TTT Interviewee: Betty Fussell Session #2 Interviewer: Judy Weinraub New York City Date: March 24, 2009 Q: This is Judy Weinraub. I’m sitting with Betty Fussell, it’s March 24th, and we are about to begin our second session. Good morning, Betty. Fussell: Good morning, Judy. Q: We were about to talk about the competitive cooking that you experienced as a faculty wife, I guess. Why don’t you tell me about that. Fussell: Not only experienced, but participated in fully and enthusiastically. So there were two places for women to compete; one was on the tennis court in this nice suburb, and the other was in the kitchen. You could not compete academically because at that point females were not let in. It’s hard to remember that there were only two graduate schools in the East Coast, in the Ivy League, who let in women into the graduate school. Yale was the first one, and that was not until 1960s. Q: What was the second school? Fussell: The second school would have been Harvard. Princeton had to be sued by the government before it let any women of any kind into its faculty. Then that hard part for me was to have applied at one point having the rank of M.A. and applying to Princeton to become a graduate student, and Carlos Baker saying, “We have not now and have never had a woman graduate school. That maybe our loss, but on the other hand, that’s certainly our policy.” Wow, okay, that made things very clear. Nor could we get a job being a faculty, nor could we get a job on the same faculty if our husband was teaching, you know, okay. So okay, so what are you going to do? Where are you going to put the academic smarts, which is all you’ve had time to accumulate? Where are you going to put them? Have a baby. There are no jobs for you. Q: So the cooking would have started while you were still in Cambridge? Fussell: The cooking competitively wouldn’t have started. Cooking in Cambridge was just surviving as graduate students on no money and trying to find out how you do that, how you make anything. We were at Connecticut College before we got to Princeton. Cooking at Connecticut College was not competitive because that was a women’s college. The competition was totally fierce, but it was the only place in the country where these high-powered women could get jobs. Rosemond Tuve, my god, the most extraordinary scholar I will ever know, and she was in this little rinky-dink college. She should have been at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Finally, they hired her at Princeton a couple of years before she died. This is everywhere, so there had never been women in the English departments across the nation except at a very few state universities. Q: But Paul was at Connecticut College for how long? Fussell: That was his first job, so four years. Q: Then what we talked about the other day was that you moved to Princeton, then you went to Europe for a year, then you came back. Fussell: Well, we moved to New Brunswick [New Jersey] first, because the job was at Rutgers, and that mattered. Everything matters, you know. Q: Take me from that point. You moved to your Princeton house, then went to Europe, then came back? Fussell: More importantly, we spent a year in Europe, after moving to the outskirts of New Brunswick, on a Fulbright. Moved to Middlebush [New Jersey] outside the absolutely godforsaken gone-to-pot town, at that point, of New Brunswick, and by that time we had a baby. So we went off to Heidelberg for a year on a Fulbright. That was important food-wise, because we had glorious food in Germany. We had terrible food in England in roughly the same period, and it was much worse off, actually, than Germany, because Germany, they still had a lot of farms around, they had a lot of potatoes, so the cities suffered. But they had a tradition of cooking that was still there, that, let’s say, places like London did not have, that they had lost in the process. So we were exposed to some really good food, and that was interesting, learned how to cook that. Came back to America after that year, had two more years in the New Brunswick area because we were trying to find a place to live. Piscataway Township, we ended up there. Had the second baby en route. Then the kids are getting older, there are no schools. We’re in this weird sort of—it’s not even a suburb, it’s a no-land. And because I am wanting to act, I want a community theater around. I’d already started to do that when we lived in Middlebush. So I made the push to get a little house in Princeton. So that’s why we moved there. We moved there for schools and essentially for me to have a community theater of some kind. That didn’t have anything to do with food. Q: But at least as you’ve described it in My Kitchen Wars, then you were in Europe for another year? Fussell: That’s later. So we’re back and forth about every three years. So the year after we moved to Princeton, we go over to France for a year. Right. Then during that year we can really solidify food. Food. Food becomes important then, at last. Q: To you. Fussell: To me, by moving to France and being in the heart of it, in great and glorious and wonderful Nice, the Riviera. Q: Was it exciting? Fussell: Enormously. Enormously, because everything was so different, completely different, because the culture was so different, and because the culture was centered on food, so it was the quickest way into that culture. There was a lot about the French culture I didn’t like. Hated their arrogance, xenophobia, etc., etc. Q: But it must have been so different from anything you’d ever experienced before, a culture based on food and the ability to take pleasure. Fussell: Pleasure of, meaning of. Meaning? Ooh, serious. How could you be serious about something that was just about the body? Oh, different attitude. Oh. Very exciting that. Very exciting. What so thrilled me was to go to markets, because they had a great market in Nice, two of them, two or three days a week, and because Nice is a port city for all kinds of races and kinds and half Italian, always, and at that point fully Algerian, so we have a great, great variety. As a port city, it always has that kind of mix. And to be able to go from the market, to see this beautiful stuff and the way they handled it, oh, and the way they treated you, every transaction was about the perfection of the moules that day. I mean, what a thrill. Imagine. Q: How did that affect your cooking? You had some help at that point? Fussell: Oh, yeah, yeah. Thank God, because I wouldn’t know how to cook this stuff. I had no idea. Soupe de poisson became our favorite because that was all those fishy things that I’d never seen before, let alone known the name of. We had a bonne à tous fait who did all the cooking. She would do all the shopping, but I would beg her to let me go shopping with her. But she handled the purse. She would ask for a certain amount of money, which I would give her, and she would do all the transactions, of course, because if it were me, it would cost twenty times as much, as she assured me constantly. So I learned the ropes through her. Q: How different was the food then that you ate there from what you had been used to eating in New Jersey? Fussell: Totally. Totally. Totally. This is the 1960s. We didn’t have any bread. We still didn’t have any butter. We certainly didn’t have good garden vegetables. None of that had begun. This was really still, in my view, post-war and the push to the suburbs and the first thing they did was not to put in a wonderful vegetable and herb garden. Q: Did you try and make some of the things that she made for you? Fussell: Oh yes, yes. Yes, I tried to make everything. Q: How did you do that? Fussell: The children were at a little private school that was walkable to, and they had a two-hour lunch hour every day and were required to clean their plates. They were beaten on the head if they didn’t clean up, and so they had to have their four-course meal. So they had the big meal at noon, and then at night they had a soup that Madou had prepared, which is essentially a vegetable puree with a little butter in it. That was a kind of standard. But while they were at school, Madou would cook lunch for my husband and me in the garden. Oh, imagine. We would have absolutely glorious—you have to have three courses, because otherwise it’s not a meal, according to her. And Nice, because of the weather, because it’s that southern belt, everything closes down for two hours and some for four. Everything closed. Q: How did Paul respond to those lunches? Fussell: He loved them. He was being waited on. It fit his routine perfectly. He wrote in the morning. He could take a nap after lunch. Perfect. Absolutely excellent as a daily routine. Q: During that time how much better a cook did you become? Fussell: A lot because I learned so much. Q: Tell me about some of the things you learned. Fussell: I learned how to use equipment, like the chinoises and bain-maries. I learned all the kitchen equipment that I had never heard of before. Because we went to England so much, constantly, I went to Elizabeth David’s shop, met her. Still have some of the beautiful pots she sold there. So all those things came together. When I saw her, I said, “Oh, you know what I want to do? I want to write a book about Escoffier.” She raised her high eyebrows and said, “That’s a big subject.” [laughs] I didn’t know, I’m just full of enthusiasm. I had no idea what I was saying to the queen of English cooking. But she was extremely warm and wonderful, generous, and let me into the big wine society, the Food and Wine Society Library there, where I got to see for the first time—ooh, look at all these books. So other cultures, even England, understands something that we don’t understand at all, and has an enormous library. Q: Actually, I’m interested in the Escoffier, too. Did you think of it as a historical subject? How did you imagine a book like that? Fussell: Well, he was, at that point, living history, because he had trained all these chefs who were still around, and many of them down there. So as I think I said last time, I talked to a number of them and got interviews from them, [Chef] Joseph Donon and some other old boys. They were wonderful. Q: I guess what I’m wondering about is, if you thought of the book in somewhat academic terms or in food terms, or had you thought that through? Fussell: I thought of it as a biography, yes. Q: So you were there for a year, but with trips to London and other parts of— Fussell: And Greece. Yes, we were going back and forth. There was another culture with a totally different food scheme which was wonderful, because that constituted then the peasant side of this. So you can get this full range. England was still kind of pub food or people’s houses food, which some of which was terrific. Ah, so you got that experience. You got the professional food of France and you got the peasant food of Greece. That was a great combination. Q: So by the time you came back, you had totally different expectations about the kitchen, presumably. Fussell: And my role and what I wanted to do with it, right. Q: How did you see that? Fussell: Well, when I was in France, because I had all this time, the kids are off to school all day, and I began to explore the local library, which was excellent, and read a lot of nineteenth century French gastronomic literature, and much more importantly, because it’s small scale, I would run around and talk to the baker, the butcher, the fish monger. I saw all these guys. The only problem was my French was so bad I was always just struggling away and struggling. The three stars were just coming up, the Turks, the chefs. So we went off to Paul Bocuse before he’d been heard of. I was writing for a little army magazine called Off Duty. I think that was its name. So I’d have an excuse, I could come in with credentials and say, “I want to interview the chef,” because he hadn’t been interviewed. They were delighted. To my everlasting regret, Paul Bocuse said, “Ah, come and cook in my kitchen for a week.” And I looked at Paul, and saw in Paul’s eyes, “Are you kidding?” So I didn’t do that, but I could have. Q: What did those raised eyes mean? Fussell: Are you out of your mind? They meant, “Who’s going to take care of the kids?” That’s very simple. Q: As opposed to why would you want to work so hard in somebody else’s kitchen? Fussell: No, it was just what’s going to happen to me? I would have learned a lot. But that’s all right, I learned a lot anyway, because all these guys would take you behind the scenes, and they would tell you who their vegetable farmers were and then you could go look at their vegetable farmers. At that point, I wanted to do a book about—oh, I wanted to do a book about this. So I wrote my old boss, Sidney Jacobs, at Knopf, and said, “What do you think about this?” He said, “Well, I’ll pass it by Judith Jones.” And Judith Jones said, “We have Julia [Child]. We don’t need a book. There’s no interest in France at the moment other than Julia.” Q: But it’s interesting that you wanted to do a book. Was that an academic urge or an urge to prove yourself through writing or what? Fussell: It was not academic; it was a way to get out of the academy. I mean, I hated the academic modes of writing. I was really always rebellious against that. I always wanted a different kind of audience because I thought academic jargon was intolerable, and when you had a subject like food, the one thing you do not want to do is to academicize it, in my view. And because I was doing the travel writing then and had written a piece about the birds of Brest for Holiday, so I had already found a way in which to write about what we were doing in the food way, and that is going to the source and finding who were doing these things. Q: How comfortable did you feel with that as something that you wanted to do as opposed to the kind of thing Paul was doing? Fussell: Oh, wonderful, because that kept—ah. Before I was writing in— Q: You mean it kept it separate? Fussell: Kept it separate. I was writing academic articles, critical articles. He always saw that as competition, and therefore I think he was extremely hostile to it. I understand that. And I didn’t even want to do that. I was always trying to find a place that was not stepping on his toes. Q: Okay. So you come back to the United States, he’s teaching, and how do you find your place? Fussell: So when we’re back, now we create a Provençal kitchen at Princeton, step number one toward producing this gorgeous food. A big thing, Paul approved it because it was professional, anything professional. He hated the idea of anything being amateurish, but the moment you had a professional stove in there, then there was some respect. Q: I was wondering why it was professional. Fussell: It was a man’s thing. I mean, he never touched the stove, but it was a—you know. So he set up the wine stuff to look like—he had the home bar, to look like a real bar with the glass shelves and lights behind, you know. So we got tons of professional equipment from Dehillerin in Paris and from Bridge Company here, and all this fit with the Julia sense of get the equipment right. Q: How did that compare to the cooking of other faculty couples that you encountered? Fussell: Other faculty couples were doing similar things, I think not quite as obsessively as we. We were kind of the leader of the pack of this. Now, a lot of people knew a lot more about food than I did and about daily cooking, but we were kind of bringing in the French glitz to it because we’d spent this time there and because we had the enthusiasm for it and, by that time, quite a bit of knowledge. Q: How did you experience each other’s cooking, through dinner parties or— Fussell: Dinner parties. Now, this is Cheever territory. Dinner parties were essentially drinking parties, but they were disguised as dinner parties. I do remember, because it was ludicrous, ludicrous, as I look back. You would show off for dinner parties and do things that you would not conceive of doing for yourselves, so everything was always an experiment. I remember making a pheasant salmi for Philip Roth and his wife. Q: Pretty impressive. Fussell: Well, it would be if you knew what you were doing. Two other faculty couples came. The whole point was to have some great coup de theâtre, which nobody had had, and you could do it in your own kitchen. So this is always very dramatic and theatrical. Q: How did that play out with the other couples? Fussell: The couples that we were friendly with were all striving to do the same thing. Now, the difference, Princeton had always been a drinking town and they had very few restaurants because of the club system and because the whole town is a series of private clubs socially. A lot of those would have cooks because there are very rich people who live there. So this kind of mix, you go to the Yankee Tavern and it’s not about food; you go there and see the boys and their wives and have good drinks. People really drank their way from place to place. It was a ritual. Everyone had a ritual hangover the next day. It was really a post-war binge that extended a long time, because it fit into other things that were happening in America that interested me a lot. Q: Whom did you talk with about your interest in food, or did you? Fussell: Yeah, sure, a lot. Everybody, everybody wanted to talk about a recipe, and there are a lot of intellectual gals who were having babies and this was one way to talk seriously about something that was not politics, nor was it about diapers. It was a kind of in-between place where you could locate yourself. The competitive cooking came mostly on big cocktail parties which would get more and more elaborate on what was served for the buffet. Q: Not dinner parties? Fussell: Well, dinner parties also, but you took care of a lot more people at cocktail parties; therefore, you could serve a lot more people. But there would be buffets for two hundred people. Q: Oh, my goodness. Fussell: These are Gatsby show-off parties. Q: Could you describe how you set up, how you planned the meal, how you managed something like that? Fussell: You spent a lot of time and, I think I say in some book, it’s a cheat to have—anybody could hire a caterer. I mean, we wouldn’t because we were always too cheap and that wasn’t our tradition, but it became unfashionable to do a caterer. You’re supposed to do it all at home. That was part of the competitive sport. Q: Presumably it would have been expensive, as well. Fussell: The caterer? Q: Yes. Fussell: And that’s why it didn’t count, because that was just money. So what you were trying to do is to prove that you had a skill and a kind of secret skill that other people wouldn’t know to the same degree that you did. Q: So you’re planning a dinner party. Then do you think through the menu? Do you wonder where on earth you’re going to get the ingredients? Fussell: Fancy the menu. You plan the menu for a month. Q: Describe that. Fussell: You plan the menu a long time ahead and the menu depends—this is because we’re in Princeton, that’s a problem because of shopping. When we first came, there were two butcher shops, actual butcher shops. They disappeared quite quickly. The first shopping center came out and a Safeway that you had to drive to in a nearby mall, etc. So this was all in transition. So you could get a lot of things that you couldn’t before. On the other hand, you were losing a lot of things all the time and you knew that. So you would do some shopping in New York and lug it back. The cheese store came in, so that was okay for a while. I mean, cheese was new. Good cheese, that was exciting. There was still no bread. I never did much baking of bread because the timing of it was wrong. It took too much time in the wrong way. The rhythm of it was wrong. Q: Presumably it would have meant a huge amount of work just before you actually got ready for a party. Fussell: Well, it really had more to do with children, picking up children at school. Finding a place in the kitchen that wasn’t subject to draft, that was hard. [laughs] Q: You took this seriously. Fussell: Yeah. But I did know a guy who would have baked then, he was an academic, he had baked in the navy, so he would give us some of his excellent whole wheat loaves. So this was happening, but it was an anomaly. Q: How many different dishes might you have prepared for something like that? Fussell: Easily twenty-five to thirty, and you were trying to make as lavish a spread as interesting as possible, so you’d set up the table and have dishes that you hoped nobody had ever heard of, and a whole lot of them. Q: You had a lot of space? Fussell: We had a lot of space, our whole downstairs, which had kind of two living rooms and the huge kitchen. It all became one big party room, in effect. Q: Was it expensive to produce something like this on an academic salary? Fussell: I never kept track of food because I was given my housekeeping money, you know. Q: No kidding. Fussell: The big expense was liquor, not food. The liquor bills must have been enormous. Food, if you’re doing it yourself, if you’re not counting labor and you’re not doing caviar and you’re not doing—you know, we couldn’t get foie gras, so we weren’t doing the most expensive thing. The biggest cost was labor, which was free. Q: Would there have been a celebratory event or what would the reason have been? Fussell: You would make a celebratory event. Everything became an event. Fourth of July, Christmas, pre-Christmas, post-Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays, football. Anything became an occasion. Q: How many years were you there? Fussell: In Princeton, about twenty-six. Q: Twenty-six years. My goodness. Fussell: I think. Maybe it wasn’t that long. Sixty, ’70, ’80, well, yeah, about twenty, maybe twenty. Q: Did your cooking change much over those years? And how did it change? Fussell: It changed as I grew more and more tired. [laughs] It changed to fatigue. Also fatigue with the whole set up of having that kind of—I want to be careful here because I was going to say that kind of ephemera, because it all disappears. But that was certainly a part of it. I wanted something that lasted beyond the moment. Q: Like what? Fussell: A book, a play. It all suited me because it was a dramatic performance and performance is the nature of now, you’re capitalizing on now, and I believe in that, I still believe in that. On the other hand, you have a play script that can endure. Shakespeare endures even though the performance is— Q: Wait. Tell me what you mean by capitalizing on the moment and still believing in that. Fussell: Because every meal is like a mantra that you wipe out by consuming it. So for the moment only, that’s what its function is. That’s its value. You transform it the moment it’s off the plate and in your body, but the moment is all, the presentation, the ingesting, and everything that goes with that, the talking, the feedings it creates, etc., but then it’s gone. Q: Whom did you talk with about thinking about things like that? It would seem like one would need peers, colleagues, people interested in the same approach, or not, I’m not sure. Fussell: I don’t know how much I talked about it. I think I found this mostly through books. I think books were my conversation. Q: And Paul wasn’t particularly interested? Fussell: I think Paul went along with all of this because it was dramatically terrific and he loved parties, and it was a public performance and he got credit by throwing these wonderful parties. I think he truly did not care anything about the food. So he wasn’t talking about the food in the same way, ever. He was always terrified of being fat because he’d been a fat child, and he had a tendency to fat and this was his lifelong terror. So the moment it was not party food, he was eating raw carrots and celery and two boxes of Twinkies. So he was one of those compulsive eaters of a kind that his mother was, really. She was a diabetic. Q: How did you feed your kids? Were you very concerned about that or what? Fussell: I was not concerned like the way parents are today, God knows. But I knew they were getting plenty of good food. It never worried me. The baby food did at the beginning, because that’s what we had, little jars. You had no idea what any of it was. You’d taste it and say, “Well, that tastes okay.” But I wasn’t about to sit down and make two weeks’ worth of applesauce in the blender. I wasn’t going to make it myself because I couldn’t make it in quantities enough. So there was zero fussing on the food, and I really also hated people who fussed about food, including kids. So I had the daughter who ate everything and the son who ate nothing. Q: What do you mean people who fussed about food? Fussell: Mothers who fuss over their kids’ eating, whether they take the stern stand or they, “Just one little bite.” No, no, no. It’s food. Q: Did the meals reflect what was going on in food world around you? Fussell: Not for the children, because it was strictly—it was a hangover of the gender divisions. In my family, unfortunately, there was a huge child-adult division which my husband picked up from the English tradition. He wanted the kids shipped off to school, boarding school, at twelve, you know. Thank God that tradition didn’t take hold in the United States and it certainly didn’t take hold in mine, but he had zero interest in that kind of thing. Q: So meanwhile, professionally what were you trying to do? Fussell: In the mid-sixties I was trying to combine things that were not easily combinable. So I was teaching Shakespeare at Douglass College. I was still being in the plays in the community theater; I was trying to throw the best parties in Princeton; and I was trying to get the kids to and from school and fed in between ballet and soccer, fed adequately, however we define that. They were not eating our party food because the parties wouldn’t begin until too late. Q: You were also trying to write articles? Fussell: Yeah, because that’s part of the territory of teaching. Let’s see. Was I writing? Yeah, yeah, it was the sixties, so I was writing in between whenever I could, trying to write travel articles, trying to write food articles more and more. Q: When did the Mabel Normand idea come along? Fussell: By this time I was doing a thesis at Rutgers for a Ph.D., and because I’m a major in dramatic literature and historically the Renaissance, so Shakespeare, Johnson and Lyly were my boys put together in tragic-comedy because I think tragic comedy is essentially the English form. Okay. What does that have to do with anything? What was your question? It was supposed to lead back to that. Q: As long as we’re here, though, how much did you get into the Ph.D.? Fussell: Oh, I finished it. Q: You did finish it? Fussell: I finished it, but I was teaching at the same time at Rutgers at that point, so I was always trying to combine too many things. So the teaching delayed it for a couple of years because I didn’t have time to finish it, but I got it done. I got it done within a couple of years. Q: The idea for Mabel Normand came along after you finished the Ph.D.? Fussell: It probably came right after it, but it came out of my complete fascination with theater and my complete fascination with American traditions, and those two things combined in somebody like Mabel, who is the bridge between vaudeville, where she never appeared, and silent movies. Q: It was, however, a very nonacademic subject. Fussell: That helped. Q: Talk to me about that. Was there a decision to stop doing academic things and move to a different kind of writing? Fussell: I think I was always looking for a way to move away from the academy and to move toward nonacademic general audience popular culture. Movies helped and theater helped. So Mabel was the perfect person. I could do a biography. There was history involved; I knew how to do that. But I was wrong. There is no history in movies. I didn’t know that. Because it’s all made up, so there are no documents, however. Q: I guess what I’m getting at, though, is, so it’s a very nonacademic subject, although certainly the research has to be done in a serious way. It’s not a food subject. It just interested me as a first book as perhaps less daunting than some other things. Fussell: Like what? Q: Well, less daunting than a serious academic subject. In a funny way less daunting than throwing yourself into food. It struck me as a subject you would have felt comfortable with. Fussell: Absolutely. Right. But daunting is not—I mean, that wouldn’t have been the feeling. The feeling would be, I mean, why write about food? That’s not important enough. Q: Talk about that a little bit. Fussell: Whereas theater is already sanctioned, books about movies, my god, movie history was very, very sanctioned. So that, for me, was a natural positioning. Food is an entirely different thing. Food was—I mean, there are all these recipe books in this country, and I’m not talking about England or France or Germany, but in this country there wasn’t any food literature, so there was nothing. I didn’t want to write cookbooks like Julia. I mean, all they were were cookbooks, essentially, or there was the snobby literature that, you know, toss that aside. Q: Like what? Fussell: Like Lucius Bebe. The gastronomes. All right, we don’t pay any attention to that. Q: So Mabel Normand you finished in 1982. Masters of American Cookery, the date is 1983. Fussell: Right, but that’s because that’s the way the time lags, and the Masters of American Cookery was really an accident, the reason for getting into that, because Moira Hodgson, we’d been both writing for the Times at that point and our paths crossed and we knew each other had friends, mutual friends, from Princeton, anyway. Q: Writing food pieces for the Times? Fussell: Yes, Moira took over the food job for a terrible year for herself, and I took over the New Jersey restaurant reviewing for a terrible year for myself. That was craziness in New Jersey, just craziness. Mimi Sheraton was running the thing when Moira left. Q: Did you think of those reviews as less serious or just a way to get into newspapers or a way to eat without having to pay the costs or what? Fussell: All of those. All of those. All of those. My husband would say, “How cute.” Ooh. And he wouldn’t go with me to restaurants. Ooh, I really didn’t like that. I really didn’t like that. [laughs] Q: Well, it means you really have to sign up other people to go with you, certainly. Fussell: Yes, you do, and I signed up some wonderful—Carlos Fuentes. I mean, I had a whole lot of celebrities, if those poor guys out at Asbury Park only knew. Q: Masters of American Cooking is interesting because it seems like a combination of history and cookbook. Fussell: Right. Now, this is why it was—back to Moira, who had gone to—we were talking and she said, “Oh, I just signed a book for Times Books,” which I’d never heard of. I hadn’t realized that’s Craig Claiborne, etc. at that point. She said, “Why don’t you give them a proposal, Betty.” I thought, “Okay. Tell me what to say.” So she said, “Well, you know, just make up something,” and dah, dah. I’d never thought of doing that, but I also thought, with just total arrogance, ‘Well, gee, you know, I have been cooking now. I’ve been cooking intensively for twenty years. I’ve got to know something.” How did I find out how to cook? I certainly didn’t find out in any traditional ways. I found out from four people, these are they, and I found out through books, and that’s how they found out a lot, through books. So anybody can cook. You just have to read a book. So that seemed natural. Q: And that was true, you feel that you really had learned how to cook from these masters? Fussell: Absolutely true. Absolutely true. Q: Over what period of time would that have been? Fussell: That would be during the sixties, essentially. Sixties, yes. But my real point was, you don’t need a recipe, you don’t need an authority. I mean, nobody got the point because we want authorities; we want somebody to tell us what to do. Ah, my despair. Q: M.F.K. Fisher didn’t tell you what to do, presumably. She was inspiring, but— Fussell: She was authoritative in a very different way than the recipe way. She was extremely authoritative in other ways that she let you know, in a way that Julia never would. [laughs] Q: But about food, what kinds of ways was she authoritative? Fussell: “There’s my way, and my way’s the right way.” Q: In terms of your own cooking, what did you get from that? Fussell: From M.F.K.? Q: Yes. Fussell: It’s about the moral dimension of food. Q: The moral dimension? Fussell: The moral dimension. You know, she’s the closest of all these people to being a poet of food. So, symbolic, social meanings of food. Terrific on that. I mean, very, very good. Q: Chronologically, I guess is what I’m saying, you must have been reading James Beard before Craig Claiborne’s books, or no? Fussell: I got James Beard’s Fireside book for my wedding, so I had an early James Beard book, and I loved that because it was so simple and because it was so American. It was an American voice I recognized, straightforward, and it was not prissy Better Homes and Gardens, which I also got, which I never used and hated. Q: So when would you have started using that, literally from the time you were married? Fussell: 1949. I think the Fireside is 1946. But I really liked it because it had pictures, and I’d had the Fireside Book of Folksongs, so I liked the layout. Q: So how would you have proceeded then in terms of preparing dishes that were— Fussell: I’d look up in the Fireside book and see if he had anything on, what, hamburger, meatloaf, boiling potatoes and mashing potatoes. How do you do that? Q: And you literally followed his directions and it gradually became part of your— Fussell: Well, his directions are very simple, so, yeah, and if you’re someone like me, you want to just take the basics and then say, “Oh, I’ve got this in the kitchen. Let’s throw that in and see what happens.” Sometimes that tastes good and sometimes that doesn’t. Q: Craig Claiborne was after that. Fussell: Right and much more codified, much more codified. Q: Much more codified. How so? Fussell: Because he was doing a different kind of job. He was bringing international cooking to America and he was translating all the time the French, the Chinese, you know, different cultures into the American mainstream pot. Q: I found those recipes rather welcoming. It inspired confidence that you could actually do it. Fussell: Right. Q: How different was that from the James Beard recipes? Fussell: Well, James Beard wasn’t giving us recipes for twenty-five ingredient pâtés. That’s what we got from Craig. The other thing we got were things like scalloped mousse, you know, those beautiful fish mousses that you could suddenly make because there was a Cuisinart, you know. Wow, that’s very exciting. So you could do French things that you would never try to do with Jim. Jim wasn’t doing those. Q: Were you looking at the Claiborne books and Julia at the same time, more or less? Fussell: Yes. I’m sketchy on—Julia’s 1961? What’s her— Q: I think so. Fussell: Is that it? Okay. And Craig is later. We needed Julia for—and people like me especially, and this was what was so interesting at the time because she’s the first cookbook writer I have ever known that commanded the respect of men. Why? Because she has a very analytic mind, she was treating it as a professional analyzer, and she has really an engineering brain. Okay. So the way she organizes things and the way she lays it out and made it all very clear and detailed. So the twenty-five pages to a single recipe made a lot of sense, because that was going to give you every single way on how to build a bridge. Q: I was interested in your writing that she was incredibly organized. Fussell: Yeah. Q: Is that what you mean by what you’re describing? Fussell: Yeah, and analytic. She’s analytic. That’s not Fannie Farmer, that’s certainly not the Good Housekeeping book, it’s not Joy of Cooking. She’s the one who showed us the structures. Q: Who took the recipes apart? Fussell: Who created the recipes out of—gave us the foundations, gave us the mother sauces, the idea of these being the base, the stocks. Okay, that is your basement, this is what you build on it, this is how you relate these things, these are the variations. Yeah, and very thorough. Q: So by the time you thought about doing this book, you were totally comfortable with all four of them? Fussell: Yeah. Yeah. Q: How did you see it? The way it reads to me, it’s an interesting combination of history and recipes and encouragement. Fussell: Well, I had wanted to just do biographies. I wanted to make them biographies. Q: After Mabel Normand? Fussell: Yeah. I wanted four biographies of these. These were such interesting people and they were all of a time, so historically they have their—you know, this is the moment of the new revolution, and so naïve that I didn’t understand that I would be hated by people like Judith Jones and others, including, as it turned out, Craig and Jim. Q: Hated because? Fussell: Because they all thought I was trying to steal recipes. It’s called the copyright problem, intellectual property. Q: But if you saw it as biographies, how would that have played into it? Fussell: Because I wanted to have the biography and I wanted to have, let’s say, the ten key recipes for each. And Times Books said, “Are you kidding? We’re not going to pay a copyright,” and Times Books owns Claiborne, but they didn’t own the others. They weren’t going to pay anybody. But each of these people, at that time, except for Julia, Julia was the only one who got it, because Julia’s a different kind of mind and spirit, and all the rest of them, the moment they caught wind that it was not just about them and there’s no hiding it, but they each automatically assumed that it was going to be a biography about them and they were going to be starred, and, no, it was about four together. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Q: So how did it morph into what it finally became? Fussell: Through the hard work of the Times editor guys. Gee, they were a peculiar lot, you know. Q: But you must have had some role in deciding how to do it. Fussell: Well, they said, “You can’t do it this way. We don’t really want biographies. We want you to use these people and then to make your own recipes.” I said, “Well, that’s what I actually do, but I was trying to honor these people.” “No, not allowed to do that. You have to—.” Okay. So I made my own the way I would if I were cooking in the kitchen, by looking at these guys and saying, “Okay, what do I want from each of those? These are going to be the four posts of the bed.” Q: That’s a pretty major concept, doing all of that in one book. How long did it take you to do that? Fussell: It took one year. Q: One year to do— Fussell: One year to do the whole thing. Q: Oh, my word. Fussell: Because this was the year of the divorce. Not the divorce; it was the split. Paul had gone off to England. I had the house. He had left the house, in effect. He had not left the house earlier, which was a problem, but he left the house now. I was by myself. I had no one. My son was at Oxford and my daughter was working. Okay. I had nobody I had to take care of, except the cats. Okay. That meant I could work twenty-four hours a day, and did. I cooked something in the kitchen, typed it up, went back to the kitchen, made the next thing. It was a nicely functioning machine for a year. It was a great way to use the kitchen at its fullest and say goodbye to it, which was important because it was a great kitchen. I’ll never have a kitchen like that again. Q: Once it was finished, how did you see that book? As an achievement, as a liaison with another kind of writing, or did you even think that through? Fussell: It was the beginning of the publishing debacle that has remained, and from my point of view, for all the remaining books. Only Mabel was a perfectly published book between the relation of author and publisher, Ticknor & Fields, and it was the last of the times when that seemed to be a perfectly wonderful relation. You were getting what you wanted. You said, “I want these pictures.” You paid for them, but you got to have the layout say, and all those things mattered a lot to me. All these guys who were the editors at Times Books, they went off to Doubleday in the middle of it. I had this new girl who came in who said, “I want this, this, this, this, and this,” and she suddenly wanted 25 percent more recipes. Okay, did them dutifully. Nothing turned out the way I’d wanted on that. Q: But nevertheless, it was a very legitimate food writing credential. Fussell: Well, it wasn’t at the time. I was just blasted by Judith. Blasted. I’m friends of Judith now, but she’s probably forgotten the letter she wrote. I haven’t. Q: What did it say? Fussell: Each of them, I mean, M.F.K. Fisher was very snotty about it, and Craig, who had embraced me because he had found out that my husband was gay, said I was perfect. And Jim, who was always a bitch anyway, you know, warm and a bitch, so he’s back and forth, whatever hit him. So I felt, oh, boy, I mean, what I thought of as a food world, I thought, “I’m sure not ever going to be a part of that.” Q: Oh, my. Now, let’s go back for a second to the week’s class you took with Beard. When did it fit into that context? Fussell: This is before I wrote it. Q: Before you wrote it? Fussell: Right. Q: You didn’t take that after you’d moved to New York? Fussell: I did, but how did it work? Because I was writing that book in Princeton, but maybe I didn’t finish the book until after I was in Princeton. I mean until after I moved to New York, because I also had Clancy. I took John Clancy courses. The reason it’s hard for me to figure this out is that I was spending time, when I was writing the Mabel book in the last two or three years of the 1970s, spending midweek in New York where I would rent. I was renting apartments. Q: You think that was when you took the Beard course? Fussell: That must have been it, actually. So it was not after I fully moved to New York. I was coming into New York and living three days a week here. That’s when it had to be. Q: It read as though you had talked to each of these people. Fussell: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I had interviewed M.F.K. Fisher. I ended up interviewing her four times. I interviewed her when I went to California on another kind of story, and I just threw her in there. Q: So that by the time you took the class with Beard, had you interviewed him extensively, or did that come afterward? Fussell: I only interviewed him twice. I had the class and I had one personal interview, and that was all I had personally. Q: One personal interview of how long? Fussell: Probably an hour, hour and a half. Q: The class was how many days? Fussell: The class was probably five days. But I had meantime read a very great deal about him, so I felt I knew him intimately. Q: Before you interviewed him or before you took the class? Fussell: Before I interviewed him. Before I took the class, yes. I mean, there was a lot that had been written about him by that time, and also because he was the kind of man who didn’t hide. Q: I know you wrote about the class in My Kitchen Wars, but could you tell me something about the class now? How many people were part of it? Fussell: Probably no more than twelve. What I loved was the kitchen. I loved the maps. I loved the way its scope was the world. Q: What do you mean? Fussell: The walls and the ceiling had the world map on it, like National Geographic. You were inside the map of the world. That was pretty wonderful. I liked the fact that the kitchen equipment was so dinky, yet by that time he had gotten an induction stove, a counter, and a couple of ovens. We were all very crowded and it was all extremely hands-on, which he was very good at. We did all the work. Q: Hands-on meaning participatory? Fussell: We were just clustering around. He sat on his high stool, like the great Buddha he was then, and smiled benignly and encouraged us. Q: How were tasks assigned? Fussell: You would divide up with—we were very mixed in who we were and genders and backgrounds. A really interesting class of people. I mean, it was very New York. Q: A mix of levels of experience, as well? Fussell: Yes, but nobody knew how to cook the way he did, so we all felt beginners. A guy named Larsen, do you remember the designer Larsen? Okay. He was— Q: Jack Lenor Larsen. Fussell: Right, Jack Lenor Larsen. He and his boyfriend were part of the students. He was kind of the most interesting because he was an extraordinary person in himself and a celebrity, but here he was cooking away. Gael Greene came by one night, and I’d never seen her before. I asked somebody else, “Who is that?” She appeared like a creature from outer space. Somebody explained “Oh, that’s Gael Greene.” “Okay.” So this is all part of the casualness of New York. I think there was a surgeon, a housewife. You know, it would go that way. Q: Was there a menu? Fussell: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We’d be given the plan, the lesson plan, the menu. We would always sit down at the end and eat what we had prepared. Q: Were there instructions on the lesson plan? Fussell: Oh yes. Vast. I mean, everything was detailed. So each recipe carefully laid out. We would each follow the recipes. He would follow us following the recipes to make sure we were doing—“Don’t use that garlic. That’s brown. That’s old. Throw that out.” Very careful about making sure we chose the best ingredients out of whatever we were given. Q: He had provided the ingredients? Fussell: Yes. Yes, yes, he provided everything. We were providing the labor. Q: Did he divide you into teams or how did that work? Fussell: Usually no more than three. You’d usually work as a pair, and you’d have to constantly make room, because there was not room. So you’d have to move out to a little porch back there or move into the other room and find a bare table you could do something on. It was very, very crowded. Q: Since it was a menu, it was important when each course was finished, yes? Fussell: Right. So he had things timed out and you’d be told, “You’d better get going on that because it’s taking too long.” So he was in perfect control without seeming to be at all. I think he had a very good time. He loved the adoration, we loved to adore him, and the food was primary. I mean, we were all concentrated on making everything taste wonderful. Q: The food meaning the ingredients as well as the way it was cooked, or what? Yes? Fussell: Right. Q: Who had purchased the ingredients? Fussell: Probably one of his staff. Clay was working and, oh, two of the young boys. I can’t remember which ones. So, yes, it was very, in that way, professional. Q: But said the equipment was dinky. Fussell: Well, yeah, because it was—I mean, this is not Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant kitchen; this is still a home kitchen. As you know, chef after chef complains who has to come to the Beard House to cook. Q: It’s not huge. Fussell: It’s not huge and doesn’t always have the salamander or the convection oven you wanted. Q: But nevertheless, it certainly provided you with an understanding that must have been helpful in writing the book, referring to Beard in Masters of American Cooking. Fussell: Right, because I love Beard’s method of cooking, which was, in a way, the opposite of Julia’s, because Jim is much more American-oriented and he just takes his great big hand and [demonstrates] there goes the bread dough. Or [demonstrates] and there goes the beating in of the egg whites. Forget spatulas. Q: The sound effects are great, but could you describe his method? Fussell: Ah, his method was in every possible way hands-on, and not nearly as—he’s much more improvised than Julia. I mean, it’s still very well laid out, but Julia goes for the details, as we all know from the television series. So it would be harder to cook for Julia than it was for Jim, because Julia, quite rightly, her goal was to methodologize, to make methodical what we were tending just to throw together. Q: I wonder if you can think of a dish that you made following his kinds of instructions and a dish following her kinds of instructions and how different the results would have been. Fussell: It’s a good comparison and I’m going to have trouble thinking of any single dish we made for him. Q: A soufflé, chicken? Fussell: We probably didn’t make soufflés. Q: For him? Fussell: Yeah. We would have made one for Julia. That would be a good comparison. The timing would be too exact for the soufflé. We made a lot of entrées, meat entrées for Jim, to reflect, I think, his own love of hearty protein. The choucroute garnie is a perfect James Beard, bringing whole lots of different ingredients together with a sense of abundance, display, that’s the James Beard style, strong flavors and less subtle. Something I hadn’t thought about, I think Jim was really about bringing things together, including people. His whole eagerness was to sit down at the table with all these people and eat together and have a good time. That would be very different from Julia. Q: But she would have choucroutes, as well, but it might have been— Fussell: And her choucroute, she would explain how to make this. We’d have to make the sausages, we would have to do the sauerkraut from scratch, you know. We would have to do each of those things from the base. It would take us several days to make the same courcroute. Jim would certainly do shortcuts on that. Her flavors would be more probably authentic Alsatian. She’d make sure that it was classically Alsatian. Jim might be much more freewheeling in what flavors—might throw in some caraway seed. Q: And the results in terms of how an eater would experience it? Fussell: I think with Julia there would be a lot of the same delight in the finished product. I’m thinking about her kitchen table where she once—we had celerie rave. No, it was celery somebody Victoire. Okay. I interviewed her at Cambridge and she was going to carefully record this and use this recipe, so she was always doing two things, three things at once. Very organized in that way. She’s not just going to give me a lunch, although I’m there for interviewing. She made this very, very simple dish seem absolutely wonderful, but it was done exactly. The way the celery was boiled in the chicken broth, the laying on of the anchovies, the hard cooking of the eggs, that all sounds pretty simple. Then we sat around the table and ate, and it was a total pleasure, but it didn’t—Jim would have wanted to make more of a show of it and he would have said, “This is my theater and I’m going to make the most of every scene.” I think Julia let the scenes build and build and at the end of twenty years you have a play. Q: Do you make any personal judgment about the difference in terms of how it would be for the people to whom it was served? Fussell: How each of them would feel about serving it? Q: No, how you felt. I mean, in the end, would their approaches make much difference to experiencing these dishes at the table? Fussell: Yes and no. Yes because of the difference of those two people and all that reflects. There’s just a very big difference in the person, and therefore sitting and eating with them makes a big difference. How you eat it is different. Q: I see. In their company. Fussell: In their company. Not because of how they prepared it; their company makes a difference. Their presence is a huge ingredient in the table, in the dish. Q: Could you compare them? His would have been more, I don’t know, gustatory or enthusiastic or what? Fussell: His would have been more theatrical. It’s not about the flavor of the food; it’s the ambience, it’s what’s created around it. And that, for me, is just as important as every single thing that has gone into any particular dish, because we do not eat in vacuums. We do not eat in labs. So the context is everything. Q: Let’s go back then to how that book was experienced. First of all, how did you feel about it after the book was completed? Fussell: Bewildered. I thought, “This is wow.” I thought I was—I mean, I’d just gotten slapped down by the food world, I mean the food world as I knew it, in ways that completely surprised me. This little hick from the suburb, which is what I was, and because I was also exploring ways—the Masters of American Cookery, that was just a little thing I could throw off because I’d done so much cooking. I was interested in the cookbooks that I had in my library. Okay, let’s throw all that in. Q: I don’t know whether you’ve looked at it recently, but it’s really a terrific book. Fussell: Well, I think so now, but I sure didn’t know what I was doing then. I mean, you know, you get hit in the jaw by people whom you’ve thought were your heroes, are suddenly saying, “Go away, little girl.” Q: So how did that affect you in terms of what your next book would be? Fussell: Well, at this same time I was trying to do another movie biography. So I thought am I would follow up Mabel by doing Jean Harlow, who I adore, or Carole Lombard, or Ingrid Bergman for a different reason. I love the fact that she had—this is some of the time when she had been out of favor. You know, the American public had rejected her because she had run off from her husband. I thought, “Oh, that’s really—.” Ah! I investigated each of these quite thoroughly and there were a whole lot of extraneous problems for each of them. There was a person working on the Jean Harlow who said, “You’re not going to have any of my material. Don’t move in here.” Very territorial again. I forget what happened with the Carole Lombard. It was going to be really hard to get any documents. Ingrid Bergman I met her daughter and I thought, “Oh, my god, they’re all so wary. They don’t know.” I was really very, very innocent. “They all think I’m trying to move in and take something, take something.” “She’s written her biography. Why would you want to—I mean, she’s written about herself.” Oh, boy, okay. Q: This says in 1996, I Hear America Cooking. You must have done things in between, or Eating In, as well. Fussell: Yes, but I Hear America Cooking wasn’t one that would have had a long gestation, and I think I thought because, all right, food is so much fun as a subject. I mean, I really love—I know. I know what it was. Despite the knock in the head from the official food establishment as it then was, the publishing establishment in New York, what I discovered in food was how many people there were of all kinds who were interested in the subject, and this has partly to do with a moment of the food revolution. So everybody was getting excited at the same time about something that nobody had talked about but we were all kind of involved with. This is there’s no community like the food community. Q: Okay. This is the eighties and I’m trying to think where we were in the food revolution. Fussell: By the eighties, Julia is a television queen. We’ve had the whole population change its mind about food. Food is fun. Food is interesting. Food can be serious fun. And it’s something that is very uniting, that is not politics and not religion, which is in shambles, you know. It is a way to have a community which is back to my community theater. It’s a way to substitute for community theater, because I was meeting all these people through writing more and more about food, and every event was a little bonding. I loved this aspect of food. So I thought, you know, “I’ve got to make a choice. I can keep on pursuing the movie thing, which is so isolating and territorial, or I can move into the food world and find out where it’s not territorial and struck that right up front. Okay, so it’s never going to be worse than that. And why don’t I run around the country and see what people are actually eating all around the country?” So that seemed to me a really good thing to do, because I wanted the community of America—this is all with the background of the Vietnam War, Cold War, all which I despised. The Korean War made me so angry I wanted to—“How can you have a war? We just had a war. See what war does? That’s bad.” So this seemed to me a wonderful counteracting to that, that was outside the realm of the divisiveness. In today’s context that sounds very [Barack] Obama, but it certainly wasn’t then. So food seemed to do that, and also because I loved to travel, because I adore America as a country to travel in, and because I could travel alone. I didn’t have anybody else to take care of. I didn’t have the kids or the husband to shepherd. I could just go wherever I wanted to. Q: How did you support yourself? Fussell: By an advance and by alimony, which is crucial. [laughs] Q: The advance is for each book as you did them? Fussell: Yes. Q: So Masters of American Cookery gave you the credential that would have gotten you future advances? Fussell: Yeah. Yeah, because those four people, not Julia, but Judith and the other three, they were the only people who, you know—otherwise I got very good press on it. Q: From the real world. Fussell: From the real world, not from that part of the territory is all. Q: Did that make an enormous difference to you that you at least got—not at least. To me, having the people who actually read and use the book would mean a lot. Fussell: I was always surprised and excited, but surprised. Okay, I mean, but I always felt—I think I still feel the same way, “Yeah, well, what do you need a recipe for? Just take a look at this.” Because I don’t use recipes that way and I don’t expect other people to. But people, to my astonishment, keep wanting to follow recipes. So, okay, all right. So for I Hear America Cooking, it was certainly never to me about the recipes, certainly never about the recipes. It’s about everything else. It’s what they come out of. Q: Play that out a little bit, that’s it’s what they come out of. Fussell: It’s what they come out of. There is no such thing as a new recipe. That’s why the copyright just drives me crazy. Recipes are not invented, no. They are traditionally a traditional mode of communication that has gone on for 40,000 years. Q: Cooking? Fussell: Cooking. There are only certain variations, you know. I mean, millions and millions. There are not infinite numbers, just new combinations. Q: As you were doing these next books, the Eating In, I Hear America Cooking, you got to travel around the country a good bit? Fussell: Oh yeah. That’s what it was for. [laughs] Q: Food, revolution-wise, what was going on? We’re talking about the mid and later eighties. Fussell: Right. For the first time, people would open up about food because they would have opinions about it, and simultaneously that meant that in areas where there had been a traditional cuisine, pockets of cuisine, they would get rewarded for talking about what was special to them, so what I call the ports of entry where the immigrants came in. So because of the revolution, there was also how to distinguish what’s in America as opposed to French, which has always been the battle because our vocabulary professionally is French and yet none of that has anything to do with the context of America. So that has always been the most interesting quest for me. Q: The context of America? Fussell: Yeah. Yeah. Q: Did you see all this as a revolution? Fussell: Yeah, absolutely. Q: Could you describe that? Fussell: Well, in Masters of American Cooking I call them the leaders. Q: No, I meant going around the country. Fussell: That just extends that. Then you’re talking to ordinary people everywhere who are participating in this because they are for the first time more and more moving into farmers’ markets, this stuff that they may have lost before the canning revolutions of the thirties, you know, that they had in the tens and twenties. So you find people who were now once again growing an ear of corn in their backyard that they wouldn’t have for a while. Q: The green markets here, you presumably lived here during the time that the green markets, where it started and expanded, but at the same time, as you pointed out, they were beginning to recover around the country. When you traveled around, did you see farmers’ markets as they grew or did you see supermarkets or— Fussell: I would look for farmers’ markets, but my real interest was in finding the ethnic roots of people and how that was expressed in food. So it was much more of that than sustainable farming or anything else, was seeing how it grew out of these different immigrants, because I always wanted to make the point that you cannot compare America to any other nation on earth and have it accurate, because our mix is different. No place else has this peculiar history. Q: Peculiar in the people who make it up? Explain that a little bit. Fussell: Peculiar in the way it happened. You have a huge native population which you eradicate. You do not intermarry. The Spaniards had a huge population in Mexico that they eradicated, but they intermarried. So you have one kind of continuity there that we don’t have. We have people from more places in the world than any other country for the reasons that have to do with the egalitarian hopes, etc. Those things never stopped. They kept coming, as they do now, and so they keep mixing. So our whole notion of what is traditional, what could be authentic, what could be those terms for cuisine don’t fit us. We have to make up a whole new vocabulary. Q: Now I know you would have plenty people to talk about thinking these things through, but as you were researching these books of the eighties, before Corn, did you have peers, did you have colleagues? How did you think these things through, or did you do it by yourself? Fussell: I didn’t know anybody who was interested in the history of cookbooks until I read James Beard’s American Cookery. Okay, that’s the first time I found anybody who valued them in anyway. Okay. That was wonderful and helped on the I Hear America Cooking, because when you would run into the ethnic pockets, you would find local books, you would find regional cuisine books still. So this is just when Paul Prudhomme was getting started. So there was a kind of discovery of it’s not really regional, but what we were calling regional cooking. It was just beginning. That’s part of the food revolution. We’re beginning to discover what’s on these shores and typical of our regions and how they differ from the regionalism of anything in Europe. Q: The regionalism of what in Europe? Fussell: Of anything in Europe, you know, where region means something different. That means vertical history going back to the Phoenicians, at least. Here it means horizontal history, in layers. Q: As you were traveling around the country, how did you contact people? Fussell: Good question. With difficulty. Most of my time was spent trying to find really local people, and I think the best fun was in Louisiana when I got to go into Cajun country and word of mouth. You head for Louisiana, you head for New Orleans, you find Paul Prudhomme. Ah, what village did you come from? What town did you come from? “Oh, you really ought to talk to So-and-so up in Lafayette.” So you drive up to Lafayette. That was so much fun. Q: How did you see the work that you were doing? Did you see it as groundbreaking, as legitimate, as what? Fussell: I just saw it as a book about America with food as the focus and nobody else had done it quite this way yet, and I was always happy to do something that nobody else had done, or to try to. Q: Let’s think about Corn a little bit and the gestation period of how that happened. Fussell: That really was a natural outcome of I Hear America Cooking, as I say in the book, because of having deliberately gone to the immigrant cultures, because that’s what we think of as American, as a source of American cooking, and realizing I had left out the center of it. Q: The center of it being? Fussell: The center of it being corn in the Midwest. So I had been all around the perimeter, and the only place I’d gone, I’d gone up to Chicago and the North, but the whole prairie lands were untouched. Then I found out why, because I didn’t even know, that’s because it was very homogeneous and it was settled all in 1840 to 1860. Q: The area you mean? Fussell: Yeah, the whole Midwest was very homogeneous in relation to the rest of the country. It was Germanic, essentially Germanic. Q: Did you have to talk people into, meaning publishers, corn as a subject? Fussell: Let me think about that. Elizabeth Sifton was my editor at Viking for I Hear America Cooking. We had had to buy the contract out from Times Books, because Elizabeth read it in manuscript and liked it. And why? Because she’s an historian. She understood and she was also interested in American subjects. So, okay, so she bought it. Then she left Viking for Knopf. So she would have bought the Corn book as saying, yes, that’s an extension of I Hear America Cooking. It’ll tell us more about American culture. That’s why she bought it. Q: It was pretty daring, though, in terms of whether or not it would sell, whether or not that specificity would appeal to people. Fussell: Well, this is why I was lucky for a while. I was lucky before she left Knopf, lucky to have Elizabeth, because she was very positive about such things. She did not have a lowbrow commercial eye. Whereas Nach Waxman said, “Oh, Betty, you don’t have any recipes in this. You’re crazy.” So there were not food books sold in this country that did not have recipes. So I did not have the sale at the beginning that it would have if it had recipes, and it got no rewards. Q: It did not have the sale in the beginning, but it had six editions. Fussell: Yeah, but that’s—who knows? I wouldn’t know. Q: So what happened between 1992 and 2004 that—six editions is a very big deal. Fussell: Because nobody had supplanted it with a book about—no one was going to bother to write another book about corn. [laughs] And because it covered a whole lot of bases, and because by that time— Q: A whole lot of bases. Play that out a bit. Fussell: Because it had a lot of Native American culture in it, which was taken seriously as our indebtedness to a tradition, and we don’t have a whole lot of books on that. From my point of view, it tried to get at a larger subject of how we were a very scientific culture and we don’t understand mythology and symbols and art, so we discount them. But you cannot write a book about corn and just have it about the economics. It misses the point. It misses the point. Q: How would you describe the point? Fussell: The point is what is corn and why is it important and how does it define American culture, not just cuisine, culture? Q: Looking back at that now, does it surprise you at all that it has been as successful as it has been, or does it also have something to do with how the revolution progressed? Fussell: It has to do with that. Q: Could you explain that some? Fussell: It was a big moment when Todd English came up to me and said—and I’d never heard of Todd English, and this is at an A.I.W.F.conference-- that’s long ago—in Boston, and he said, “I’ve so wanted to meet you because of the book you wrote about corn.” I couldn’t get over it. A chef had read a book about a food subject? Stunned. I thought, “Okay, then a whole lot of people are getting interested in food in this way,” and that happened. I mean, that’s why that book is still in print, because the food world has so expanded who’s part of it. Q: I think it’s also still in print because it provided a model for so many other people. Fussell: Well, yeah, yeah. Okay, so then we could have single food subjects easier, Mark Kurlansky and Cod and Salt. But there would be no market for that unless people really wanted to find out where food was and where it came from and how it got to where it is. Q: Were you surprised that it continued to be reissued? Fussell: No. I would only be surprised if somebody offered me a million dollars. That’s the only thing that would surprise me. [laughs] Q: How did other people that you knew react to the idea of a single-subject food book? Fussell: Well, I’ll tell you the booksellers’ attitude, I certainly got no nominations from any of the food organizations for a book without recipes, and the fact that the I.A.C.P. for the first time found a way to reward just plain old scholarship instead of recipes was huge. So the beginning of the Jane Grigson Awards was an enormous boost, not just for me, but for the whole idea of this is what food’s about, not just how-to’s. That was big. Q: When did it become gratifying, that is, having written this book? Fussell: Corn? Q: For you. Fussell: I think there are two kinds of moments. One was on the spot, when I went around to county fairs all over the country, I mean meeting the corn farmers, meeting all these people I could never meet otherwise, and having something to say. “You’re in here.” I absolutely loved that, and I think that’s over. I mean, I don’t think there are any county fairs anymore. But that was a great moment. And the same down in Arizona and going to Hopi villages and talking to them and showing them. If I didn’t have the book to show them, the fact that I was showing that kind of interest, I mean, it was killing how responsive they were, heartbreaking in a way. Q: Over that period of time, from ’92 to 2004, did the food world begin to react differently to you as an author, as a legitimate food writer? Fussell: Let’s see. What was the year of publication of Corn? Q: This says ’92. Fussell: So nothing much. Yeah, the Grigson Award is what made the difference, not the book. So then I got to be a scholar and I got recognized by the I.A.C.P. I got recognized by the A.I.W.F. earlier, but then it kind of morphed, you know. Q: Morphed into? Fussell: Into the I.A.C.P., in effect. So organizations like that, the A.I.W.F., very much on the outside, and the I.A.C.P. kind of took that over and moved ahead. So I became known because I did a lot of lecturing, as well as writing, a lot of lecturing. Q: A lot of lecturing where? Fussell: For conventions. I mean all kinds of conventions, Nestle’s and—it could be some commercial organizations. Q: Not necessarily— Fussell: Not just food. Q: —food writers? Fussell: Right, right. At universities, museums, or anyplace where there could be tie-ins, because food was getting in the air. It was getting cachet. Q: It must have made a change in how you viewed yourself as a writer, though. Can you remember how that felt, being asked to speak at these conventions or meetings? Fussell: Yeah, I loved the fact that people wanted to have food as a main topic. Whee! And all aspects of it, which I felt fully equipped to talk about, because there hadn’t been a whole lot of people going to talk to the farmers. That’s what I did in France. Well, I could do that in America, and a lot easier because I understood what they said most of the time much better. [laughs] Q: Meanwhile, you did Crazy for Corn, which came out in ’95. Fussell: And those are the recipes that were ready to go into the Corn book, but by that time that book was so—no more. No more text. Get rid of that. Q: So how easy was it to get a contract to do a book with those recipes? Fussell: Well, as Susan Friedman said, who is the one who finally published it, she said, “Oh, I see, Betty. This is the stuff that is left over from the Corn book.” “Not exactly, Susan, but, yeah.” That was easy, but it was not well published, in my view, so I was not happy with it. Q: Now Home Bistro, that’s ’97. What was going on— Fussell: Right, and that really just combined Eating In and Home Plates, which Dan Halpern of Ecco Press, he was an old pal from Princeton— Q: Dan Halpern? Fussell: Dan Halpern, who lived in Princeton—no, he lived in New York then, but I knew him through Princeton friends. I knew him through the literary world as a publisher of poets. He’s done a cookbook with Mark Strand’s wife. He was always a foodie. Why? Because he’s from California. So I was fascinated at this time by the number of guys who had eaten beautifully all of their lives and had never set foot in the kitchen. So they had the palate, but their wife was suddenly, “What?” She said, “Work?” That’s a huge shift again, so guys for the first time were forced to do some cooking at home. Now, this would have been toward the end of the eighties, wives going back to work. Then the guys thought, “Oh, that’s kind of fun.” They were the big fans of Julia. So the first one, Eating In, was to make a cookbook so small that a guy could put it in his pocket when he’s at the— Q: Literally in his breast pocket? Fussell: Right, at the supermarket, and say, “Let’s see. What’s around here? Okay, all I need is a lemon, a garlic.” So it’s really, really simple stuff, and yet the flavors are what his palate by that time would have been trained to have. Q: No kidding? I mean, publishers saw it that way as a vehicle that would reach—well, I guess it could be women as well as men, but— Fussell: Yeah, yeah, but I mean it was something pocket-size to take with you when you’re shopping, because the whole point is you can make anything out of anything, you just need five ingredients, lemon, garlic, and cilantro, etc., pasta, maybe some cream. So that was designed just for this. My daughter did the illustrations. I mean, this is just a little fun thing. Then that took off a bit, enough so that a nice girl at—was that Doubleday, said, “I want a sequence.” So we did Home Plates to just follow up, because there were an infinite number of recipes you could do that way. Then Dan said, “Hey, let’s put them together and do a hardback.” So this is kind of through friends, more or less. Q: Were you supporting yourself entirely at that point through these books? Fussell: Not through the books, but mostly through—I was making some pretty good money food writing. The best pay was Lear’s [Magazine], when I was on Lear’s, haha, that craziness, that complete craziness. You could make some pretty good money with two articles. It’s the articles that were the bread and butter. The books were never making money. Q: Magazine articles? Fussell: Magazine articles for every possible thing that is on wheels, yeah. Q: However, My Kitchen Wars was quite a different approach. Fussell: Right. Now, if I were a commercially minded person, which it would benefit my children if I were, but I’m not, I would have followed the Corn book with what I thought of then, with a beef book. That was in my head then. Q: The idea came to you at that point? Fussell: Yeah, yeah, because I realized that there was a big connection here that I wasn’t making. There are whole lots of nice contrasts and there was a continuity. Okay. But instead, I made another very deliberate choice and that was, “You know, I want to write a book where the writing counts, where the writing really counts, and it’s not the subject.” So I thought, “This is the time to do that.” I was twenty years away from the marriage. I always knew I was going to write about the marriage because I felt it embraced so many women. It was so typical of the war years and post-war years. So I got these fellowships, MacDowell, the writing colonies. Q: To work on the book? Fussell: To work on that book, that’s right. That was my writing book, my book about writing. Q: Now, it had six editions presumably— Fussell: Six editions? Q: That’s what I’ve read, between— Fussell: How can that be? Q: Maybe not. Fussell: Oh, I don’t know. Q: You don’t think so? Was that successful? Fussell: None of them are successful from my point of view in terms of making money. Q: That’s what I meant. Fussell: None of them make money. None of them have ever made money for me. Q: Gee, today if something like My Kitchen Wars came out, presumably you’d be on every talk show possible. Fussell: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. There’s been too many. It’s not sensational enough. Mine was toward the beginning of the explosion of food memoirs, but it got quite cold-shouldered from the food world because it was too personal, it was about a marriage. I mean, that’s not about food; that’s about a marriage. Q: That’s why I thought it would be very popular now. Fussell: I think we’re over the memoir explosions. There are too many of them now, but then I don’t have a good finger on that pulse ever. Q: On the timing. Interesting. Fussell: I’m always ahead of that moment when things come in, and that doesn’t bother me. It’s just that I’m not the kind who makes money. Damn. [laughs] Q: Interesting. The concept for My Kitchen Wars was what? Fussell: Because I literally felt that Corn had used me. So I thought here’s where the subject was so much bigger than I had imagined and it completely engulfed me. Okay. Okay. I used the first person there just as a way to get into this, but Corn used me up in a way. Okay. Okay. I want to do the opposite. I want to use food to say something else, to describe my life. So I felt it was a very deliberate choice of using it metaphorically, whereas Corn was substance as well as metaphorical in a huge, huge way. So this is a shift toward the metaphorical possibilities of food. Q: Do you get a lot of inquiries about it now, My Kitchen Wars? Fussell: No, I get responses still that completely astonish me. I mean, the world of the anonymous comment had come in at that time. I don’t think I saw half of the stuff, because I wouldn’t even know how to look for it. I was constantly astonished by the people who really thought, “What is this sour-grapes woman talking about?” Angry, angry, a lot, or disgusted. I mean, you’re not supposed to write about personal things like that. A lot of stuff. Q: It’s quite poignant. Fussell: Well, I thought it was….. [End of interview] Fussell – 2 - PAGE 1