Interviewee: Betty Fussell Session #2

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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.