Betty Fussell

Betty Harper Fussell (née Betty Ellen Harper, born July 28, 1927) is an award-winning, American author, who has written a biography of Mabel Normand, a memoir My Kitchen Wars, and books on cooking and food history. Her essays on food, travel, literature, theater, and movies have been appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Cosmopolitan, and Vogue.

Quotes

I've spent most of my life doing kitchen battle, feeding others and myself, torn between the desire to escape and the impulse to entrench myself further. When social revolutions hustled women out of the kitchen and into the boardroom, I seemed to be caught in flagrante, with a pot holder in my hand. I knew that the position of women like myself was of strategic importance in the war between the sexes. But if you could stand the heat, did you have to get out of the kitchen? For even as I chafed at kitchen confinement, cooking had begun its long conquest of me. Food had infiltrated my heart, seduced my brain, and ravished my senses. Peeling the layers of an onion, spooning out the marrow of a beef bone, laying bare the skeleton of a salmon were acts very like the act of sex, ecstatically fusing body and mind.
- "Assault and Battery". My Kitchen Wars: A Memoir. Open Road Media. 2015. 1st sentence; 1st edition. 1999. ISBN 978-0-86547-577-9.

... I found that Oklahoma was the only place in the country where you could go to the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the National Hall of Fame for Famous American Indians on the same day. Of course this is the only place in the country that even has a Cowboy or Indian Hall of Fame. It is also the only place in the country that has a town named Corn.
- "CORN, U.S.A.". The Story of Corn. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2004. p. 21. ISBN 0-8263-3592-6.

In the past four years, I've branded Highland cows on a ranch in Montana, stalked nilgai in Texas, watched cows butchered by hand in a slaughterhouse in Colorado, and toured a Cargill plant near Dodge City that kills 6,000 cows per hour. I've attended conventions of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in San Antonio and of a breakaway group in Denver, applauded lectures at the American Grass-Fed Society in Indiana and whooped it up at rodeos at the National Denver Western Stock Show. I've talked with a New Jersey housewife investigating mad cow disease, with an ex-bull rider turned political activist, with an animal scientist who transformed McDonald's. I went to Florida to see Piney Woods cattle in the palmettos, to Cheyenne to "Eeeeehaaaawwww" with the Cowgirls of the West in the Pioneer Days Parade. I even enrolled in Beef 101 at Texas A&M, in order to get some hands-on experience in how we turn cows into meat.
- Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2008. p. 7. ISBN 0151012024.

Treating corn as a commodity is a part of our ingrained history — but it’s only two hundred years old. To people who aren't accustomed to thinking of history at all, that’s a long time. But to us here, it’s an eyeblink.
- (September 29, 2014)"Betty Fussell speaks at FUZE.SW 2014 in Santa Fe". Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, YouTube. (quote at 15:20 of 25:43)

I'd hit 40 by the time I began to write real words. By then I'd married a professional writer/teacher, typed and edited his manuscripts, raised two children, entertained like crazy, finished a doctorate in English Lit, taught Shakespeare, performed in community theaters, traveled as family all over Europe, lived in Princeton, London, and Provence.
And along the way I found Julia Child and the pleasures of making at home in Princeton what we were eating in Cimiez. Like Julia, I wanted to tell other people about it. Not through how-to technique but how food checks time. The way travel does. The way play-acting does.
- "Preface". Eat, Live, Love, Die. 2017. pp. xi–xvi. ISBN 978-1-64009-011-8. (pbk edition; quote from p. xii); 1st edition 2016

... food is life ... You don't have to cook. You do have to eat. Everybody has to eat. ... The basis of food is other people. ... You cannot raise everything you're going to eat. ... everything is culturally relevant to food.
- (February 9, 2017)"Jocelyn Ruggiero's SNIPPETS: Betty Fussell, award-winning writer". Jocelyn Ruggiero, YouTube. (quote at 1:47 of 9:53)

Who can blame Betty Fussell for wanting to get even? After reading My Kitchen Wars, I wonder only how she managed, for the more than 30 years that they were married, to direct her kitchen cleaver anywhere other than at Paul Fussell’s skull.
- Susan Bolotin, (October 31, 1999)"Skewered: In her memoir, Betty Fussell takes revenge on her prizewinning former husband". New York Times.