled to do that, so I didn’t really.

Q:  Had he cooked at that point?

Fussell:  Oh, heavens, no.  [laughs]  His father was a lawyer.  His mother was a housewife with a maid.  Nobody cooked.  And his grandmother was a teacher of elementary school who was the president always of the Browning Society, so she never cooked.

Q:  You mean she was busy?

Fussell:  She was very busy.  She was a career woman.  So I never cooked, really, until the honeymoon.

Q:  I’m sorry, didn’t cook until?

Fussell:  Until we got married.  And the food he had eaten at graduate school was garbage.  You know, everybody’s living as cheaply as possible.  The one-dollar “chink” meals, you know.
So we rented a house that had a kitchen, and because we were so excited to be on—it wasn’t on the beach, but it was on a point of land with water all around it, this is a real house.  This is wonderful, exciting.  You had to rent it for the summer to get it at all in East Orleans, where we’d never been.  We just knew it was Cape Cod and it was near a beach.  So we asked friends to come, because there seemed to be a big room with a lot of little cots, and to our astonishment, they did, but in droves.  So suddenly I was cooking for a lot of people without a clue of what to do except learn very quickly.  We did have this wonderful—these two Waring blenders.  Ah, that was a godsend.  One for drinks and one for sauces, soups, purees.

Q:  So how did you go about cooking?  Did you read cookbooks?  What did you do?

Fussell:  No, didn’t have time.  That’s a good question.  I wonder why I haven’t thought about that.  There was nothing in the newspaper.  Did I even read the newspapers?  Don’t know.  Never read the women’s page.  Never read recipes.  So what was I using?  Oh, I know, I know.  I was given Good Housekeeping.  In 1947 I was given that.  Ah, how could I forget this?  The wife of one of Paul’s graduate student friends, who’d been a marine colonel, and they had three kids and his wife had kept a little loose-leaf notebook of her recipes, and she very kindly gave that to me as a wedding present.  That was probably the best wedding present I got, and that was her typed-up recipes for brownies and tuna casserole.  You know, enough to get you through for many, many a meal.

Q:  And things like that?

Fussell:  Yes.  I’d never heard of Joy of Cooking, so the Good Housekeeping would have been my compendium.  I’d never heard of Fannie Farmer.  I’d never heard any of the standards.  My father never used a cookbook; he just cooked out of his head.

Q:  A farm cook.

Fussell:  Yes.

Q:  But you had, at least, watched someone can.

Fussell:  Yes.

Q:  You had a sense of the cycle—

Fussell:  But didn’t like canning.

Q:  You didn’t like canning or canned food?

Fussell:  I didn’t like canning, because it’s very, very hot in the summer and it was always, you know, “Get out of the kitchen.  I’m canning.”  Dangerous boiling water and it was a very tiny kitchen.  There wasn’t room.  I liked the results.  I liked the stewed tomatoes, a lot of stewed tomatoes.

Q:  So do you remember, there you were in East Orleans, what shopping was like, what any sense of how you got that food into the kitchen?

Fussell:  What was shopping like?  I think this is pre-farmers’ markets.

Q:  Yes.

Fussell:  I’m trying to think what was available at the Cape.  There was the duck farm down the road, so you could go get a duck.  No, you couldn’t buy the duck; you bought their duck pies, which were delicious.  You could buy clam pies there too.  We could buy lobsters.  We could buy seafood, clams and things.  Learned to steam clams at home.  This was really very much living on what the produce was.  There must have been a supermarket where we got our store-bought bread and butter.  Learned how to do that.  I’m sure we took the little Volkswagen.  I think Paul probably helped on this at first, because we’d be shopping in quantity for all our parties for all these friends who stayed.  So, yes, that was a year of experimentation, but it’s easy to learn by doing, and it’s also easy to rescue failed foods.

Q:  Or not.  [laughs]

Fussell:  Or not.  You try not to do things that you think are going to be difficult, like a pork roast you’ve never seen before.  So lots of hamburgers and things you could do on a grill.  I don’t think we had a grill, but we had a stove with a frying pan.

Q:  Did Paul participate?

Fussell:  No, no, no, no.  He was a man.  Zero interest in cooking.  That’s women’s work.

Q:  Did you feel it at all a burden, the cooking?

Fussell:  I felt the relentless cooking for friends a burden just because we hadn’t expected to have the onslaught we had, and they stayed.  This was kind of free bed and board at the Fussells, and we had really sort of presented it with a very open end.  At that time there was a clutch of friends from college that were mutual friends, so I mean, this is both real pleasure and oh, my god, will they ever leave.  [laughs]  This is before anyone’s getting married or living in houses, so whoever was there to purvey, purvey.

Q:  It must have been so incredibly different from the atmosphere that you grew up in.

Fussell:  It was fun.  Yes.

Q:  I mean, it’s hard for me, I mean in my own life, but let alone anybody else’s life, to separate women’s freedom, sexual freedom, food freedom.  I mean, they all kind of went together, I guess.  I don’t know how you experienced that.

Fussell:  Sexual freedom is not part of my—I didn’t experience sexual freedom.  Let’s put it that way.

Q:  At that point.

Fussell:  No.  What I did was sexual expectations, in every sense.  No real sexual exploration before marriage, and the responsibilities, the whole coupling, a marriage had much more to do with, “Ack.  What is this?” rather than a kind of liberation into it, and certainly not connected to food at that moment.

Q:  When you say, “What is this,” do you mean sex?

Fussell:  Yeah.  Yeah.  How does it work?  I mean, not that there hadn’t been enormously heavy petting, but it was different, very different, and we were both very, very inexperienced in terms of real coupling.  Paul had never experimented in the army.  I mean, his pals had taken the advantage of—I mean, making use of the privilege of being in Europe with different boys and available girls.  But Paul was much too frightened of sex to do that.  We were both frightened of sex.  God, it took us a long time to get over that.

Q:  Did you chafe at all at what was expected of woman in terms of the cooking, the cleaning, the more inhibited vocational opportunities?

Fussell:  Chafed a lot at that.  [laughs]

Q:  Can you describe any of that?

Fussell:  Yeah.  “What is this?”  It was my husband saving up all his socks to be darned until after we were married, so that they get darned.  Oh.

Q:  Did you know how to darn?

Fussell:  I knew how to darn from my grandmother, because she had a darning egg.  But he had a lot of socks.  I was supposed to do all the washing and ironing.  I had never ironed men’s shirts.  I didn’t know how to do any of that.  I learned.  The expectations were that I was going to be his mother without the maid.  That’s what’s interesting, looking back.  His mother didn’t do a lot of that either.  His mother was a very good sewer.  But his mother loved housecleaning.  His mother was an impeccable cleaner.  So there was a huge gender division in his family between smart lawyer father and a housemaid mother, even though they had a maid.

Q:  Was she smart?  She must have been smart.

Fussell:  She was smart, but uneducated.  She was eighteen, married out of high school, and had her first baby almost immediately and changed from a very pretty dark-haired Irish girl to fat and stayed fat.  So Paul had this odd, weird combination, as I tried to ponder it, between—his expectations were that any woman would be his mother.  At the same time, he had real contempt for her because she wasn’t educated, and what he had was extreme respect for and ambition for education.  So that was complicated.  But I kept saying to myself and to him for a while, “Why have I been educated, a good education, a B.A.?  Why have I been educated to do nothing but darn socks?  I don’t understand this.”  So, yeah, I think this group—so we all had babies.  I didn’t as quickly as my pals, because I chafed under this.  I was one of the last of my girl group to get married and they almost had babies instantly.

Q:  But you were fairly young when you got married.

Fussell:  Twenty-one.  Twenty-one.

Q:  That’s a hard age to think of as one of the last of your group.

Fussell:  Most of my friends in high school got married out of high school.

Q:  Wow.

Fussell:  Okay, different world.  So you were expected to get married around eighteen.  If you got through college, well, gee, you’ve already delayed it four years.  Time to hitch.  Time to start producing.

Q:  You seem to have had, and I imagine still do, incredible energy so that you squeezed in an awful lot, whether you were reading or going to school or performing in amateur productions or—

Fussell:  Right.  I inherited my mother’s manic energy.  I think I, hopefully, bypassed the other part of it, but the energy, yeah, I’ve always had a lot of high nervous energy, none of it is backed by physical.

Q:  Put to very productive use, though, it seems like.  Was that in any kind of conscious fashion?

Fussell:  No, I think I always had a very practical side to—you know, that’s not quite right.  That’s not right at all.  I had an intense desire to keep busy, so when I was in the household and miserable, as long as I was doing something, they’d let me alone.  So if I were drawing, I drew endless reams of stuff because it looked as if I was doing something.  If I was sitting reading, I wasn’t doing anything.  So doing, as opposed to reading, became a lifelong habit, I think.

Q:  And Paul didn’t really care what you did as long as you didn’t interrupt his—

Fussell:  Essentially right, as long as I didn’t interrupt and interfere with anything that—I think it was hard on him when I—I mean, he was very skeptical of my wanting to take a M.A. while he was finishing his Ph.D., but he couldn’t really rationalize not, because he had a huge educational mission in himself coming back from the war.

Q:  That’s what he saw for himself?

Fussell:  Not only himself, but that was going to save the world.  I mean, everybody had to be educated.  So he didn’t really approve, because what was I going to do with that, and my rationale at the time was, “Well, then I will be equipped to teach after we have the children and after they’re grown.”  You know, then I’ll always have some kind of job, skills, as I’d left the job track.  That was enough to get by at the time.  It was harder to justify when I wanted to do the Ph.D.  Then I used the rationale, “Okay, I’ve been teaching Shakespeare for a couple of years, but I’ll never be able to advance in salary.  I’ll still be getting only $800 a year because I’m not a Ph.D.,” which was true, but on the other hand, by the time I got the Ph.D., the job market fell off.

Q:  What about cooking?  At what point did you take any real pleasure in cooking, do you think?

Fussell:  I think when we came back from the Cape and moved into an apartment in Boston, and that was the year which I instead of—I mean, I could have gone out and tried to find a job in Boston and could have done so as a secretary or something.  I didn’t want to do that.  I didn’t want any more made work, because I felt I’d been doing that since age twelve.  I had to do a little piecework in order to bring in money.  I wanted to do something I really wanted to do.  I wanted to do two things.  I wanted to be a good wife, learn how to be a housewife, and I wanted to take an M.A. the next year.  So, okay, so I had to learn German and Latin from scratch and had to brush up my French.  I did have French.  You had to have three languages.

Q:  You mean to get in?

Fussell:  To get in, just to get in, just to apply.  So, okay, so I had my work cut out, so that meant word cards at home, and because I was a good student, I’m good at that, I can do that, I can work by myself.  And the pleasure in breaking the day, Paul would be off at Cambridge doing his work in Widener Library, and during the day I would do the shopping and plan what would be for dinner, and that became fun.  The deterrent there was we had no money.  So you had to shop very frugally and I didn’t go far afield.  I could have gone to Italiantown, which I didn’t know about, but that would have taken too much time.  If I’d done that, I would have learned a lot more about cooking fast.  But just at home I learned what would, (a), give Paul pleasure and me pleasure, and then because Paul is really demanding, he loved to have parties because he wanted people around on his terms, so we began to give parties.  Then we got, even then, known for our parties, because the food was good and we knew what a party was.

Q:  So what was that food, with no money and limited imagination?

Fussell:  The food would have been clam dips.

Q:  No, I meant first what you ate together.

Fussell:  What we ate together would have been casseroles, since spaghetti we wouldn’t know.  I would learn how to cook spaghetti.  I’m sure the sauce was canned.  It would be very primitive.  This would be the first of the 1950s.  What’s available then?  We would not be getting good bread.  We would not be getting anything.  Just putting anything together on a plate was better eating than Paul had done for his two previous years in graduate school where he was eating out all the time, fast food joints, essentially.

Q:  Did it give you any pleasure to do this?

Fussell:  Yeah, because it’s discovering, I’m discovering a world, I’m discovering a world of food, and everything is new.  How you cook spaghetti.  I think by then we were learning that you’re supposed to cook it, not into the soup that it had been.  You could get it out of something other than the Franco-American can where it’s already made mixed with its sauce.  That was exciting.  I think using garlic was exciting, as we knew about that now from Lucy’s and John’s.  We could make our own garlic bread because we could get Italian bread there.

Q:  Did you have girlfriends that you talked about any of this with?

Fussell:  Didn’t have any friends.  Didn’t know anybody.  Paul had to supply—Paul’s brother had gone to Harvard, so his friends were all the older couples who went to graduate school at the same time that his brother had befriended.  It was a characteristic pattern to Paul.  So he fell into his brother’s group and I fell into the same group.  Nice people, nice people from all parts of the world.  The best cooks were from the South, Mississippi.

Q:  Wait a minute.  The best cooks from the South, what do you mean there, in terms of his friends?

Fussell:  Yeah, a graduate couple where the wife was a cook and she was a very good cook.  So you’d pick up things from people like that.

Q:  Think back to that couple.  They would have had you to dinner, they would have had parties, what?

Fussell:  They would have had beaten biscuits and ham.

Q:  And invited you over?

Fussell:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Mostly, this is graduate school, so mostly whatever it is is going to be a canned ham.  They might have had a real ham from the South, so that would have been my first real salt-cured ham.  I mean, that was a discovery.  Yeah, how wonderful.  I think probably she baked pies, so we would have had good fruit pies, although we would have known about good fruit pies in California, because fruit was there, so you could make those.  Aunt Lyda made good fruit pies.

Q:  Did you have any emotion about the idea of cooking, whether it was disparaging or a value or anything?  I mean, did you categorize what that cooking role was in your head?

Fussell:  The cooking role was, first, necessary, and was something I had to do and had to learn about real fast.  So that wasn’t an immediate pleasure, but the more I did it, the more pleasurable it got as I learned about what the food was that I was cooking.  So that evolved into a real looking forward to the task of and the consumption of, particularly when that was extended into a party.  I think that’s the first time with other people.  These were all couples, more settled than we were.  Some had children, etc., and they all had a sense of cooking that was different from any I had experienced.  So I began to say, “Hey, this is nice.”  This is family cooking.  This is pleasurable.  It’s a way to have a good time with friends.  There’s a center to it that is other than alcohol, which had been the driving force for all these guys and then the girls with them.

Q:  So any residual sense of the way cooking and eating was in the home where you grew up dissipated or wasn’t a problem?

Fussell:  Well, it just turned from being something you got through to something that became you could look forward to.  But I’m sure, well, I knew how to make Jello, so there are a lot of continuities.  You relied on the things you knew.  Jello would have been a big one.

Q:  A big which, though.  [laughs]

Fussell:  A big continuity.  And adding more stuff to it.  I mean, I’m sure we kept adding more stuff, more unlikely stuff.  I can’t remember when—when did cake mixes come in, brownie mixes?  In my memory it seems to be much, much later in the fifties.  Whenever it came in, we certainly used them immediately, and grateful, grateful for them.  Instant cakes, yes.  Instant brownies, especially, yes.  That was a big boom.

Q:  Did you begin to take a certain amount of pride in your own skills?

Fussell:  I got that through the parties.  I got it from praise from other people, would say, “Hey, that tastes good.  What’s in it?”  I would think back, and then it would—doesn’t everybody do this?  And I found that, no, everybody didn’t do it in the same way.  I still think my big thing was presentation.  I had a use of dramatic flair to lay things out so people thought the food was better than it was.  No, the context was good.  So we tried to make it exciting.

Q:  What about Paul?  Did he enjoy that part of it?

Fussell:  He loved being a host.  Not the food, much more the liquor, but he loved, yes, being the host.

Q:  In any case, as your skills and people’s response to your skills developed, this was something you could take pride in rather than not take pride in.

Fussell:  Yes, this was such an easy way to get approval.  I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over that.

Q:  Easy compared to?

Fussell:  Well, obeying your mother, obeying your husband, trying to fit in as a Californian with easterners you don’t understand at all, trying to figure out the rules of anything.

Q:  At what point in all of this did you start to keep notes?  Your memory is extraordinary or else you began to keep some kind of notes or journals about what you were eating or what you were observing in life.

Fussell:  I didn’t do that until we—I mean, I wish I had.  No, I didn’t keep notes of any kind except little scraps of paper if somebody sent me an idea for something.  Until when?  I don’t think it was until we went to France, and I saw how serious, how serious the subject was.

Q:  The reason that made me think of it at that point in my reading was, when you mentioned one of the restaurant meals and said your notes from that meal say X, Y, or Z, and that’s when I wondered at what point you made any kind of systematic—

Fussell:  Not until we got to France and were eating in our first really good restaurants.

Q:  And what do you think made you take notes?

Fussell:  The discovery of food in France.  That has been described by many people many times, and for the same reasons, that it was such a totally different culture and the key to that culture was food, and whew, what a strange idea.  Everything about it was exotic.  Like landing on Mars and saying, “Gee, well, you know, I’d better remember each step of the way here.”

Q:  Was that something the two of you could talk about?

Fussell:  Yes.  Yeah, this is something that we could share, because Paul is the one who had wanted to go—I just wanted to go to Europe, I didn’t care where.  Paul was the one who wanted to go to France because he had been in the infantry in Alsace.  So he wanted to return to that landscape and to his memories.  Again, it was the same sort of incredible revelation that he had had about a country that existed, it’s so different from Pasadena, California.  But he had never had time to eat, of course, as a soldier, so this was a wonderful glue for the both of us, and discovering what Europe was all about.

Q:  At that point did you have children?

Fussell:  We had children late and partly because we were not only discovering male-female, but we were discovering the world at large for the first time.  We were both very—even though Paul had been in the war, he was still a very protected parochial boy.

Q:  So the first times that you would have been a faculty wife, then, you were a faculty wife without children.

Fussell:  Right.  Didn’t have children until I was twenty-eight.  I was married at twenty-one.

Q:  And the first European trips would have been—

Fussell:  It would have been the year after—let’s see, did Paul get his Ph.D.?  No, this would be in the summer.  I think the summer of ’51.  It was so soon after the war that—of course, we went to England, because England was the motherlode for all Ph.D. candidates in English.  It was still so badly bombed.  So we took the grand tour the first summer we actually got to go.

Q:  Just the two of you?

Fussell:  Yeah.  And went everywhere by train and bus.  Germany was so badly bombed, France slightly less of it.  The signs of war were everywhere.  It was like movie time, traveling through a movie.  And there was no food, except the French just couldn’t disguise that there was food.  No place else had food.  It was slim pickings for Europe.  I mean, England really had terrible food, really awful.

Q:  Now, I couldn’t tell from your Kitchen Wars how many times you went to Europe.  It seemed like a lot, but I wasn’t—

Fussell:  It was a lot, and I’d have a hard time giving you an exact number, because we traveled throughout the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, summer vacations, a couple of times a full year, and a summer spent home instead of Europe was considered the summer lost.  So it was heavy travel.

Q:  I guess you noted that in 1965, near Nice, that’s when you were studying the French gastronomical literature.  So by that point, first of all, you were curious about French gastronomical literature.

Fussell:  We traveled through France a lot.

Q:  I guess what I’m wondering about is what were the steps that led to considering studying French gastronomical literature a legitimate object of study.

Fussell:  Not until I had written some travel pieces that were very involved in food.  So I was trying to find a practical outlet for this intensely wonderful experience we kept having with food.

Q:  You mean it was the travel pieces?

Fussell:  Well, first the travel pieces and then, hey, France has a huge literature on food itself, and that was when we had the year in Nice, so I had time to do that instead of running around.  But by that time I was getting inside the French food system and getting fascinated by that, and because we were there, you could contact a local baker, butcher, etc., etc., they were all there and happy to talk because they loved Americans at that moment.

Q:  Again, by that point would you have been—so that was 1965, did I say—cooking seriously yourself?

Fussell:  Yes and no.  We had a bonne à tous fait who did the cooking in the house.

Q:  You mean in France?

Fussell:  Right, right, for the year we spent in Segny.  However, she had days off, and if we gave a party, I would do the cooking, but of course I learned a very great deal from her.

Q:  So that prior to that in the United States, prior to that year, how seriously had you been cooking?  Actually that’s not really what I mean.  At what point did you think, this is really a legitimate subject to think about, to research, to get involved in?

Fussell:  That’s a slow evolution, because the first trip to France, which I remember as having real butter and real bread, the first taste of, okay, everything we experienced we knew we couldn’t duplicate in the States; it wasn’t there.  So there’s no question of applying it.  You just said, “Oh, got to get back here.”  Nor was there any reason—you wanted to learn more about it because it was so good.  What made it so good?  But you weren’t going to try to export that back home.  So the first experience was of the total divisiveness of food cultures.  Whoa, where has this been all my life?  So only as travel became more accessible and our lives became more accustomed to going back and forth, you’d say, “Well, now, if I were making that at home, what would I make it out of since we cannot get,” (a) ripe tomatoes, we cannot get any mâche, we cannot get any of the ingredients for soupe de poisson, etc., etc.  No, that was a very slow time.
	But meanwhile, that was a time to discover other people, like Elizabeth David, who I discovered sometime in the fifties.  She was the first writer I’d ever heard of who wasn’t just a little snobby kind of thing like the guys who called themselves gourmets, like men’s magazines.

Q:  Would you have read Elizabeth David in France or in the United States?

Fussell:  In England.  Would have found her in England first.  Had never heard of M.F.K. Fisher at that time, but then I didn’t read magazines, so I wouldn’t have found her in Gourmet or Vogue or anything, because I didn’t read anything like that.

Q:  Again, let’s go back to the year in 1965.  By that time, professionally how established were you in terms of your teaching or that sort of thing?

Fussell:  1965.  Let me think.  Okay, I had taught a couple of years at Connecticut College, but my teaching was always very, very ancillary to Paul and his schedule.  In order to have a year off, his schedule would dominate everything, so I stopped teaching.  Because we both loved travel a lot, I was trying to do more and more travel writing and find out how you did that, and food seemed to be the way.  So I would try to, wherever we were, try to look for food stories and find out how to shop them.
By the time we hit Nice, I really wanted to write a book about French food.  By that time, of course, Julia [Child]’s Mastering had come out, but because I had worked at Knopf, I sent a query to my former boss—I worked for the production manager, Sidney Jacobs, and said, “Here we are in France and we’re having this wonderful experience and there’s so much information here, all this wonderful stuff.”
	He said, “Well, write me a little proposal and I’ll give it to Judith Jones,” and he did.
Judith Jones said, “We have a book on French cooking.  We don’t need anything else.”

Q:  What was your proposal about?

Fussell:  It was about interviewing the baker, interviewing—it was a reporter’s kind of interviewing each of the wonderful food producers, because they were all there right at your fingertips.  You could go to the market and talk to them and very much local to this area, and also because it was the opening of the Escoffier Museum.  So I found some of the old chefs who had worked for him, Chef Donon.  It was just a very nice coming together for an American.

Q:  Did you write a travel piece about that, the opening of the—

Fussell:  I didn’t because, cruelly, I missed the date, I misread the invitation.  And I’m not sure where I could have published it at that time, but I intended to go to the opening and write it up and see if I could get it somewhere, and I was a day late.  It was a terrible moment.

Q:  I bet it was.

Fussell:  And it’s just down the road, just down the road a piece.

Q:  Where would that have been, the Escoffier Museum?

Fussell:  It’s on the Loubet River, which pours into the Mediterranean.  It’s just twenty-five miles west of Nice.  It’s just right there.  I can’t think of the exact name.

Q:  Do we have time, from your point of view, to talk a little bit about the competitive cooking in Princeton?

Fussell:  Sure.

Q:  First of all, when did you move to Princeton?

Fussell:  I’m so bad on dates.  I try to keep them straight.  It was about this time, so I have a feeling maybe we moved in—we’re talking about 1965 in Nice?

Q:  Yes.

Fussell:  If so, we lived in Princeton, I think, in 1964.  We moved the year before, spent a summer there or a summer in Cambridge.  We immediately rented the house and spent the next year in France, so that’s why I’m bad on this.

Q:  Rented the house in Princeton and you spent the next—

Fussell:  And immediately moved to France for a year.  I mean, it’s the way the timing came up, because Paul had every third year off.  That was not an ideal way to do it, but you could rent a house for a full year to people.  You know, that worked okay.  So I didn’t get launched, let’s say, in person until after we returned, let’s say 1966.  These are always academic years.

Q:  Then I think actually with that in mind, let us, in fact, stop and resume with that.

Fussell:  Okay.

[End of interview]









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