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My Kitchen Wars

(book, Betty Fussell)

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h4. From Culinate

The wife of noted academic Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory), Betty Fussell longed to be an academic herself. In the meantime, she raised kids, kept house, and cooked up a Gallic storm of meals and parties inspired by the likes of Julia Child. She eventually gave up both the academic aspirations and the husband, carving out instead a career for herself as a noted writer of books on food (The Story of Corn). 

My Kitchen Wars is a poignant, acerbic memoir of Fussell's life, from her hardscrabble origins in California to the Fussells' debauched days of midlife partying and adultery to her later years, when she found herself and her path. My Kitchen Wars is clear-eyed about the pains and rewards of the kitchen, about the slavery and the liberation that cooking can be.