'In the News' Archive
Our Lady of the Kitchen
by Betty Fussell
Everyone seemed to be riding the Julia wave as the media blitz for Julie & Julia swept the country this summer. I got a free ride because of my 1999 memoir, My Kitchen Wars (just out in a new paperback edition), which detailed what Julia meant to my generation of housewives in the 1960s. I was happy to be quoted, along with Nora Ephron, in the August issue of Vanity Fair by Laura Jacobs, who profiled Julia in “Our Lady of the Kitchen.”
Recalling Julia in the 60s, Nora Ephron told Jacobs, “It was an almost hilarious epidemic of cooking from that cookbook. … People would just pitch themselves into these things, and it was very much part of the fabric of all our lives in the early 60s.”
I’m cited as one of those “pitchers”: “We’d called Julia Child by her Christian name the moment Mastering the Art of French Cooking appeared in 1961, because she seemed to be talking directly to us. …. To cook French, eat French, drink French was to become versant in the civilized tongues of Europe as opposed to America’s barbaric yawp.”
I got another happy freebie mention in a new novel that appeared in April, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission, set in Princeton in the 1990s, three decades after Julia had taken over the lives of women like me. Korelitz’s heroine has read up on women who’d written back stories of the academic scene, and I was happy to be linked to such notables as Rebecca Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem) and Eileen Simpson (Poets in Their Youth).
But I was even happier to be linked to Julia, even though her revolutionary shakeup of American food was perhaps all too transient in Princeton.
Korelitz writes of her heroine: “The wonderful Princeton purveyors she had read about in Betty Fussell’s gastronomic memoir, My Kitchen Wars — like the butcher who gamely ground pork and veal for clever, frustrated housewives in thrall to Julia Child — seemed to have perished, and all good restaurants, if any had existed, had evidently fled along with them.” (p.83)
Julia was a blessed person and she continues to shed her generosity of heart and mind on all of us she left behind.
Interviews with Friends and Mimosas Are Best
by Betty Fussell
I recently did a radio interview with Patrick Martins of Heritage Foods and Shanna Pacifico, chef at Back Forty, which aired live Aug. 9 on Heritage Radio Network.
Patrick broadcasts live on Sundays under the rubric “The Main Course” at Roberta’s Pizza, an oasis in the abandoned industrialism of Bushwick, Brooklyn. Patrick, Shanna and I chewed the fat while drinking a pitcher of freshly squeezed Mimosas and eating a brunch of polenta with poached eggs. Under the circumstances, it was real easy to talk.
Heritage Foods inaugurated a new beef program this year, the “Beef Cattle Share Program,” where you can buy online 1/8th of a grass-fed cow that will arrive at your doorstep cut into various prime steaks, stew cubes and ground for hamburger. While it’s not local (this year the program’s cattle were raised in California), it’s quality grass-fed beef, humanely raised, and it’s one way to cut costs by buying the cow on the hoof.
Recent Mentions: A Review of Raising Steaks and a Look at the Food Industrial Complex
Andrew Riely posted a review of Raising Steaks at his blog, Gulliver’s Nest, that was written for the June issue of Radcliffe Culinary Times. Here’s the intro:
When I began my graduate research on cattle ranching in Texas, I thought it amusing that most ranchers I spoke with talked a blue streak about their desire for independence and self-reliance, yet they all dressed, drove, and drank the same. Meanwhile, they eyed those few among them who challenged conventional ranching methods with deep suspicion.
Betty Fussell examines the same dynamic in her wonderful, sprawling Raising Steak, an investigation into the economics, culture, and gastronomy of American beef. How can a good steak symbolize rugged cowboy individualism when its producers are terribly afraid of sticking out from the herd?
The conundrum troubles few people, if the exploding popularity of steakhouses is any guide. Fussell gets right at steak’s raw patriotic appeal, writing, with typical strength and directness, “Real American men, women and children eat steak because it’s red with blood, blood that pumps flavor, iron, vitality, and sex into flaccid bodies. For women, steak is better than spinach. For men, it’s better than Viagra. With steak, it’s easy to get carried away.” I’ll say!
Plus: Looking at the numerous articles, books and even films released recently that take a closer look at industrial food production and the treatment of animals, Sarah Earle of the Concord Monitor questions our relationship to the food we eat. Raising Steaks, she writes, “joins a stampede of such literature barreling through the stockades that have separated the average American from his lunch since the dawn of the industrial farm.”
Dear Reader Features “Raising Steaks”
This week only — Betty’s book “Raising Steaks” is featured at DearReader.com’s nonfiction book club, coordinated by Suzanne Beecher. Betty will answer readers’ questions and comments.
What’s Your Beef?
Leslie Cole has put together a wonderful beef primer. Head over to The Oregonian for lessons on what “grass-fed” and “natural” (not to be confused with “naturally raised”) really mean. Cole also includes a list of accepted definitions of terms found on meat labels.
Scroll down to the bottom for an interview with Betty about “the enduring confusion about brands, labels and claims.”
Chowbama
Sarah Boesveld of the Globe and Mail writes about the fascination with President Obama’s food choices and quotes a few food experts …
But Mr. Obama - however svelte - has a way of making food about community and connection, foodie watchers say.
“One thing everyone cares about is: ‘What does the president eat?’ ” says Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine.
“Food has always been part of politics - eating hot dogs in one place and tacos in another. Food is a very emotional and approachable topic.”
Mr. Obama appears to connect with the masses by sharing his gastronomic tendencies, says Betty Fussell, a New York-based food historian. He has meetings while dining, and the world has seen a few televised breakfast campaign stops during which he revealed his affection for waffles.
“A lot of our personal identity is wrapped up in food, and everybody knows that instinctively,” she says. “[Mr. Obama] seems to be endorsing real food. We won’t see him plowing into a dozen doughnuts,” she says, or, God forbid, wolfing down McDonald’s fare à la Bill Clinton.
The Story of the Cow
A recent article in Slate looks at three books about beef, including Raising Steaks (though it is incorrectly referred to as “American Steak” in the first reference). Sara Dickerman writes:
Betty Fussell’s American Steak takes a picaresque approach to the American beef industry, examining through character sketches the story of American beef both light (how to cook carne asada) and dark (what happens inside a beef processing facility). In Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, Andrew Rimas and Evan DJ Fraser take a longer-term look at bovines—examining the history of cattle, their co-evolution with humans, and their deep significance in mythology and culture. And in the academic collection Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, edited by historian Paula Young Lee, several scholars examine the modern invention of the slaughterhouse as a dark countermelody to the history of urbanism.