Food writer Betty Fussell
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/di...ng-trails.html

Still Blazing Trails

AUG. 4, 2014

A Good Appetite

By MELISSA CLARK
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I walked the druid path through an oak grove to the Casa Dorinda, a
retirement community in Montecito, Calif., where Julia Child spent her
final days. I could have driven the main road like everyone else. But
those weren’t the directions that Betty had given me.

Betty Fussell, the 87-year-old food writer, never took the main road
anywhere. If there was a beautiful, sensual, messy path, Betty took it,
even if it meant getting lost along the way. Which is just what happened
to me in that oak grove one morning last spring.

When I finally found my way out, I saw her, leaning on a walker. It had
been years since we had last seen each other in New York, and I was
struck by the change.

“Oh, did you fall?” I asked gently.

“You betcha I fell,” she said. “I was coyote hunting in Montana with my
son. We hiked a mile and a half up a mountain over black ice. Sam
slipped, and then got right back up. But at my age when you fall on
black ice, you tear a ligament.”

A coyote hide with a bullet hole, bagged by Sam, is on prominent display
across the back of her sofa. On the bed is the hide from a deer she shot
herself at age 82.

Betty hadn’t changed after all.

I first met her when she came to teach a food-writing course at Columbia
University, where I was a graduate student. Tall and regal, with
sculpted cheekbones and long gray hair piled high on her head, she
strode into the classroom that first day with a chocolate cake in her hands.

“Guess the secret ingredient,” she commanded.

We 18 seminar students licked and nibbled, inhaled and inspected.
Coffee? Cinnamon? Buttermilk?

“Mayonnaise,” I said, tipped off by the reddish hue of the cake. It was
a wartime recipe, a way to compensate for shortages of eggs and butter.

We bonded over that, and throughout the class over the idea that food
writing could be about so much more than the ingredients on the plate.
Culture and history were as important as recipes. It may be taken for
granted today, but it was novel then. And it made me, and an entire
generation, want to write about food seriously.

As Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant and adviser to New York
University’s Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, said, “Betty was
so brilliant and so knowledgeable that she gave people permission to
treat food as an intellectual pursuit.”

She was a trailblazer in the American food movement, though she’s not as
well known as James Beard, Alice Waters or Larry Forgione. But she
worked right beside them, helping persuade Americans to understand and
embrace their own food culture, instead of always looking to Europe.
She’s written dozens of articles on the subject and 11 books, including
“I Hear America Cooking” (Viking Penguin, 1986), one of the first
scholarly works combining a study of regional American cooking with
accessible recipes and a lively text.

“Food in Good Season” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), a cookbook, celebrated
seasonal local eating about two decades before the concepts became
buzzwords for food lovers. “The Story of Corn” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992),
spanning the ages from Mayan agricultural rituals to the rising hegemony
of high-fructose corn syrup, became the benchmark for single-subject
books about food, and helped spawn a genre. The seriousness she applied
to the subject helped make possible some of the most incisive writing
about food of the last 20 years, from Saveur magazine to Dan Barber’s
“The Third Plate” (Penguin Press, 2014).

And she did all of this while maintaining an earthy sense of humor and
delight. A conversation with her is as peppered with 1950s
colloquialisms like “you betcha,” and “heavens to Betsy” as it is with
references to the Old Testament and Shakespeare.

“She may be an intellectual,” Clark Wolf told me, “but she’s also a heck
of a lot of fun.”

From that very first lesson of the mayonnaise cake, I’ve learned so
much from Betty. She taught me that understanding the context of a
recipe not only gives you a window into a particular culture or
historical period, it gives you the tools to become a better cook (if
you don’t want to use the mayonnaise, go ahead and use eggs and butter —
it’s no longer wartime). She taught me about food as metaphor and not
just nourishment.

Melissa Clark uses hickory wood chips to grill salmon cured with brown
sugar, allspice and mace.
Video Credit By Jenny Woodward on Publish Date August 1, 2014. Image
CreditAndrew Scrivani for The New York Times

And then there’s her recipe for spiced, brown-sugar-cured smoked salmon,
which has changed the way I grill the fatty fish. She learned the
technique from reading about Native American cooking practices, and I
learned it from her. As Betty would say, it’s a darned good recipe.

She was born Betty Harper in an orange grove in Riverside, Calif., in
1927 (on the way to the hospital). Her mother died when Betty was young,
and Betty was sent to Colorado to live on a farm with her grandparents.
In her memoir, “My Kitchen Wars” (North Point Press FSG, 1999), she
writes about her first remembered taste of butter, which, as a toddler,
she pulled from the open icebox: “I took it out and licked it. It got
slippery in my hands, creamed my mouth, melted on my tongue and ran down
my throat. By the time they found me, I had consumed a pound of it.”

She met her husband, Paul Fussell, while at Pomona College in Claremont,
Calif. They moved East, eventually settling in Princeton, N.J., and
teaching at Rutgers. Betty taught Shakespeare as an adjunct until the
couple had their two children, Sam and Rosalind. Then, to please Paul,
she gave up any academic aspirations and focused her energies on the
children and cooking lavish dinner parties.

“Her dinner parties were legendary,” said Daniel Halpern, the publisher
of Ecco and a neighbor at the time. “Whatever she cooked was better than
what everyone else was cooking, and she was a delight to be around:
funny, compassionate, literate, with a bawdy sense of humor.”

Paul, on the other hand, Mr. Halpern said, “was complicated in a less
pleasing way: an irritable, impatient, old-fashioned intellectual.
Spending time with Paul was work. Spending time with Betty was pure
pleasure.”

Betty’s marriage fell apart when she was 50. She moved to a church
belfry in Greenwich Village and started writing full time. Starting over
is one of the things of which she’s most proud.

“I had no power and no money,” she said. “But I had freedom. I was no
longer responsible for anyone but myself. I could do whatever I wanted
to do. It was a thrill I’ve never gotten over.”

She told me this over raw local sea urchins and a thermos of Negronis we
hauled to the beach. We used her walker as a table. She has completed a
memoir due out next year, picking up where “My Kitchen Wars” left off,
to be titled “How to Cook a Coyote.” “It’s about my life as a writer,
and cutting my own path,” she said, sipping her Negroni, as red as the
Pacific sunset.

I asked whether, in writing the book, she ever found herself
second-guessing the life decisions she had made.

“For me, I took the exact right path,” she said. “The cranky,
independent one. And I’ve never looked back on it with anything but joy.”

And did she get to where she wanted to go?

“You betcha.”

Recipe: Brown Sugar-Cured Salmon